This document discusses the concept of melodrama in classical Hollywood cinema. It defines classical Hollywood cinema as utilizing continuity editing to achieve clarity, identification with stars/emotions, and spectacle. Melodrama operates through cinematic effects like music and editing that elicit emotional affects like pathos, empathy, and suspense in the audience. It explores how audiences can both identify with and critically question the emotions of melodramatic heroines. The document also discusses the role of music in setting utopic ideals and how melodrama both conforms to and challenges social norms around gender, race, and class.
The intention of the essay is to link evolution
in cinema genres with the changes in the structure
of popular culture.
La intención del ensayo es asociar la evolución en los géneros cinematográficos con los cambios en la estructura de la cultura popular.
The intention of the essay is to link evolution
in cinema genres with the changes in the structure
of popular culture.
La intención del ensayo es asociar la evolución en los géneros cinematográficos con los cambios en la estructura de la cultura popular.
Chapter 8 THEATER We sit in the darkened theater with many str.docxspoonerneddy
Chapter 8 THEATER
We sit in the darkened theater with many strangers. We sense an air of anticipation, an awareness of excitement. People cough, rustle about, then suddenly become still. Slowly the lights on the stage begin to come up, and we see actors moving before us, apparently unaware of our presence. They are in rooms or spaces similar to those that we may be in ourselves at the end of the evening. Eventually they begin speaking to one another much the way we might ourselves, sometimes saying things so intimate that we are uneasy. They move about the stage, conducting their lives in total disregard for us, only hinting occasionally that we might be there in the same space with them. At first we feel that despite our being in the same building with the actors, we are in a different world. Then slowly the distance between us and the actors begins to diminish until, in a good play, our participation erases the distance. We thrill with the actors, but we also suffer with them. We witness the illusion of an action that has an emotional impact for us and changes the way we think about our own lives. Great plays such as Hamlet, Othello, The Misanthrope, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Long Day’s Journey into Night can have the power to transform our awareness of ourselves and our circumstances. It is a mystery common to much art: that the illusion of reality can affect the reality of our own lives.
Aristotle and the Elements of Drama
Drama is a collaborative art that represents events and situations, either realistic and/or symbolic, that we witness happening through the actions of actors in a play on a stage in front of a live audience. According to the greatest dramatic critic, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the elements of drama are as follows:
1. Plot: a series of events leading to disaster for the main characters who undergo reversals in fortune and understanding but usually ending with a form of enlightenment—sometimes of the characters, sometimes of the audience, and sometimes of both
2. Character: the presentation of a person or persons whose actions and the reason for them are more or less revealed to the audience
3. Diction: the language of the drama, which should be appropriate to the action
4. Thought: the ideas that underlie the plot of the drama, expressed in terms of dialogue and soliloquy
5. Spectacle: the places of the action, the costumes, set designs, and visual elements in the play
6. Music: in Greek drama, the dialogue was sometimes sung or chanted by a chorus, and often this music was of considerable emotional importance; in modern drama, music is rarely used in serious plays, but it is of first importance in the musical theater
Aristotle conceived his theories in the great age of Greek tragedy, and therefore much of what he has to say applies to tragedies by such dramatists as Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE), especially his trilogy, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Sophocles (ca. 496–406 B.
3. Melodrama IS CHC
“…melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American
form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and
emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.
It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood move.”
Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised”
4. What is CHC?
Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC) is defined by
continuity editing with goals of—
Clarity—spatial, temporal and narrative
Identification (star system and emotional pathos)
Conflict (misrecognition leads to clarity, authority)
Spectacle (impressive to look at/listen to)
5. Melodramatic Mode
How does cinema get the audience to feel?
Williams: “cinematic effects…operate in the service of
melodramatic affects”—a “dialectic of pathos & action.”
Effects:
Mise-en-scene, music, close-ups, low angles, wide angles,
Editing for “too late” and “in the nick of time.”
Affects:
Loneliness, suffering, injustice/justice, empathy, pathos,
suspense
Audience knows more than the victim & may identify with many
characters. The King’s Speech
7. Is it OK to cry at a film?
“the surprising power of identifying with victimhood”
What happens when we identify with Stella Dallas,
standing in the rain outside of her daughter’s
wedding? Can we both identify with her sadness and
feel some critical anger as well? Is Stella feeling both
things?
“unlike tragedy…rather than raging against a fate that
the audience has learned to accept, the female hero
often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially
questions” (Williams 47)
8. Progressive or Regressive Emotions?
Audience is not naively identifying only with emotion. (Well,
maybe on the Hannity show…) Melodrama is “a complex
negotiation between emotion and thought.” (Williams 49)
Do not mistake melodrama for “failed tragedy or
inadequate realism” (Williams 50)
Look for moments of narrative or cinematic contradiction—
where truth shines through the character’s (or American
culture’s) belief that it is the “locus of innocence and virtue”
(and, of course--power)
9. Limits of representation
musical loss and return
Melodramatic music (often) delivers an opening base
(or tonic) in original key, then digressions and a final
return (with musical teases) to the opening key.
In CHC music proves that “virtue and truth can be
achieved in ..individual heroic acts rather than, as
Eisenstein wanted, in revolution and change.
Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence
Spielburg’s Schindler’s Bach or Mozart?
10. “All Art constantly aspires to the condition of
music.” Walter Pater
Film music and utopia: “Music extends an impression
of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect,
unintegrated world.” Flinn, p. 9
Meanings for music go back to Plato (music=social
unrest), St. Augustine (rhythm=spiritual completion).
Because music has no system of signification, it is
both praised and seen as threatening—excessive in
meaning.
Musicals create utopic/dystopic spaces—Wizard of
Oz, Glee
12. Female body and Fabric
“ The magic that Loie Fuller creates, with instinct, with
exaggeration, the contraction of skirt or wing,
instituting a place. The enchantress creates the
ambience, draws it out of herself and goes into it, in
the palpitating silence of crepe de chine.”
Mallarme played in French with similarities between
the sound of words soi (herself) and soie (silk).
Stephane Mallarme (1893)
13. Embodied difference—
dance=public persona
The Cakewalk—
Parodic dance of
whiteys and/or
adapted from
Seminole Indians.
First public dance
without makeup for
black women and
men
14. How to get women
into the cinema?
Puffed Sleeves by
Adrian in
Letty Lynton
(1932)
Macy’s sold
500,000 copies
in their
“Cinema Shop”
Did they really…?
15. 1950s
Get me out
of those
ruffles!
Gamine
innocence
?
Stick me in
the
suburbs…
The public speech in Reese Witherspoon films. The Proposal (at the wedding) and then Ryan Reynolds gives one. Any other examples? The King’s Speech perhaps? Melodramatic mode within realist novel/film. Eg Henry James—guilt/innocence. Dostyevsky?
Feminist anger of the 70s was the more popular emotion to identify with—not the suffering mother.
Is melodrama very American??? Defining our nation?