Melodrama And Meaning

Author : Barbara Klinger
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253208750
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Barbara Klinger
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Melodrama and Meaning written by Barbara Klinger and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 232 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.

Author : Ben Singer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231113293
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822374048
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Carolyn Williams
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110709593X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Guy Barefoot
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474290361
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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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 240 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.

Author : Elena Lahr-Vivaz
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 0816532516
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Linda Williams
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691201331
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Playing the Race Card written by Linda Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.

Author : Peter Brooks
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300065534
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Melodramatic Imagination written by Peter Brooks and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama - in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.

Author : Stanley Cavell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226098142
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contesting Tears written by Stanley Cavell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Note on the Captions Preface Introduction 1: Naughty Orators: Negation of Voices in Gaslight 2: Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Moments of Letter from an Unknown Woman3: Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager 4: Postscript: To Whom It May Concern 5: Stella's Taste: Reading Stella Dallas Notes Bibliography Filmography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.