.I remember hearing Cassavetes joke about the response to his films. Imitating an imaginary viewer, he slouched down in his chair and flailed his arms in front of his face, as if defending himself from the fury of an atomic blast, all the while chortling: "Oh, no. A new experience. Save me. Anything but that!"

Films come in cans. Unfortunately, most of the experiences in them are canned as well. "Look here. Think this. Feel that." We laugh and cry on cue. It's button-pushing – nothing like real experience.

Cassavetes gives us something closer to the turbulence and turbidness of life. He asks us to turn off the emotional Cruise Control and go off-road. The journey is bumpy and unpredictable. Characters get in our faces (and under our skin). They are as hard to figure out (and as changeable) as people outside the movies. There's no orchestration to tell us what to feel. There's no narrative road map to show us where we are going. It makes for a pretty rugged trip at times.

Cassavetes isn't merely being perverse. He wants to get us lost so that maybe, just maybe, we can find ourselves and meet the world in a new way. He wants to force us to throw away all of our formulas, clichés, and customary patterns of response in order to encounter life freshly. Disrupting our expectations, dislodging our stereotypes, making things hard on us is one way to do that.

Love is another way. No filmmaker had more faith in the power of emotion to show his characters and viewers the way out of the traps their minds get them into. Love is the great teacher because it forces us to open our hearts to new experiences. It forces us to jettison our old ways of understanding.

But don't look for swoony, moony "I-look-into-your-eyes; you-look-into-mine" Hollywood romance in these films. That is just one more clichè they shred. The films in this series tell the truth about love in all of its glorious, painful, wondrous complexity. The truth about how vulnerable it can make us. How scary it can be. How ferocious it can be at some times and how delicate at others. The truth about how hard love is to hold on to, and how fleeting it can be.

For Cassavetes, filmmaking was question-asking. His films ask the hardest possible questions about the meaning of our lives and relationships – questions we might not want to know the answers to. They force us to come face to face with difficult truths. But what is inspiring is that even after plunging into the darkest corners of our hearts, the most tortured and twisted recesses of our souls, the films never despair or turn cynical. Cassavetes never abandons his faith in the healing, redeeming power of love.....

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