Cassavetes found himself most drawn to the astoundingly simple and universal themes of love, and the backwards ways in which we set out to get it, our roles in life, father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, club owner, dentist, writer, actress, studio executive, etc., and the conflict between society's rigid stability and the risk of emotional vulnerability, or vulnerability in general, society being constructed on the precepts of minimizing risk, though risk being our only means of growth as human beings. (This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor does his work lend itself to such a list, but only the subjects I find to recur throughout his filmography). In a desire to explore these themes, absent of pretense, Cassavetes effectively rejected the established cinematic language, or "shorthand for living" as he called it, and sought a fresh approach. He wished to confront audiences with characters as rich and flawed as any they might know in real life. No heroes or villians, no easily defined patterns of behavior, and no stock movie plots. His films find story springing from character. If his films do contain heroes and villians, they inhabit one body, as we contain within us our own best and worst selves. Our struggle is an inner one. 
Now, most films depict something akin to this inner struggle by correlating it to an outer struggle, or action, tied to a plot, for example Hitchcock would often have a voyeuristic protagonist, a passive character by implication, witness something terrifying, like a murder, with the plot then following their attempt to solve the murder, forcing the protagonist to overcome their character flaws in order to do so. That's a formulaic reduction of a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, and I'm not knocking Hitchcock here, but that type of storytelling puts the audience at a remove from what's happening on screen because they know what the problem is and how the protagonist must go about solving it. The audience in essence becoming more like a cheerleader for the hero than a participant. While the hero too, in most cases, knows what must be done, though having a certain reluctance to stand up and face his own troubles in order to solve the film's central problem. This presupposes a lot of knowledge that most of us just don't have in our day to day lives, along with a structure that usually isn't there. I don't know about you, but I've never witnessed a murder, not that I haven't seen countless films on the subject, and wished for the thrill of danger and excitement that comes with a macabre adventure of amateur sleuthing, but alas it's never happened.Cassavetes saw film as a medium for telling the truth about life, not escaping it. He eschewed this intellectual, and distancing, style of filmmaking, opting to employ a cinematic style which constantly knocks the viewer off balance, and keeps them there. He throws out plot in any traditional sense, and along with it those self-aware characters that can sum it up, and presents us with characters who are terrific and terrible from one moment to the next, in the way that real people are. He follows these people, sometimes odd, sometimes tragic, a little crazy but always human, on their journey to reach a shred of enlightenment. Often coming nowhere near the point of conquering their demons, but at least being able to look them in the eye and acknowledge their existence. His camera, ever searching, looking for a foothold, peering around corners, over shoulders, sometimes missing the action, but always seeking to get a grip on what's happening, puts us in the middle of the action with no frame of reference to cling to, no flashy shots to admire at a distance, no exquisite shot compositions to marvel at, casting us adrift on a rough sea of handheld camerawork.
Because of that we're right there in the mess with those people up on screen, we definitely don't know anymore than they do, in fact we probably know less. We can't shout up at them to not open that door or to pick up the gun and shoot the son-of-a-bitch, because we are lagging behind the characters just trying to keep up and besides those don't seem to be the type of situations they're in. No, these people are at home, or in bars, or working mundane jobs, they're in places we know but struggle to recognize up on the screen because they're not presented to us in the traditional grandiloquent manner of Hollywood. The locations are not standing in for anything, they're far from glamorous, their grit and grime is real. And the problems are slippery, you can't quite wrap your head around them. You pick up bits and pieces, here and there, fragments. You witness moments of revelatory emotion, then the characters clam up again, hide behind convention and politeness or fall back into a prescribed pattern of behavior. You see, his people know how crazy it might look if they were really honest about what they were feeling, they know the great risk they take in expressing themselves, and how most people will look down their noses at them, taking refuge behind their own superiority. He understood how we disassociate from one another, how much we think we know and how little we actually do. His films look down into that schism between what you want and what you really get, the schism that can exist between two people and the emotional nakedness they must risk to reach across and connect with each other.
Notes on the filmmaker:
Cassavetes paid the bills and funded his own projects by acting in other films, the standouts in my mind being The Dirty Dozen (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and the underseen Marvin &Tige (1983), among others. I must confess I've never seen a performance of his that wasn't captivating. His first film as director was Shadows (1959), born from an improvisation at Cassavetes' acting workshop which he taught with Burton Lane, the film was pitched by Cassavetes off the cuff on a late night radio talk show in New York hosted by Jean Shepherd called Night People. Donations starting coming in bit by bit from people all over the country and eventually they had enough money to go ahead and make the film. (A note on improvisation: despite their improvisatory feel, Cassavetes' films were all scripted, though he allowed his actors the freedom to interpret their roles as they saw fit, meaning while their dialogue was written their performance was not required to follow any predetermined course in terms of emotional expression) After Shadows was completed, offers came in from Hollywood and Cassavetes made two pictures in the studio system Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting (1963), neither particularly noteworthy and both artistically unsatisfying for their creator, this failure to fit into the studio machine made him turn back to independent filmmaking. His next film Faces (1968), shot on 16mm using his own house as the primary set, garnered 3 Oscar nominations and made good on the early promise of Shadows. He made 12 films in all, 8 of which I would describe as essential: Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984). His wife, Gena Rowlands, gave some of her finest performances in his films and their pairing as actor and director goes down in the pantheon of cinematic collaborations. John Cassavetes passed away from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989, at the time still largely dismissed by critics as a sloppy and incomprehensible filmmaker, only after his death were his films given the respect they deserved.
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