Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television


Book Description

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.




Imitations of Life


Book Description

On melodrama.




Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television


Book Description

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.




Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television


Book Description

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.




South Korean Golden Age Melodrama


Book Description

Examining the theoretical, historical, and contemporary impact of South Korea's Golden Age of cinema.




Global Melodrama


Book Description

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.




Living Screens


Book Description

Through original analysis of three digital-age, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce), Living Screens explores the "plasticity" of our current situation in which we live with screens that melodramat...




Melodrama and Meaning


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.




On The Wire


Book Description

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.




Genre Trajectories


Book Description

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on genre and identifies developments in genre studies in the early 21st century. Genre approaches are applied to examine a fascinating range of texts including ancient Greek poems, Holocaust visual and literary texts, contemporary Hollywood films, selfies, melodrama, and classroom practices.