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 262 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 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 Living Screens written by Monique Rooney and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.
Download or read book Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television written by Agustín Zarzosa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of mode is critical in the reevaluation of melodrama. As a mode, melodrama appears not only as a dramatic genre pervaded by sensationalism, exaggerations, and moral polarities, but also as a cultural imaginary that shapes the emotional experience of modernity, characterized by anxiety, moral confusion, and the dissolution of hierarchy. Despite its usefulness, the notion of mode remains mystifying: What exactly are modes and how do they differ from genres? Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects argues that, whereas genres divide a universe in terms of similarities and differences, modes express or modify an indivisible whole. This study contends that the melodramatic mode is concerned with the expression of the social whole in terms of suffering. Zarzosa explains how melodrama is not a cultural imaginary that proclaims the existence of a defunct moral order in a post-sacred world, but an apparatus that shapes suffering and redistributes its visibility. The moral ideas we associate with melodrama are only a means to achieve this end. To develop this conception of melodrama, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television offers a novel conceptualization of the following aspects of melodrama theory: affect, interpretation, exchange, excess, sacrifice, and coincidence. These aspects of melodrama are coupled with the analysis of classic melodramas (Home from the Hill and The Story of Adele H.), contemporary films (The Piano, Safe], and Year of the Dog), and television series (Torchwood and Lost). Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television provides an essential new look at melodrama and its function in popular culture and media.
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 224 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 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 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 Global Melodrama written by Carla Marcantonio and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.
Download or read book Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama written by John Champagne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering queer analyses of paintings by Caravaggio and Puccini and films by Özpetek, Amelio, and Grimaldi, Champagne argues that Italian masculinity has often been articulated through melodrama. Wide in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this much-needed study shows the vital role of affect for both Italian history and masculinity studies.
Download or read book All that Hollywood Allows written by Jackie Byars and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All that Hollywood Allows explores the representation of gender in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. Both a work of feminist film criticism and theory and an analysis of popular culture, this provocative book examines from a cultural studies perspective top-grossing film melodramas, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity, East of Eden, Imitation of Life and Picnic. Stereotypically viewed as a complacent and idyllic time, the 1950s were actually a time of dislocation and great social change. Jackie Byars argues that mass media texts of the period, especially films, provide evidence of society's consuming preoccupation with the domestic sphere - the nuclear family and its values - and she shows how Hollywood melodramas interpreted and extended societal debates concerning family structure, sexual divisions of labour, and gender roles. Her readings of these films assess a variety of critical methodologies and approaches to textual analysis, some central to feminist film studies and some previously bypassed by scholars in the field.
Download or read book On The Wire written by Linda Williams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many television critics, legions of fans, even the president of the United States, have cited The Wire as the best television series ever. In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay between film, melodrama, and issues of race, suggests what exactly it is that makes The Wire so good. She argues that while the series is a powerful exploration of urban dysfunction and institutional failure, its narrative power derives from its genre. The Wire is popular melodrama, not Greek tragedy, as critics and the series creator David Simon have claimed. Entertaining, addictive, funny, and despairing all at once, it is a serial melodrama grounded in observation of Baltimore's people and institutions: of cops and criminals, schools and blue-collar labor, local government and local journalism. The Wire transforms close observation into an unparalleled melodrama by juxtaposing the good and evil of individuals with the good and evil of institutions.
Download or read book Melodrama written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 224 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 Global Melodrama written by Carla Marcantonio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.
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 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 The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama written by Carolyn Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.
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.
