Author: Robert Lang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691047591
Category : Melodrama in motion pictures.
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
"The difficulty for men or the impossibility for women of living up to patriarchal society's ideal order is the very stuff of melodrama," writes Robert Lang in this daring work on what the author sees as the central genre of American film. Lang contends that the true melodrama is essentially an Oedipal drama--a dramatization of the ways in which we are all formed within a matrix of familial imperatives. As he interprets them, these imperatives are often crippling reflections of patriarchy. Revealing how melodrama both submits to patriarchal ideology and confronts it, he believes that we can learn from it either how to be happier on its terms--which are the terms of life in Western society--or how to find our way out of the familial labyrinth. Lang traces the development of melodrama in the first fifty years of the American cinema by offering detailed interpretations of Griffith's Way Down East, The Mother and the Law, and Broken Blossoms; Vidor's The Crowd, Stella Dallas, and Ruby Gentry; and Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill. Drawing on the insights of Irigaray, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Peter Brooks, and several contemporary film theorists, he focuses on the psychoanalytic aspects of the films to bring us new insights into the way we live our lives.
Author: Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.
Author: Marcia Landy
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814320655
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
On melodrama.
Author: Laura Heins
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095022
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Film Melodrama shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich. Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, Laura Heins argues that German fascist melodramas differed from their American counterparts in their negative views of domesticity and in their use of a more explicit antibourgeois rhetoric. Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Some spectators objected to the eroticization and modernization of the public sphere under Nazism, however, pitting Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda against more conservative film audiences in a war over the very status of domesticity and the shape of the family. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.
Author: Wimal Dissanayake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521414654
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This unique study examines the importance of melodrama in the film traditions of Japan, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia.
Author: Jackie Byars
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807843123
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Analyzes the role of women in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s
Author: Darlene J. Sadlier
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092325
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American film and TV melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. The first of its kind, this anthology engages in a serious study of the aesthetics and cultural implications of Latin American melodramas. Written by some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship, the studies range across seventy years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the "Golden Age" of melodrama, the impact of classic melodrama on later forms, and more contemporary forms of melodrama. An introductory essay examines current critical and theoretical debates on melodrama and places the essays within the context of Latin American film and media scholarship. Contributors are Luisela Alvaray, Mariana Baltar, Catherine L. Benamou, Marvin D’Lugo, Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, Gilberto Perez, Darlene J. Sadlier, Cid Vasconcelos, and Ismail Xavier.
Author: Juan Sebastián Ospina León
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520973410
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Struggles for Recognition traces the emergence of melodrama in Latin American silent film and silent film culture. Juan Sebastián Ospina León draws on extensive archival research to reveal how melodrama visualized and shaped the social arena of urban modernity in early twentieth-century Latin America. Analyzing sociocultural contexts through film, this book demonstrates the ways in which melodrama was mobilized for both liberal and illiberal ends, revealing or concealing social inequities from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Los Angeles. Ospina León critically engages Euro-American and Latin American scholarship seldom put into dialogue, offering an innovative theorization of melodrama relevant to scholars working within and across different national contexts.
Author: Ben Singer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231113293
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.
Author: Barbara Klinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208750
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema—academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media—create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal's selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.
