All I want for Christmas is a long lens: Gena Rowlands and Peter Bogdanovich chatting up the standing-room-only crowd Thursday at BAM (Photo: STV)

About a decade ago, American Music Club's Mark Eitzel wrote a song asserting that "the world is held together by the wind that blows through Gena Rowlands' hair." It is the type of precise, uncomplicated reverence that has trailed the blonde icon's screen career for more than 40 years, and it finally landed in Brooklyn Thursday night as BAM welcomed her to the opening of its "An Independent Spirit" series celebrating her work.

Rowlands and director Peter Bogdanovich visited the theater after a sold-out screening of 1974's A Woman Under the Influence, in which her late husband John Cassavetes directed her to her first Oscar nod and which later evolved into a near-mythic, self-distributed indie benchmark. Everybody pretty much knows the story: Rowlands stars as Mabel Longhetti, a wife and mother whose fragmented relationship with her husband Nick (Peter Falk) culminates in one of cinema's all-time great emotional crises. And even as Cassavetes' raw aesthetic so infamously flirts with unwatchability, Rowlands' harrowing work continues to reel and stun and haunt, bringing the viewers who greeted her last night to their feet and even rendering the talky Bogdanovich virtually speechless.

"To this day," Rowlands told the audience, which seemed to hold its breath between her raspy asides, "all of these years later, I cannot see a young mother picking up her kids at the school bus without thinking about Mabel. And then I get to wondering how the kids turned out. It's the whole thing. But I would say it's the hardest picture that I ever did to get over. It did linger a while."

"You take such a journey in the picture," Bogdanovich said. "It's extraordinary, really, the journey we take with you. It's the most naked performance I've ever seen in a movie. It's so... naked."

Rowlands nodded. "You see, I don't think of Mabel as crazy."

"I don't either."

"I think crazy, to me personally, I don't think of anyone as crazy unless there's some cruelty involved," Rowlands said. "Otherwise what they're doing is behavior. Nutty behavior, but it's not crazy. Certainly, she broke down. When I was younger, they used to call it 'having a nervous breakdown.' And there are a lot more terms for it now. But actually, it was a good way of expressing it, because when you've just got so much... whatever it was, that you could not go on, you cannot perform any of life. You are broken down, just like a car or anything else. And I think that's what happened to Mabel, because she so trusted Nick."

Rowlands also recalled the period following the film's completion, when Cassavetes could not find an American distributor and thus released the film himself. She said she was incredulous when he suggested they go to a newsstand one morning for a few national papers, find the theaters playing movies they liked in places like Los Angeles and Chicago and then start cold-calling them about picking up Influence.

"I said, 'You're going to call them up? Just what are you going to say? How do you know they'll talk to you?' He said, 'Are you kidding? Do you know how boring exhibitors' lives are? They'll take my call just because I'm an actor and they can tell their wives they told me to go jump, you know? They will take the call.' I said, 'Well, what will you know to say about anything?' He said, 'Well, I'll talk to them. We'll talk about the movie and pretty soon, they'll reveal themselves to me.' I said, 'Really? OK.' So that's what he did. And they all took his calls--they all did."

It is not as though Cassavetes was the first or last guy to ever self-distribute a film. What is more interesting is that he could be so emotionally invested in the resonance of his two-and-a-half-hour psychodrama and still be calculating enough to single-handedly lead it to the immense audience it found. I mean, do you think Bergman could have self-distributed The Virgin Spring or Cries and Whispers? That is not to compare their films, of course--Bergman is by far the aesthetic genius between them--but Cassavetes possessed an even more inspirational edge in that he broke his ass making challenging, withering films (completely independently) and then literally went door-to-door looking for viewers.

And as his muse, colleague, leading lady, you name it, Rowlands' shared Cassavetes' humility. "It was very surprising that anyone liked it," she said of Influence. "Because it was just about impossible for us to get done, and it's not as if we just loved paying for our own movies because nobody else would give us money. John wrote what I think is a truly great script, and people would say, 'Who wants to see a middle-aged dame with a nervous breakdown? Who cares?' And I think that maybe I'm crazy myself to think it relates to other people."

Yeah, well, people relate. Big time. And they will relate to even more as the "Spirit" series continues for the next 10 days, including another Rowlands appearance Saturday to introduce Cassavetes' Opening Night. Last I heard, tickets were still available, but unlike Gena Rowlands, you know that could never last.