Melodrama Unbound

Author : Christine Gledhill
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543190
Total Pages : 761 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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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 Book excerpt: For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional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.

Author : Geoff Mayer
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476643075
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hollywood's Melodramatic Imagination written by Geoff Mayer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-12-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melodrama is the foundation of American cinema. It is, however, a poorly understood term. While it is a pervasive and persuasive dramatic mode, it is not tied to any specific moral or ideological system. It is not a singular genre; rather, it operates as a "genre generating machine" capable of determining the aesthetics and structure of the drama within many genres. Melodrama centers the conflict around the clash between good and evil and provides a sense of poetic justice--but the specific values embedded in notions of good and evil are determined by the culture, and they shift from nation to nation, region to region, and period to period. This book explores the "populist" westerns of the 1930s, the propaganda films that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the popularity of Sax Rohmer's master villain Fu Manchu. "Melodramas of passion" and film noir also offer a challenge to melodrama with its seemingly alienated protagonists and downbeat endings. Yet, with few exceptions, Hollywood was able to assimilate these genres within its melodramatic imagination.

Author : Roxie J. James
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030395855
Total Pages : 183 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture written by Roxie J. James and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book delves into humanity’s compulsive need to valorize criminals. The criminal hero is a seductive figure, and audiences get a rather scopophilic pleasure in watching people behave badly. This book offers an analysis of the varied and vexing definitions of hero, criminal, and criminal heroes both historically and culturally. This book also examines the global presence, gendered complications, and gentle juxtapositions in criminal hero figures such as: Robin Hood, Breaking Bad, American Gods, American Vandal, Kabir, Plunkett and Macleane, Martha Stewart, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Eleven, and Let The Bullets Fly.

Author : Henry Bacon
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474442161
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio written by Henry Bacon and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English-language collection on this innovative director, exploring Tulio's unique style and the extent and effect of his obsessive recirculation of story elements and stylistic patterns in his work.

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 : Travis Workman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520395700
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Political Moods written by Travis Workman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically and politically opposed to each other. However, Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode. Travis Workman reveals that the melancholic moods of film melodrama express the somatic and social conflicts between political ideologies and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references. These moods dramatize the tension between the language of Cold War politics and the negative affects that connect cinema to what it cannot fully represent. The result is a new way of historicizing the cinema of the two Koreas in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, war, and nation building.

Author : Nayoung Aimee Kwon
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253059771
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theorizing Colonial Cinema written by Nayoung Aimee Kwon and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing Colonial Cinema is a millennial retrospective on the entangled intimacy between film and colonialism from film's global inception to contemporary legacies in and of Asia. The volume engages new perspectives by asking how prior discussions on film form, theory, history, and ideology may be challenged by centering the colonial question rather than relegating it to the periphery. To that end, contributors begin by excavating little-known archives and perspectives from the colonies as a departure from a prevailing focus on Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The collection pinpoints various forms of devaluation and misrecognition both in and beyond the region that continue to relegate local voices to the margins. This pathbreaking study on global film history advances prior scholarship by bringing together an array of established and new interdisciplinary voices from film studies, Asian studies, and postcolonial studies to consider how the present is continually haunted by the colonial past. Winner of the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award!

Author : Ariane Hudelet
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100020135X
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Exploring Seriality on Screen written by Ariane Hudelet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television history. By associating theoretical considerations and close readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic approaches, this volume offers a complex panorama of issues related to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. Written by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies, film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock.

Author : Mandy Merck
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1911239767
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cinema's Melodramatic Celebrity written by Mandy Merck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-21 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the study of both celebrity and the cinema, Mandy Merck argues that modern fame and film melodrama are part of the same worldview, one that cannot resolve the relation of personal worth to social esteem. Tracing the history of this conundrum back to the philosophy of the seventeenth century and the theatre of the eighteenth, she demonstrates its convergence in stage melodrama and its intensification in the Hollywood star system. Are today's celebrities worth our attention? In that demand for judgement and the hope for its visual guidance, the melodramatic imagination survives – permeating not only fiction film, but documentary, the artist's film, and our self-exhibition on social media. Examining a range of classical and contemporary films from Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) to Laura Poitras's Citizenfour (2014) , the many remakes of A Star Is Born, the compulsory exhibitionism of political celebrity and the unmasking of whistle-blowers, Merck illustrates the ways in which the cinema constantly restages the moral evaluation of prominent individuals, whether they are actors, artists, politicians or activists.

Author : Petho Agnes Petho
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474435513
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Caught In-Between written by Petho Agnes Petho and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole.