Download or read book American Film Melodrama written by Robert Lang and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book American Melodrama written by Daniel Charles Gerould and published by New York : Performing Arts Journal Publications. This book was released on 1983 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerould goes a long way toward 'revisioning' the genre.--Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research
Download or read book Imitations of Life written by Marcia Landy and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On melodrama.
Download or read book Nazi Film Melodrama written by Laura Heins and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book All that Hollywood Allows written by Jackie Byars and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the role of women in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s
Download or read book Melodrama and Meaning written by Barbara Klinger and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994-08-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melodrama and Asian Cinema written by Wimal Dissanayake and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique study examines the importance of melodrama in the film traditions of Japan, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia.
Download or read book Struggles for Recognition written by Juan Sebastián Ospina León and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melodrama written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Latin American Melodrama written by Darlene J. Sadlier and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melodrama Unbound written by Christine Gledhill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional crises, either subversively excessive or narrowly focused on the dilemmas of women. Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama is a transgeneric mode that has long spoken to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Pointing to melodrama’s roots in the ancient Greek combination of melos and drama, and to medieval Christian iconography focused on the pathos of Christ as suffering human body, the volume highlights the importance to modernity of melodrama as a mode of emotional dramaturgy, the social and aesthetic conditions for which emerged long before the French Revolution. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres. They examine how melodrama has traveled to and been transformed in India, China, Japan, and South America, whether through colonial circuits or later, globalization; how melodrama mixes with other modes such as romance, comedy, and realism; and finally how melodrama has modernized the dramatic functions of gender, class, and race by orchestrating vital aesthetic and emotional experiences for diverse audiences.
Download or read book American Domesticity written by Kathleen Anne McHugh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.
Download or read book Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television written by M. Stewart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.
Download or read book Gaslight Melodrama written by Guy Barefoot and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1945, a year when American crime films were apparently moving out on to the streets of contemporary Los Angeles and New York, one reviewer noted the emergence of a 'cycle of mystery and horror pictures placed in the gaslight era of the turn of the century.' For another critic, it seemed that for Hollywood there was 'no world of today save the world of London by gaslight'. In Gaslight Melodrama, Guy Barefoot examines the films that gave rise to such comments, and the pattern of discourse that gave rise to such films. The book's main focus is provided by 1940s Hollywood melodramas such as Gaslight, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Hangover Square. It also discusses a related cycle of British films that located murder and melodrama in Victorian or Edwardian settings, and then looks beyond cinema to the Gothic novels of the 18th century, 19th century discussions of gas lighting in street, home and theatre, and ambivalent 20th century responses to the Victorian era. Combining close analysis of particular film texts with attention to cinema's cultural context, Gaslight Melodrama provides an exploration of the ways in which the past has been the site of contested meaning, and an examination of the network of melodramatic narratives embedded within familiar and lesser-known examples of classical Hollywood cinema.
Download or read book South Korean Golden Age Melodrama written by Kathleen McHugh and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the theoretical, historical, and contemporary impact of South Korea's Golden Age of cinema.
Download or read book Mexican Melodrama written by Elena Lahr-Vivaz and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexican Melodrama offers a timely look at critically acclaimed films that serve as key referents in discussions of Mexican cinema. Elena Lahr-Vivaz artfully portrays the dominant conventions of historical and contemporary Mexican cinema, showing how new-wave directors draw from a previous generation to produce meaning in the present.
