“Whatever Happened to Sentiment in the World Today?” Notes on John Cassavetes’s Experimental Melodramas

John Cassavetes is rightfully regarded as one of the giants of American independent cinema by film theorists and audiences alike, but they do not often discuss how strongly the director was connected to classical Hollywood melodrama. Cassavetes’s oeuvre is special because the director embraces the defining elements of modern art cinema, while also not abstaining from certain basic components of the traditional melodrama genre, such as a rhetorical style and the explicit portrayal of emotions. Cassavetes is capable of creating modern art films by utilizing all the significant components of the melodrama genre. How can one create a modernist art film that is simultaneously pathos-filled and overflowing with emotion? How can one produce a modern art film that discards the clichés of melodrama genre, by either ignoring or challenging classical principles in its formal structure, while still embracing the melodramatic value system? This essay explores the characteristics of Cassavetesian film form and seeks to understand how the director managed to create the paradox that can be termed as modern melodrama.