Melodrama Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article describes how Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah distils the idioms of the historical courtesan film, poised as they are between the glorification of courtesan culture and lamenting the debased status of the courtesan; between a... more

This article describes how Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah distils the idioms of the historical courtesan film, poised as they are between the glorification of courtesan culture and lamenting the debased status of the courtesan; between a nostalgic yearning for the feudal world of the kotha and a utopian desire to escape from it. The article argues that Pakeezah self-consciously defines the particular " chronotope, " or space-time, of the historical courtesan genre by showing that nothing less than a transformation of the idioms of that genre is required to liberate the courtesan from her claustrophobic milieu—whose underlying state is one of enervation and death—into the open space and lived time of modernity.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original... more

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

Tesi di Laurea in Letteratura, Musica e Spettacolo

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon... more

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

ÖZET Modernitenin ortaya çıkardığı bir tür olarak kabul edilen melodram, bu nedenle modernitenin getirdiği tüm temsilleri taşır. Modernitenin kentteki görünümleri, bireyler arasındaki ilişkileri biçimlendirmesi, geleneksel ile modernlik... more

ÖZET Modernitenin ortaya çıkardığı bir tür olarak kabul edilen melodram, bu nedenle modernitenin getirdiği tüm temsilleri taşır. Modernitenin kentteki görünümleri, bireyler arasındaki ilişkileri biçimlendirmesi, geleneksel ile modernlik arasındaki bocalamalar, modernliğin yüceltilmesi ama son tahlilde geleneksele dönülmesi, modern hayatın getirilerinden yararlanılırken, duygusal ilişkilerde geleneksel kadın-erkek davranışlarının bırakılmaması melodram-modernite etkileşimini farklı bağlamlarda sunarken, moderniteye yönelik eleştirilerini de dile getirmiştir.

El artículo hace referencia a la estrategia melodramática, las conversaciones y a la función que cumplen los invitados, el presentador y el público asistente a los talk shows. A partir de lecturas comunicacionales, antropológicas y... more

HAGO COMENTARIOS SOBRE EL CINE IBEROAMERICANO, QUE ME HA GUSTADO MUCHÍSIMO.

The article explores the metamorphosis of a vampire figure in the beginning of the 19th century, when it evolved from a mindless walking corpse, well-known from Slavic folklore, into a deadly dangerous seducer of aristocratic backgrounds.... more

The article explores the metamorphosis of a vampire figure in the beginning of the 19th century, when it evolved from a mindless walking corpse, well-known from Slavic folklore, into a deadly dangerous seducer of aristocratic backgrounds. The thorough interpretation of "Le Vampire" by Charles Nodier, staged for the first time in Paris in 1820, uncovers a strong relation between the hegemony of melodrama in the 19th-century theatre and the vampire fever, which expanded from France to other European countries.

Grand Guignol was a popular cultural form that first developed in France, notably at the Théatre du Grand Guignol. It was basically a style of macabre, melodrama, generally featuring women in peril, ghosts and horrific stylized murders.... more

Grand Guignol was a popular cultural form that first developed in France, notably at the Théatre du Grand Guignol. It was basically a style of macabre, melodrama, generally featuring women in peril, ghosts and horrific stylized murders. London’s Grand Guignol shows how the genre was imported to Britain and enjoyed its greatest period of popularity during the 1920s [...] Hand and Wilson argue that theatre audiences after the end of the First World War responded enthusiastically to this type of play; this was perhaps inevitable, in the light of the horrors of the war and the resulting trauma.

This essay examines not only the transformative process from the literary source (Kabale und Liebe) to the operatic realization (Luisa Miller), but also the compositional and dramaturgical strategies that reveal a new aesthetic... more

This essay examines not only the transformative process from the literary source (Kabale und Liebe) to the operatic realization (Luisa Miller), but also the compositional and dramaturgical strategies that reveal a new aesthetic perspective in Verdi's opera. ln the first part, the role and function of 'offstage music' is analysed with particular attention to its ,spatial, implications. ln the second part, it is argued that Luisa's prayers in the most crucial moments of the opera as well as her gestural and mimetic reactions can be interpreted as a kind of inability or difficulty of verbal expression: this is a sign of the social stratification of the characters of the drama, but also reflects Luisa's attitude towards life and thus, in essence, the inevitability of the tragedy.
Finally, this essay aims to demonstrate that the musical and aesthetic solutions developed by Verdi and Cammarano were used to define an intense and claustrophobic dramaturgy that explores Luisa's psychology, blurring the boundaries between onstage, visual, verbal, and musical aspects.

The fact that media of modernity, especially cinema, literature and theater, soon had become the myth reservoir of modernity is not exactly a new idea to media-theoretical writings. Any way it is especially true for epic cinema such as... more

The fact that media of modernity, especially cinema, literature and theater, soon had become the myth reservoir of modernity is not exactly a new idea to media-theoretical writings. Any way it is especially true for epic cinema such as the peplum films of Hollywood between the 1950s and today. Which definition of myth this is especially based on - because there are many - is yet to be clarified. It will not be possible to answer this question exhaustively in an essay like this, but it seems appropriate to outline some basic definitions and approaches to expand further on this idea.

Nella produzione di Tomasi di Lampedusa, e soprattutto nel Gattopardo, la polemica antimelodrammatica ha un duplice movente: da un lato, il rifiuto dell’estetica dell’‘esplicito’, dall’altro, il fatto che l’opera ottocentesca fosse... more

Nella produzione di Tomasi di Lampedusa, e soprattutto nel Gattopardo, la polemica
antimelodrammatica ha un duplice movente: da un lato, il rifiuto dell’estetica
dell’‘esplicito’, dall’altro, il fatto che l’opera ottocentesca fosse assurta a
simbolo del Risorgimento e, per Tomasi, delle sue storture. A quelle del melodramma
vengono contrapposte soluzioni musicali o più complesse come i
drammi di Wagner, o connotate in senso nostalgico (musica sacra, strumentale,
opere di Mozart), in quanto vestigia dell’irrecuperabile mondo aristocratico
dell’infanzia lampedusiana.

Este artículo reformula un análisis de Machuca (2004) de Andrés Wood como una película de género(s), reconsiderando los aspectos melodramáticos y a la vez, examinando estrategias narrativas del cine de horror. Machuca produce una reacción... more

Este artículo reformula un análisis de Machuca (2004) de Andrés Wood como una película de género(s), reconsiderando los aspectos melodramáticos y a la vez, examinando estrategias narrativas del cine de horror. Machuca produce una reacción emocional y física. El público, según entrevistas y datos etnográficos, reaccionó con el cuerpo (lágrimas y sollozos).2 Mi énfasis en el artículo será consolidar los vínculos entre la película y el pasado histórico/testimonial, vinculando el largometraje con la novela autobiográfica Tres años para nacer (2002) del poeta-profesor Amante Eledín Parraguez (1956).3 Se hará una lectura atenta (close reading) y reflexiones del efecto perturbador u horroroso del final. Será contextualizado a la actualidad (2019) de las marchas y protestas en Chile.

A book that looks at the relationship between melodrama, gender, sexuality and nationalism per se, and with reference to Hindi cinema between 1970-2000. Table of Contents: 1. Political History, Political Economy 2. Bombay Cinema and... more

A book that looks at the relationship between melodrama, gender, sexuality and nationalism per se, and with reference to Hindi cinema between 1970-2000.
Table of Contents:
1. Political History, Political Economy
2. Bombay Cinema and Questions of Form
3. Towards a Theory of the Sexual Economy
4. Femininity and the Regulation of Pleasure and Desire
5. The Changing Faces of Masculinity
6. Gender, Sexuality, Nation
7. Communities and Their Others
8. Wounded Identities

Publicado en: Fassbinder. Solo quiero que me amen Jesús Rodrigo García (coord.), Shangrila textos aparte 2018 ______________________________________________________________________ En los límites del Apocalipsis La estética negativa de... more

Publicado en: Fassbinder. Solo quiero que me amen Jesús Rodrigo García (coord.), Shangrila textos aparte 2018 ______________________________________________________________________ En los límites del Apocalipsis La estética negativa de Fassbinder El cine es sangre, lágrimas, violencia, odio, muerte y amor Douglas Sirk La filosofía de un director de cine está en la iluminación y los encuadres Douglas Sirk Apocalipsis del yo Cuando en 1978, Fassbinder realiza su contribución a Alemania en otoño (Deutschland im Herbst, 1978), ya tiene en su haber más de treinta películas, si contamos entre ellas sus producciones televisivas. Apenas si hace diez años que se dedica al cine, cortometrajes aparte, y su filmografía ya es más extensa que la de muchos de los cineastas más consagrados de la historia del cine. Su trabajo teatral no es menos impresionante: entre 1969 y 1976, interviene como director, interprete, escritor o adaptador en más de treinta producciones teatrales. Sorprendentemente, aún le queda tiempo para intervenir en unos cuantos programas de radio y participar en películas de otros directores. Una producción tan prodigiosa no es frecuente, como tampoco lo es el frenesí vital que la rodea. Parece como si Fassbinder hubiera querido condensar toda una vida en poco más de una década y que se hubiera planteado este rabioso ejercicio a la manera de un enorme auto sacramental dividido en escenas, capítulos o retablos en los que cobijarse para conjurar los demonios personales y sociales que nunca dejaron de

This paper builds on my research of Rousseauian melodrama as an influential form that, travelling from France to Italy, Germany, the UK and America, influenced innumerable performances including that of British actor, Thomas Potter Cooke,... more

This paper builds on my research of Rousseauian melodrama as an influential form that, travelling from France to Italy, Germany, the UK and America, influenced innumerable performances including that of British actor, Thomas Potter Cooke, in one of the first stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). From its inception in the late eighteenth century, melodrama has both moved audiences and emphasised theatrical movement, particularly through dramatic transitions between spoken word and music that were timed in such a way as to augment the sensational effects of pantomimic action and gesture. With his Pygmalion: Scène Lyrique (written 1762; first performed 1770), Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed the foundational melodrama, placing music in tension with spoken lyric and other elements. That Rousseau’s Pygmalion travelled far and wide—spawning imitations and adaptations—can be seen in Thomas Potter Cooke’s performances. Having developed a formidable reputation as an actor in nautical melodrama (a genre intrinsically about travel/movement), Cooke played the part of the “Creature” in Richard Brinsley’s Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). A mute version of Shelley’s Monster, Cooke’s Creature performed its receptivity to music and other living forms through dramatic gesture and electrifying tableaux vivant. My paper draws attention to the role and significance of melodrama theory for understanding Cooke’s performance, particularly focusing on the galvanising drama effected through the alternation of music, spoken word and action.

Personalità della prestazione e regole contrattuali nella disciplina dei rapporti della lirica Sommario: 1. Tradizione e innovazione nel contratto di scrittura teatrale-2. La scelta dell'artista-3. La scritturazione dell'artista-4. Le... more

Personalità della prestazione e regole contrattuali nella disciplina dei rapporti della lirica Sommario: 1. Tradizione e innovazione nel contratto di scrittura teatrale-2. La scelta dell'artista-3. La scritturazione dell'artista-4. Le prove-5. La protesta-5.1 I soggetti legittimati alla protesta-5.2 Forma ed esercizio della protesta-5.3 Impugnabilità della protesta-6. Le recite-7. Verso un nuovo modello di scrittura teatrale: le modifiche auspicate dagli artisti al contratto attualmente in uso 1. Tradizione e innovazione nel contratto di scrittura teatrale Negli ultimi anni sono comparse numerose pubblicazioni che profe-tizzano la fine dell'opera lirica e che, più in generale, descrivono la grave crisi in cui versa la musica classica nel mondo occidentale. Il primo apocalittico descrittore di questa realtà è stato Norman Lebrecht autore di due bestseller degli anni Novanta intitolati When the music stops e Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics; in tempi più recenti, sul tema è tornato il celebre critico musicale americano Conrad L. Osborne, che, nel libro Opera as Opera: the state of the art, afferma che «There is the sense of end times hovering about opera and classical music». È interessante notare come tutti questi scritti individuino, tra le cause del crepuscolo della musica colta, oltre che il calo degli ascoltatori e il progressivo invecchia-mento del pubblico, anche l'eccessiva "divizzazione" degli artisti. Direttori d'orchestra, cantanti e concertisti sono divenuti delle stars attorno alle quali ruotano managers, segretari, agenti e pubblicitari che spesso finiscono per mettere in secondo piano l'aspetto artistico culturale. Mi sembra interessante soffermarsi su un'affermazione di Osborne, il quale sottolinea che chi andava a teatro ai tempi di Mozart, Rossini o Verdi ci andava prima di tutto per sentire la musica, mentre chi va a teatro oggi ci va principalmente per sentire il divo o la diva di turno che cantano Mozart, Rossini o Verdi. Sulla veridicità di questa affermazione si potrebbe dissentire:

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An... more

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances struc-tured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

Each year the Italian government chooses a topic as the focus of the 'week of Italian in the world', to be held late in October. Researchers, institutions and practitioners in the field of Italian as a FL are asked to focus their work on... more

Each year the Italian government chooses a topic as the focus of the 'week of Italian in the world', to be held late in October. Researchers, institutions and practitioners in the field of Italian as a FL are asked to focus their work on the topic of the year, which is The Italian of music, the music of Italian in 2015. In this essay the leading figure of ITALS, the research and formation centre of Italian as a second and foreign language of Venice University, discusses the importance of a type of Italian music, i.e. the opera, which had and still has an important role in the spread of the Italian language and culture. The main idea of the essay is that the opera is not just a form of theatre, but the theatre in Italy in the XIX century, both as far as quantitative and qualitative literary production is concerned, and because it was the opera that attracted the attention of both literate and illiterate Italians, and it was the operas, and not the normal dramas, that discussed the political, social and existential issues that were relevant in those years. Sommario 1. L'IMMI e la promozione dell'italiano nel mondo, rivolta alla società.-2. L'IMMI e la promozione dell'italiano nel mondo, rivolta ad appassionati.-3. L'IMMI e la motivazione occasionale nei corsi di italiano .-4. Il ruolo dell'IMMI nell'insegnamento della storia della cultura e della letteratura italiane.-5. L'IMMI e l'insegnamento dell'italiano a musicisti e cantanti.-6. Conclusione: dagli slogan alle azioni positive. Il 2015 è stato definito 'anno della musica' e quindi la promozione dell'i-taliano nel mondo ha come motto «L'italiano della musica, la musica dell'i-taliano». Sulla seconda parte del motto, che riprende per altro un'idea ripetuta da secoli e ovunque, non interveniamo: l'idea della musica (o, meglio, musicalità) dell'italiano è allo stesso tempo culturale e personale, legata cioè alla percezione di che cosa sia 'musicale' e del perché l'italiano lo sia. Il fondamento più solido per questa affermazione è il fatto che le vocali sono i fonemi più 'musicali', perché cantando è sulle vocali che si sofferma la voce, e in italiano la quantità relativa di vocali rispetto a quella delle consonanti è molto più alta che in altre lingue (per ulteriori riflessioni, Bonomi 1998). Ci concentriamo quindi sulla prima parte del motto, «L'italiano della mu-sica», e lo completiamo con «la musica in italiano» (producendo l'acronimo IMMI) sulla base di due considerazioni:

This article proposes an allegorical reading of a Turkish TV serial to allow an assessment of the politico-cultural atmosphere of the ephemeral present. This present is defined as a world of post-truth where competing universalisms... more

This article proposes an allegorical reading of a Turkish TV serial to allow an assessment of the politico-cultural atmosphere of the ephemeral present. This present is defined as a world of post-truth where competing universalisms produce a condition of antithetical truths, each of which claims to be the only possible truth. It is argued that these truths are products of a situated antagonistic struggle, which, rather than indicating a firm belief, are used to serve the purposes of a game of power seeking. The search for truth in the battle of good against evil, characteristic of melodrama, is, however, what allows for narrative continuity in serials. Refusing to consider politics and culture as two separate domains, the article explores the ways the structure of game both as a narrative genre and as a way of conducting politics characterizes the world of post-truth.

Halit Refiğ, "Bilinmeyen Muharrem Gürses", Vatan, 1.10.1960, s. 4-5.

Paris-based music publisher Louise Dyer used the Melbourne Centenary Music Book of pipe music by Australian composers to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Melbourne’s foundation in 1934. Whilst reinforcing the objectives and... more

Paris-based music publisher Louise Dyer used the Melbourne Centenary Music Book of pipe music by Australian composers to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Melbourne’s foundation in 1934. Whilst reinforcing the objectives and principles of the pipe music education movement, which developed in England and France during the 1920s and 1930s, the book also stands out as unusual amongst published scores of this time. This paper explores the Australian-inspired cover design in the context of its educational rationale.

This paper will address Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) together with Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” – and its interpretation by Slavoj Žižek in Violence – in order to... more

This paper will address Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) together with Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” – and its interpretation by Slavoj Žižek in Violence – in order to explore the concepts of mythic and divine violence within the film. First, I will explore the “law-preserving” and “law-making” powers of the state exerted by both the police and, more importantly, the press in the film as forms of mythic violence, which suggest a rapport between Benjamin’s text and Althusser’s well-known concepts of repressive and ideological state apparatus. I will furthermore attempt to approach this question at the level of genre: in the melodramatic excesses of Schlöndorff and Trotta’s film, I will suggest – via Thomas Elsaesser’s genealogy of melodrama in “Tales of Sound and Fury” – that it is possible to discern the functioning of mythic violence as the sudden reversals of fortune and egregious suffering that are fundamental to the genre. I will then ask whether, through Katharina’s acts of resistance and final, murderous outburst, the film could open up a potential space for divine violence. If – as Benjamin and Žižek suggest – it cannot be objectively defined, then can Katharina Blum at least point to the possibility for divine violence as, in Žižek’s terms, the counter violence to the excess of state power? By offering us, as spectators, a moment where we sympathise with – if not actively urge – the murder of Katharina’s tormentor, the tabloid hack and agent of institutional oppression, Werner Tötges, might the film place us in a position (as we could speculate did Katharina) to “wrestle with [the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”] in solitude and (…) to take upon [ourselves] the responsibility of ignoring it”?

War has become a fixture of American culture. It has been a constant background fact of U.S. geopolitics, it forms the theme of countless books, films and games, and despite many deaths and mostly failed military campaigns, it seems to... more

War has become a fixture of American culture. It has been a constant background fact of U.S. geopolitics, it forms the theme of countless books, films and games, and despite many deaths and mostly failed military campaigns, it seems to exert an enduring fascination on politicians and citizens alike. This book explores how war has been portrayed in the United States since the Second World War, with a particular focus on an emotionally charged but rarely scrutinized topic: combat death. The author argues that most stories about war use three main building blocks: melodrama, adventure, and horror. Melodrama and adventure have helped make war seem acceptable to the American public by portraying combat death as a meaningful sacrifice, and by making military killing look necessary and often even pleasurable. Horror no longer serves its traditional purpose of making the bloody realities of war injury and death repulsive, and has been repurposed in recent years to intensify the positivity of melodrama and adventure. What emerges from this book is an in-depth attempt to understand how war stories perform ideological and emotional work, and how they manage to have such a powerful grip on the American imagination.

Wenn ich mit meinem siebenjährigen Sohn ins Kino gehe, wählen wir häufig einen Film, der eine Körperempfindung verspricht, einen Film, der uns körperlich berühren kann. Er nennt diese Filme krass. Mein Sohn und ich stimmen überein, dass... more

Wenn ich mit meinem siebenjährigen Sohn ins Kino gehe, wählen wir häufig einen Film, der eine Körperempfindung verspricht, einen Film, der uns körperlich berühren kann. Er nennt diese Filme krass. Mein Sohn und ich stimmen überein, dass das Vergnügen an diesen krassen Filmen darin besteht, wie sie ans Unanständige grenzende Körper-empfindungen in Szene setzen. Der Punkt, an dem sich unsere Geister scheiden-und über den in unserer Kultur entlang der Achsen von Geschlecht, Alter oder sexueller Orientierung oft Dissens herrscht-liegt in der Frage, wo die Grenze zur Unanständigkeit überschritten wird, welche Filme also zu krass sind. Für meinen Sohn sind krasse Fil-me gut, wenn sie Monster wie Freddy Krueger (aus der Freitag der 13.-Serie) beinhalten, Figuren, die Teenager, insbesondere Mädchen, aufschlitzen. Diese Filme faszinieren und erschrecken meinen Sohn gleichermaßen; eigentlich jedoch spricht er lieber über sie, als dass er sie anschaut. Eine zweite Kategorie, eine die ich mag und mein Sohn nicht, sind traurige Filme, bei denen man weinen muss. Diese Filme sind krass in ihrem Fokus auf unangemessene Gefühle, die ihn zu sehr an seine Machtlosigkeit als Kind erinnern. Eine dritte Kategorie, die bei mei-nem Sohn sowohl heftiges Interesse wie äußerste Abscheu (er macht * [Anm.d.Hg.:] Der vorliegende Text ist eine Übersetzung von «Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess», erstmals erschienen 1991 in Film Quarterly 44,4, S. 2-13 und wiederabgedruckt in: Barry Keith Grant (Hg.) (1995) Film Genre Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, S. 140-158. Wir danken der Autorin und der University of Texas Press für die Erlaubnis zur Übersetzung. Eine frühere, wesentlich kürzere Fas-sung des Textes wurde von der Autorin auf dem Symposium «Feminismus und Me-dien» 1990 am Institut für Neue Medien der Städelschule Frankfurt als Vortrag prä-sentiert und in der Konferenzpublikation unter dem Titel «Filmkörper-Geschlecht und Genre» in deutscher Sprache abgedruckt (Williams 1991).

Essay. Melodrama in Hollywood and World Cinema Course. Convener, Prof. Laura Mulvey, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media (MA), Birkbeck College, University of London, January 2005. Revised & edited September 2020. Exploring... more

Essay. Melodrama in Hollywood and World Cinema Course. Convener, Prof. Laura Mulvey, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media (MA), Birkbeck College, University of London, January 2005. Revised & edited September 2020.
Exploring the myth of the fallen woman in classic Hollywood melodrama, via Jungian framework, tracing her historical, religious and literary antecedents, delving into the archetypal realms of the dark, wild feminine projected onto the screen, and her impact on the spectator, male and female. What these femme fatales, gold-diggers, seductresses, fallen angels, and furious housewives subversively revealed was a hidden narrative current underneath the official one, women's own dispossessed femininity, debased, fragmented and demonised, yet so powerfully vibrant and creative.
Keywords: femme fatale, fallen woman, melodrama, Hollywood, animus, anima, archetypal image, Jungian analysis, collective unconscious, projection, medium, moving image, film, myth.
Published Sep 2020 at lolaonfilm.com

Segundo volumen antológico de la obra del poeta, narrador y ensayista argentino Alberto Julián Pérez. Los poemas de Fragmentos hacia la destrucción del sujeto poético introducen al lector la lucha agónica y alegórica del sujeto en busca... more

Segundo volumen antológico de la obra del poeta, narrador y ensayista argentino Alberto Julián Pérez. Los poemas de Fragmentos hacia la destrucción del sujeto poético introducen al lector la lucha agónica y alegórica del sujeto en busca de su identidad; el melodrama político El valor de una mujer presenta personajes del mundo popular que sobreviven en un medio hostil y aprenden a luchar contra la opresión y la injusticia; sus ensayos estudian la poesía de Olga Orozco, la obra del poeta indígena Churqui Choque Vilca, las novelas Estrella distante, de Roberto Bolaño; Como agua para chocolate, de Laura Esquivel; Sobre héroes y tumbas, de Ernesto Sábato; Boquitas pintadas, de Manuel Puig y la obra ensayística de Arturo Jauretche, desde una perspectiva social y cultural integrada.
La obra de Alberto Julián Pérez plantea de una manera original la relación del sujeto poético con el lenguaje; discute dramáticamente las luchas del mundo popular con la sociedad burguesa; y propone a la literatura como uno de los saberes fundadores de la modernidad política y social en Hispanoamérica.

In 19th century French very successful melodrama, discourse is seen as a powerful way to get attention. Criminals and traitors are masters of speech and seductive persuasion, but they never achieve their goals by the end of the play. On... more

In 19th century French very successful melodrama, discourse is seen as a powerful way to get attention. Criminals and traitors are masters of speech and seductive persuasion, but they never achieve their goals by the end of the play. On the other hand, the mute, humble and shy characters demonstrate that silence can convey values such as honesty, loyalty and show the audience that sensibility should be preferred to histrionic actor play.

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The... more

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The Hours offers a considered return to the iconic cultural form of the white middle-class nuclear family in a context where norms of heterosexual family and conjugal life are at once firmly entrenched and widely contested. Largely overlooked in film criticism, The Hours is characterized by its baroque and generative temporality and intertextuality that contribute to a nuanced meditation on women's experience of conjugal and family life. While much of the literature on melodrama draws on psychoanalysis and theories of spatiality, this article develops three distinct yet interrelated temporal and affective readings: Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Virginia Woolf's modernist “moment of being”; the performativity of gender and kinship (Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); and theories of queer time and affect (Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant). These readings probe The Hours's return to mediated cultural ideals of white conjugal and family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002), Savage Grace (dir. Tom Kalin, Spain/US/France, 2007), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, US, 2009). Released at a historical conjuncture when queer debates about marriage and conjugal life are deeply polarized, these works share an ambivalent and stylized fascination with the white bourgeois family melodrama that is at once problematic and generative. I situate the film at the crossroads of two complementary and sometimes contradictory genealogies: the “thinking woman's film,” engaged with female subjectivity and authorship belonging to an influential white liberal feminist genealogy, and the genealogy of queer, white male – authored melodrama.

Fantasy, Gothic, horror and sci-fi fiction have long been privileged genres for exploring anxieties, fantasies and thought experiments about race. In nineteenth-century fiction, Gothic monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula,... more

Fantasy, Gothic, horror and sci-fi fiction have long been privileged genres for exploring anxieties, fantasies and thought experiments about race. In nineteenth-century fiction, Gothic monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, and Mr. Hyde were often understood as possessing racial overtones, although interestingly these figures were usually not marked as “raced” in early silent film versions.1 Instead, the first important Gothic figure of the twentieth century to be widely understood as racially resonant was King Kong.2 More recent instances of similarly implicit coding are present in the Predator series, while overt allegories of sci-fi multiculturalism include the Star Trek, X-Men and Alien Nation franchises. In Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed notes that space aliens, which have become a ubiquitous if ambivalent presence in popular culture, pose questions about the limits of being human as well as about the nature of community and its borders (Ahmed, 3). In this respect, ...

In this article we investigate the astonishing variety of emotions that a brief scene in a film melodrama can evoke. We thus take issue with the reductive view of melodrama that limits this genre’s emotional effects to sadness, pity, and... more

In this article we investigate the astonishing variety of emotions that a brief scene in a film melodrama can evoke. We thus take issue with the reductive view of melodrama that limits this genre’s emotional effects to sadness, pity, and tear-jerking potential. Through a close analysis of a melodramatic standard situation—a “news of death” scene—in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s "21 Grams" (2003), we reveal the emotional dynamics and the high density as well as rich variety of affective phenomena likely to be experienced during the trajectory of this two-minute scene.