MELODRAMA
CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
Problems of definition
riticism
The study of melodrama as a cinematic genre is a recent development. It achieved public visibility in 1977, when the Society for Education in Film andTelevision commissioned papers for a study weekend, some of which were subsequently published in Serpen and Mouie in the UK and in The Australian Journal of Screen Theory. Around this time and since, a spate of articles has appeared in British, French and American film journals and interest in the genre has been extended to work on television, particularly soap operas.
The British foundations of this work were laid in two very different contexts. In 1972, a small independent film journal, Monogrum, opened a special issue on melodrama with a detailed and seminal account of the historical sources and aesthetics of the 'great I lollywood melodramas of the 50s', written by Thomas Elsaesser as part of a project of re-evaluating American cinema. Then in 1974, Spare Rib, a general interest magazine for the women's movement, published a review by Laura Mulvey of Fassbinder's Fear Ears the Soul/Angst essm Seek- au/ (1974) in which she used the film's acknowledged homage to Douglas Sirk's All That Heuuen Allows (1956) to argue a case for feminist interest in the genre. Elsaesser's and Mulvey's contributions represented two very different approaches to melodrama, and dominant film theory and feminist work coexist uneasily on this terrain.
One major source of difficulty in the ensuing debate is the diversity of forms that are gathered under the heading of melodrama. Until the 1970s, the term hardly existed in relation to the cinema except pejoratively to mean a 'melodramatic' and theatrical mode that manipulated the audience's emotions and failed aesthetically to justify the response summoned up. The film industry used the category to denote dramas involving the passions - hence crime melodrama, psychological melodrama, family melodrama. Closely related are two further categories, the woman's film and romantic drama.To these, film critics have added the maternal melodrama and the argument that most American silent cinema should be considered as melodrama, with the work of D. W. Griffith constituting a virtual subset of its own. Ascription of literary and theatrical sources is equally diverse, running from Greek tragedy, through the bourgeois sentimental novel, Italian opera to Victorian stage melodrama. In the face of such confusion, arguments that melodrama constitutes a 'mode' or 'style' crossing a range of different periods and forms are persuasive. However, this does not evade the problem of generic definition, for writers on melodrama have been united in seeking to trace in it the convergence of capitalist and patriarchal structures, a project that requires historical, cultural and formal specificity.The categories set out above belong to particular phases of generic production and particular socio-historic circumstances - although with considerable overlapping and transformation of material between them.
Lack of generic specificity may arise in part from the fact that interest in melodrama lirst entered lilm criticism via the channels of rnise en scene and the auteur. Criticism from this standpoint (such as Mouie) saw in the work of Nicholas Ray, Vin-cenle Minneili, Max Ophuls and Otto Preminger a transformation of banal and melodramatic scripts through the power of autho-
that
iysis
re-evaluated Hollywood in terms of ideological texi and looked to mise en scene for a formal play of Jistan_iq71 and
rial vision expressed in mise en scene. Later, film cn anatysis
irony. The work of Douglas Sirk was discovered aroun „a lined up alongside Ophuls and Minneili, preparing 119 ^ for the central place occupied by melodrama in ****~n( arne ology and film aesthetics during the 1970s, and at the sa" sntl0n allowing more critical space to the role of generic cor nj «^ (see Halliday, 1971; Willemen, 1971). These be8innin^di,ncy of en scene and ideological criticism account for the Ien. me|0. much writing on melodrama to focus on the 1950s farm V dramas made by a small number ot auteurs, Minne *• witn Ray, Preminger and Sirk (see Schatz, 1981). This conlrj'ed''t0 the the constitution of film noir as a critical category that ^ greater visibility of a corpus of non-authorial works. On   ^ sQ hand, more recent work on the woman's film, whic a predicated on preceding film critical traditions, has a much wider range of titles to emerge. dism'sse<) Early feminist investigation of Hollywood had ^ much of the work validated by auteurism as enshnning ^ viewpoint on the world that was oppressive to w°mwomari's ever, Molly Haskell's (1979) influential chapter on the   ^ of film of the 1930s and 1940s drew attention to a who    t[c or submerged and despised production, featuring do by romantic dramas centred on female protagonists 1P ^el0. stars valued by the women's movement. Critical wor farnily drama has tended to elide the woman's film w,ln. " t0 the melodrama. Only feminists have drawn attentio woman's film as a category of production aimed a^cea for about women, drawing on other cultural forms p«» ^
women often by women - such as women's ma8az"iethetic 3"d back fiction - and to raise questions about the aes cultural significance of this gender specification.
Theorising family melodrama weStem
While on the surface appearing far removed from ^ actual and gangster film, genres whose plots are often roo ^(]eSS fre-historical events, the family melodrama is never ■« ^eCt. quently defined as the dramatic mode for a
namely the centrality of the bourgeois family tot e c;t,0ffrey
and continued dominance of that class. For examP)e' conjunC' Nowell Smith argued that 'melodrama arises from rea)ism. tion of a formal history proper (development of trag tnc etc.), a set of social determinations, which have ^liid1 rise of the bourgeoisie, and a set of psychic determine .^.Tliis take shape around the family' (Nowell-Smith.19   ' ffererit description places melodrama within a network o ^jdjjig to cerns, the relationship between which is at 15S"ewriter. the theoretical and political commitments of the     ^ soao-One problem that emerges is the relation betw^ar forrn a" historical conjuncture that gives rise to a particu ^^gt se its subsequent aesthetic development and msto™sm and fe"1' of problems is introduced in the meeting of Mar»s ^talis"1 inism, which offer competing notions c'
3 for the
and bourgeois ideology, sex and class as key terms oaI)l sis of the family in melodrama. When Freudian ps?^_ ^ is brought to bear on melodrama, interesting tens
aly*
duCeri k
" '» fenai v       aPplication of those ideas in film theory c°'istrUcri LSrn'Tl,e feminist emphasis on the problem of the T^'ions of" °f fernininity in patriarchal culture introduces ■etic con'sf Konticr in relation to both the industrial and an-'e<-'n so"1"'0" °f a {om: what' f01 instance, is the relation ""? HoweC''IC autlicnces and the forms produced in their , of ™ tno male oedipal scenario - so often cited as the matt I**'0 narrative cinema and frequently the explicit f._ "  r of W50s melodramas - to be understood in forms ■----10 nrotagonists and 'femi-
Mice b-etwee farm
bedrock 5ubject that
ul-'drock ot classic narrative cinema ~~       dt,(Stoou m ■ s*iect matter of 1950s melodramas - to** arid fem
tha» offer an unusual space to fena e tu a fe»«*
niW problems, and are specifically »° aui'«icer , tnrinthearg"ment'e
The question of gender is also a facto       ^ express to Wither melodrama is better considered ^ ^ ^ ^
rathur t-V,-... -i nöi
rather than ered'proEressive'
^^'^genreuncta,
is brj_ .6 or no1- Tile taxonomies that arise oiu ^. „ ."""Ons thai h    f°CUS icmoS<apbic motifs, themes and tit-'nalysiSof'w ;'ve a material or structural force in feminist J, dtrco m,,..0?''" s lives. but which in mise en scene analysis ironir .Jp,1Hncai significance on behalf of patriarchy. Sim-■     pT"&e ■ !Sti'ncialio" or disruption at the level of style may 7***» to v^'*"* m 8"vii.B the spectator, both male and female, n "hif' Ihe s''ClUreS 01 feel'"S' ""'mally closed off, but do little r* level of oi"2'1'1 relati°ns between the sexes represented at etise the CIT 0t anfl eharaoer, Such shifts of emphasis charac-mPlexities of the melodrama debate.
Mi
Melodrama as a problem of'style and articulation'
Writing in 1972, Elsaesser's approach draws on the ^960s concern to validate Hollywood through mise en scene analysis and the post-1968 interest in iwny, distanciation and ideological criticism, reworking both in the cunrext of his own concerns with aesthetic affect. Much of Elsaesser's article is concerned to counter the conventional relegation of the form for its blatant use of 'mechanisms of emotional solicitation' (Elsaesser, 19/2, p. 8). He counteracts this view from two main directions. First, he seeks to show how the aesthetics of melodrama as a popular and commercial form give access to truths about human existence denied to more culturally respectable forms such as European art cinema. Second, he seeks to demonstrate how it is possible under certain social and production conditions for the melodrama to be ideologically subversive.
In common with other critics, Elsaesser establishes melodrama as a form that belongs to the bourgeoisie. In its Ctrst manifestations - which Elsaesser cites as the eighteenth-century sentimental novel and post-Revolution romantic drama it constituted an ideological weapon against a corrupt and feudal aristocracy. The bourgeois family's struggle to preserve the honour of the daughter from despotic and unprincipled aristocrats marked a contest over space for private conscience and individual rights. Elsaesser identifies certain features in early bourgeois melodrama as important to its later developments.
MELODRAM*
319
318   THE CINEMA BOOK
the capacity of the eighteenth century sentimental novel and romantic drama to make individual conflicts speak for a society that, he argues, lies in the popular cultural tradition it inherited, leading from the medieval morality play to music hall drama, the most significant aspect of which was its 'non-psychological conception of the dramatis personae' (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 2); and formal devices such as ironic parallelism, parody, counterpoint and rhythm. Another significant feature is the siting of the struggles of individualism in the family. Por Elsaesser, the family is not, except in early forms of melodrama, important in itself as a political institution; rather, through the highly charged formal motifs of melodrama, it provided a means of delineating social crises in concretely personalised and emotional terms.
These constituents of the melodrama - its non-psychological conception of character and formally complex mise en scene, its containment of action within the family and consequent emphasis on private feeling and psychic levels of truth - enable Elsaesser to construct the family melodrama of the 1950s as the peak of Hollywood's achievement. According to Elsaesser's argument, by the time melodrama was taken up in the cinema it was already saturated with significance beyond the specific socio-historical conditions that gave rise to it. He therefore looks to cinematic history to illuminate how the strategies of melodrama are realised in film. He argues that in the beginning, all silent cinema was forced into a melodramatic mode - not simply because of its temporal closeness to Victorian popular forms (see Tell, 1974; Vardac, 1949), but because the requirements of expression outside verbal lan guage fortuitously pushed the medium into modes that favoured a melodramatic worldview. While the coming of sound meant the dominance of the verbal register and a consequently different dramatic mode, the development of new technologies in the 1950s - colour, widescreen, deep focus, crane and dolly - often in the hands of German directors with backgrounds in Expressionism, made a complex visual mise en scene again possible, in which the spoken word would be submerged as only one strand in a musical counterpoint.
Coincident with the development of the technology for such a dramaturgy was the popularisation of Freudian psychoanalysis in America in the 1940s and 1950s. The family reappears as a site of dramatic action, though in a far different ideological context from its heroic stance in the emergence of melodrama as a bourgeois form. The domestic melodrama provides not the exterior spaces of the western or urban gangster film to be conquered by a hero, who, in search of oedipal identity can express himself in action, but a closed self-reflexive space in which characters are inward looking, unable to act in society (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 10).
Not only do the location and mores of the family reduce the scope for dramatic action, but the characters themselves, in line with the melodramatic tradition, are unaware of the forces that drive them. The intensity and the significance of the drama, then, are not carried in what the characters say, or in the articulation of inner struggle as in tragedy; rather it is the mise en scene of melodrama, providing an 'aesthetics of the domestic', that tells us what is at stake. The 'pressure generated by things crowding in on the characters ... by the claustrophobic atmosphere of the bourgeois home and/or small town setting' (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 13) is intensified through the demand of the 90-minute feature film for compression of what may be far more expansively expressed in its literary sources. There is, Elsaesser argues, a sense of 'hysteria bub bling all the time just below the surface' and a 'feeling that there is always more to tell than can be said' (Elsaesser, 1972 p. 7).
Elsaesser draws on Freudian concepts for the interpret esthetic strategies"
tion of mise en scene, arguing that the a
rk'.
1950s melodrama function similarly to Freud's 'dream wo; Sometimes this is a matter of the stock characters' lack of se awareness producing an explicit form of displacement at level of the plot:
The characters' behaviour is often pathetically at variance with the real objectives they want 1» achieve. A sequence of substitute actions creates a kind of vicious circle in which the close nexus of cause and effect is somehow broken and - in a" often overtly Freudian sense - displaced. (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 10)
In other cases, it functions 'by what one might call an intt ^ fted symbolisalion of everyday actions, the heightening o ordinary gesture and a use of setting and decor so as to re the character's fetishist fixations' (Elsaesser, 1972, p. !")■
This account provides the basis of Elsaesser's ar8um.cal that in the hands of gifted directors and at the right h,storKoy moment, it can be used to critique the society it lejW"**^ terms here are pathos and irony. The extemalisation of ings and reactions into decor, gesture and events objec and distances emotions, producing pathos or irony
through a 'liberal' mise-en-scenc which balances different points or view so that the spectator is position of seeing and evaluating contrasting attitudes within a given framework ... resulting from ... the total configuration and therefore inaccessible to the protagonists themselves. (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 15)
Thus melodrama can suggest causes beyond individual resp* sibility, to be found on a 'social and existential level' (Elsae
1972'1,14>- • ,cir-
The melodramatic aesthetic gains its social force in cular movement of displacement: while capitalist so creates psychic problems that become acutely focused in » rf
and sexual relations, so events within the family are outwards into the mise en scene indicating
ed
forces that e**' Flci-iesscr SL"
specific family conditions. From this position, tia> ]inear gests that the shift in 1950s Hollywood from t aeEt trajectory of the active hero conquering the spaces o or the city, to the impotent hero trapped within a t iate interior and confined by the codes of behaviour app j^otlS to the family, indicates a shift in the ideological conie)0<jIa-obtaining under postwar advanced capitalism. The Jling matic form had come full circle from its initial char" of individual human rights via the bourgeois family s. deo]ogy against a feudal aristocracy to a later critique of the ^ of individualism in which the bourgeois family bec°ent 0n a site of Ihe 'social and emotional alienation' conscqu corrupt individualism and the failure of the drive to filment (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 14). .. )andthe
The major distinction between Elsaesser's Posll'°!itarxi5i'1' work that followed later lay in his use of Freud and ^ for While noting the rich potential of Freudian subject ^jng Hollywood melodrama and assuming rather thai) ^^nd the oedipal hero as dominating the form, it is °n baSes mechanisms of a Freudian 'dream-work' that Elsae6lhe melo-his argument for the rich and complex significance 0 ^m is drama's mise en scene. And what he takes from ^ [i0tj0n not so much a classical definition of class relations a ue„tly, of alienation translated into existential terms. Cons
■ h hotween class and his arguments do not analyse or distmgursn ok [he dis. Sender relations in Hollywood melodrama, ^etaphysical Placement of one into the other, jon and rape'
interpretation of class conflict as sexual exP1011' that ™----u__    Fkaes,er dominates the form tn
and the subject matt*-a^        quMtlons at„ut t *iS aPPaT'Tte nation between soc a    ^ q( exercise of power. ' more „sible - less a q
^cement of one into the other, 'the ""fij^ ^^TJ^r, the relation Ration of
interpretation of Cass conflict as sexual -g*«££*o*                        potentially more vrs Ule   e f_ 1972)
that, according to Elsaesser, dominates the form m ^ gende   ec°      ^ rf ^ by the othe ^
history (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 3).This means that*^ the symbol            ion together™ p rf ^ ^ ly
<* how a female protagonist may affect plot ^^ed. than of the*       establishmg bo th'■ tůruugh the
trajectory of the hero's oedipal drama ««««f^3 'mise beconres.**          ^         taerar*V ^ und„
furthermore, the emnhasis on melodrama as f**™^ to a place ir^ .^.^ the pop^N*^ is the possible
therrnore, the emr* °edlpal drama remains unexamined.
scene' neg|ect.   P    's on melodrama as 'form' and 'mise   becomes crucial m ».,
'e t'lised; forinst<'UeS'IOnS that 8cneric specifications would   to a place in the bourgeois social hierarchy am ^Oman's fi]ni   nC°'     distinctions and relations between   mechanism of inheritance, the property relations that under-ns 'rnportant t^r0"''"u'cdrama, family melodrama - ques-   pin this position.The problem for the family is the possible n unc't'!standing of the place of women in   failure of the father to fulfil this function suitably, together ">nH*.r but particularly of   with the risky business of raising the son into a patriarchal identity in order that he may take over his property and his place within the community. One root cause of such possible failure is the confinement of sexual relations within the family - evoking the oedipal drama - and the problematic position
of women there.
However, while ffowell-Smith makes the relations of power, Wori- aw   , gender and sex more visible, he still leans towards a masculine
r hiise en see     'tS me,;ilJhoncat aim exisrenuo construction of melodrama. Like Elsaesser, he distinguishes
!°ci°logica| ''ne "'ha'ysis. What followed was either a more melodrama from the western in the way it closes down on rehch, 197g\ 10 'ts subject matter (see Kleinhans, 1978:   potential social action and turns inward for its drama. Although
"""l and site       understood the family as a political insti-   he does not make the home an existential space, it becomes k inf]Ucn   | re''' °PPression, particularly for women, or   simply the arena of the 'feminine' characterised by passivity ' Produced 8<     !''e devcloPment of feminist Film theory   and negativity. Feminist film theory had argued that represen-av.ai'ab]e in tl accou"ts of the social or sexual positions made   tation of the 'feminine'as positive, rather than 'non-male', was ,e "arralive to protagonists and spectators. Here   impossible within the framework of classic Hollywood narra-■"■ hmna metaphorically resonant, was   tive. Nowel] Smith draws on such arguments to deal with the mmmff.   'feminine' presence in melodrama. While acknowledging it fre-uently figures female protagonists, he argues that 'masculinity' rhe only knowable heroic norm, so that acute - induction of active female
have then
tions important to an undemanding ofthe P'^a™ic"ularly of melodrama. Issues of class and gendet, bu debate Sender, were to figure in the next stage m the e, about melodrama.
Sex and class in melodrama
^terwork on melodrama was to prise Osaess«'gj proclivity »8 work away from its metaphorical and exis a more
t°r mise
Seen as svm"0'rather than beinS metaphorically resonam, — 0r 'hsolnh, Pt0,natir> indicating the 'return of the repressed'
Central ComradictIt">s. °f melodr t0 *e debates that emerge in these reassessments Product of""5' -S the sig"ificance of the bourgeois family as a 5°cial rel patr'archy and capitalism. At issue here is how the HrJi tne"s  °"s of capitalist production - class - articulate th° hlB^Trv reliltions °f capitalist/patriarchal reproduction " / Once the bourgeoisie stops rising, it is no longer t a direct symbolisation of class struggle - as -*-i novel or post-
ly. Once the bourgeoisie stops r's"*3"struggle - as e in it a direct symbolisation or , QX p05t-    I d m
.f the eighteenth-century ^m«^r, the 1
n...ine' presence m mv... quently figures female protagonists, he argues uJai . still constitutes the only knowable heroic norm, so that acute contradictions are involved in the production of active female characters.The space allowed female characters, while it cannot represent femininity, facilitates an exploration of problems of male identity.
From here, Noweil-Smith goes on to give an account of melodrama as a patriarchal form, taking the oedipal drama (more literally than does Elsaesser) as its subject matter. The Hollywood melodrama of the IS^Os is structured in terms of conflict between the generations, in which the son has to accept his symbolic castration by the father before he can take up his place in the patriarchal and bourgeois order, proving himself, by becoming both an individual and like his father, capable of ■-*-.rinothe family unit for the next generation (Nowell-
SSS* rom e'e'ueenth-century sentimental „ u  '< to be telatlS   drama. for instance. However, the family it See'ns to ope   tU C'aSS at an iaeological level. On one hand, 'ePr0(jUt:^ rate as a trans-class institution; on the other, seer' does no°t •    t,ua,s as class subjects. The family, how-
ar*ed individ,/',mp'y securc closs subjects; it also produces   by no--
I °und ci„en       Arguably, the neuralgic point for debates   reconstituting the family......
of' tn's respect '"e)ut|rama is the interrelation of sex and class.   Smith, 1977, p. 116).
m alysis of >' 'd antl Marx compete to provide the terms Like Elsaesser, Nowell Smith thaws on Freud for an under-f re e>hph fa'>"iy; according to which authority is given standing of the mechanisms of melodramatic narrative and „fpression im's' "'e fam'ly is viewed as the site of sexual mise en scene. However, rather than concepts elaborated in The P ced socio Smith. 1977' Mul^ey, 1977/78) or of dis-   Interpretation of Dreams, Nowell-Smith deploys freud's account
r<!Ud's tak "eronoinic contradiction (Kleinhans, 1978). from   of a childhood fantasy, the 'family romance', and his theory of >aS,ration ae h"'0 0ediPal dra'ira, particularly the moment of   conversion hysteria. The family romance provides the means s'otl ber    rcPression; from Marxism the concept of the   of understanding the meltidrama as being both about the family, ^"^adicti U"?en p,oductive and personal life, in which the   foregrounding female characters, and about patriarchal iden-- r°duction°'>S "lhere"t in the alienated labour of capitalist   tity. In the family romance, the child questions its parenthood, are supposed to be compensated for within the   exploring through the question 'Whose child am 1?', or 'would ' however, they are merely displaced (see Klein-   I like to be?', different family arrangements. Thus the structure
allows differential and even taboo sexual relations to be explored, reorganised and eventually closed off in the final res '-'tin of a reconstituted family to which melodrama is
*•» is conse-
fami ham
action are t 'fly, where,
The
1978).
. *e male oedipal crisis        ,odrama as«b0"
^"ffrey Nowell-Smith (1977) located mcto ^ ,)f daS ca form by distinguishing its addres I.=>    c)a5S l0 wli.a tfa?edy. Whereas tragedy does no. depiCtW*    llielod.an » ■ iressed, the social relations' ^^^.ically' among « authority to be distnb>rted
it
'í"ía«i""í£!'»»'*"
ssfescf?-*-'—
olutionof/reC° , such resolution is conse-
commiUed\ NoweU-Sm.tha5;s;^ession; for fiction, this However, Now      tnerefore on repre the fan.
==tS=-s='-»-
tasy, which," _
Daydr ——jw in DouglaB Sirk'n. leads Nowell Smith to the notion of mise en scene as 'excess' - a 'too much' of music, colour, movement that indicates not simply a heightening of emotion but a substitution for what cannot be admitted in plot or dialogue, □ process for which Freud's theory of 'conversion hysteria' provides an analogy (Nowell-Smith, 1977, p. 117). From a perspective that views classic Hollywood in terms of the 'classic realist text', such 'hysterical moments' can be seen as a breakdown in realist conventions, where elements of the mise en scene lose their motivation and coherence is lost. Such moments of breakdown cannot be done away with by a 'happy end' but represent the 'ideological failure' of melodrama as a form, and so its 'progressive' potential.
Melodrama and real H
------...ina: __..ua
Melodrama and real life
Chuck Kleinhans offers a different perspective. A Marxist feminist sociology of the family, rather than Freudian theories of sexuality, provides the premiss of his arguments: 'Since bourgeois domestic melodrama emerges with the ascension of capitalism, and since it deals with the family, it makes sense to look at the family under capitalism to better understand melodrama' (Kleinhans, 1978, p. 41). He characterises the social relations of capitalist production in terms of a split between 'productive' work and personal life now confined to the home - the sphere of reproduction. The alienation of the labour process within capitalist forms of production is disguised and compensated for in the notions of personal identity and happiness supposed to be found in the family, a bourgeois conception of'people's needs' shaped by the ideology of indi-
v'd"alisTO.Atthes
a,ised outside prod,?';'""6'Women and children are margin-Won'«r beco, J. " 'Ct,on and confined to the home, while capitalist relations '^nsf" for providing the fulfilment that ',es outside the fa,,,', prod"ction cannot - a need whose source ™«c contradictinr theiefore cannot be achieved. 'This ,K1cmhans, 1978   " ,°rms the raw material of melodrama'
and disasteri in that, in tne pjJing Qn ofdomestic con,l,ct and Wo °nwntration on 'the personal sphere, home. ™*>ness to rPal £ s Problems- (Kleinhans, 1978, p. 42) and its ou'cf genres with fh lodrama deals more directly than many exPeriences. in so Tmes a"d situations close to its audience's ta,mly itself, dispIa„nmg'Its function is similar to that of the ™" Problem, of lit g S?CIaI c°Mradiction, working through aSIOn and women's se f'8    fami,y intact at the cost of repres-
Profoundly consen, "sacnficc- to these terms, melodrama 'r°'n Providing an iZ''bve fol™- Its penchant for ambiguity,' £** f<*<* !Z°K °f bourgeois society,
":W" A»°«*, for ^t !1Umber °f P°sslb,e ^dings. " ,matr'age to her BlrH       'the ""suitability of Cary's secon
Pur\°fdaSS' °f 4e of^iS T^8"" .ndifferently a ****** on it, 3I;p°ff ilfestyle - thus attenuating the film'-^Ptomatic - mZ!? "mteh For Kleinhans, these films are structural !, SU^PM of bourgeois ideology °f 'deologica, brH"™ prob'cms. They are not, however, instances anaIVsis from a™own or aesthetic radicalism and it is °nhr Can r£,veal its p,ojPc; d'fIercnt position to that of the film
is
far
disperses All Thai second jrob-
:. in
only that
The two voices of melodrama
Ura Mulvey's (1977/78) contribution shifts the emphasis away from melodrama as a 'progressive' genre by reinserting questions about the place of women both in the subject matter mel°drama and in its conditions of production and consumption. While sharing some of Kleinhans's concerns, her eminist perspective produces a very different intervention. JjWnhana sees the family as a product of capitalist social rela-"°ts residing in the split between 'productive' and ^productive' life: patriarchy does not enter as a term in his analysis, and, as with Klsaesser, the question of gender specialty in melodrama disappears.
For Mulvey, however, it is in patriarchy that the pertinent and irresolvable contradictions lie. For her, the notion that melo drama exposes contradictions in bourgeois ideology by its failure 0 accommodate the 'excess' generated by its subject matter see Nowell-Smith, 1977) fails to understand either the degiee t° which family and sexual relations are constituted as contra-d'etory or the role ot melodrama in providing a 'safety valve '°r them. Drawing on Helen Foley's view (about Aeschylean t'agedy) that 'over-valuation of virility under patnarchy causes s°cial and ideological problems which the drama comments on' (Mulvey, 1977/78, p. 54), Mulvey argues that 'ideological contradiction is the overt mainspring and specific content of
MELODRAMA 321
there is subversive excess in melodrama, this is where Mulvey locates it. Whereas the patriarchal mode of melodiama is able to produce some form of readjustment of its values, some reconciliation between the sexes, the attempt to entertain the woman's point of view, to figure feminine desire, produces narrative problems of an order impossible to tic up, except in the fantasies of women's magazine fiction. In All J hat Heaven Allows, Cary, a widowed mother of two, past child-bearing age, is able to unite with her younger, employee lover only when a last-minute accident renders him bedridden and incapable. However, such a fantasy, while resolving certain of the narrative's contradictions, touches on 'recognisable, real and familiar traps, which for women brings it closer to daydream than fairy story' (Mulvey, 1977/78, p. 56).
Progressing the debate
"'ebdrania, not a hidden, unconscious threat' (Mulvey, 1977/78, of * :0nseciuently, mise en scene can no longer be the means u< Privileged rriti™. ._____.________:-f„___but
Two major and interlinked areas of debate emerged from Mulvey's and Nowell -Smith's interventions. The fii st concerns the 'obscured dialectic between class politics and sexual politics, bourgeois ideology and the patriarchal order' (Pollock, 1977, p. 106); rhe second, the question of whether gender difference can be said to have aesthetic consequences in fictional structures.
rather P critical access to progressive interpretation, aesth 'i 195°S Hol'ywo°d melodrama, represents the specific time t "10de *at distinguishes it from tragedy, working over-Welod Carry Wili" the ,imited stock figures of bourgeois ernot' ram3 cannot consciously be aware of, 'giving abstract closeSpectacular form' (Mulvey, 1977/78, p. 55).Thus Mulvey in ti Soff thc notion of a formal subversiveness being inherent
melodramatic mode. dra nstead. she looks to the production conditions of melo-mat a      "S relation to its imputed female audience, whose the'     a"d cu|tural conditions of existence the form, despite acln Symbo''c imbalance' of narrative structures, was forced to With       ^ " 'S'after a11' Ae patriarchal need for coexistence viat W°men that produces the crisis melodrama seeks to alle-Pat 6 Because she insists on the real contradictions of Cal • "*al 'deology foi women, rather than their metaphori-can tm"  a*lce for men. Mulvey begins to show how melodrama tiv   °* function for patriarchal ends, bringing about a narra-resolution of its contradictions, and at the same time Perform
quite different function lor women: offering the sat-
:sed
rtl??'0" of recognising those contradictions, usually suppress IMUlvey, 1977/78, p. 53). t[| Thls view leads Mulvey to distinguish between those films .   are 'coloured by a female protagonist's dominating point-- view' and those that deal with male oedipal problems by amming 'tensions in the family, and between sex and gen-rations' (Mulvey, 1977/78, p. 54), constructing the hero as saesser's and Nowell-Smith's victim of patriarchal society. '  : she argues, worked in both traditions, his independently P oduced The Tarnished Angels (1958) and Written on the Wind u J/' conforming to the second pattern, his work for Ross AllTk" 31 Universal. who specialised in women's pictures (see ' That Heaven Allows), belonging to the first. Women's pictures, ariously known in the trade as 'weepies', 'sudsers' or 'four •mdkerchief Pictures', were tailored to the female matinee Whence, generally deriving from women's magazine fiction r novelettes, and had a tangential relation, yet to be fully e*Plored, to the family melodrama derived from the bourgeois novel.ThCSe films are characterised by an attempt to reproduce "e woman's point of view as central to the narrative, and if
The repressed feminine
Griselda Pollock (1977) takes up the first issue in a consideration of what precisely is repiessed in the oedipal moment. She notes confusion in discussion of melodrama as to whether its representation of the family signifies an interrogation of bour geois family relations, or the displacement of contradictions found in bourgeois social relations, or both. Behind this lies an issue about the primacy of patriarchal or of capitalist relations - of sex or class determination. Pollock wants to argue the necessity of thinking of the family, and the place of women within it, as a product of both in dialectical articulation together. In this respect, she sees both Nowell-Smith (19/7) and Mulvey (1977/78) as in danger of 'reifying sexuality outside the social formation', arguing that 'the contradictions which All That Heaven Allows exposes are between different social positions, not just irreconcilable desires or the sexuality of women' (Pollock, 1977, p. 110). Taking issue with the view that femininity in patriarchal culture is unrepresentable because unknown and unknowable, Pollock argues that femininity can be produced only as specific social positions. In western society, the social position of mother is crucial to the perpetuation both of capitalist social relations and patriarchal dominance, demanding the subjugation of female sexuality in social and cultural life. From Pollock's perspective, the women's point-of-view movies and male oedipal dramas have one thing in common: the relocation of the woman as mother, a position that, while fathers may disappear, be rendered silent or impotent, dominates the conclusion of these films.
However, such relocation faces the problem of'the extraordinary and disruptive role played by the woman's uncontuined, withheld or frustrated sexuality in the dynamic of the narrative' - which includes 'female sexuality outside familial roles' (Pollock, 1977, p. Ill) and the continued sexuality of mothers. This leads Pollock to posit the 'repressed feminine' as the key to understanding melodrama. In her terms, the 'feminine' represents a psycho-sexual position, hypothetically available to cither sex, but foregone and repressed in the reproduction of sons in the patriarchal, masculine position and daughters as mothers. What is important here is that femininity is understood not simply as an empty, negative, passive space, but
322   THE CINEMA BOOK
something positively 'lost' in the construction of the social and sexed subject positions necessary to patriarchal, bourgeois society. Although Pollock does not do so, the fantasy of the family romance could be invoked here to explain the patriarchal function of both women's film and male family melodrama. In one of its forms, it allows the child to disown the father and fantasise the mother's independent sexuality with another man. This, for the male child in particular, allows both an exploration of incestuous desire and identification with the female position; for the female child, it allows a refusal of the repression required for the confinement of female sexuality to reproduction.
Taking up Mulvey's (1977/78) 'safety valve' theory of melodrama, Pollock goes on to suggest that many of the contradictions exposed in 'progressive' analysis of melodrama are in fact ones that patriarchal and bourgeois culture can contain. And this is as true of the women's picture tradition as of the male family melodrama; the woman's point of view in All That Heaven Allows is not in the last analysis what is disruptive. Cary in fact is offered as a passive spectator of her own fate, quite in line with patriarchal ideology, whereas in Home from the Hiil (1960), on the surface a male melodrama, the figure of the woman, totally robbed of point of view, holds nevertheless enormous control in the disposition of narrative events.
Pollock's intervention in the debate constitutes a useful appraisal of its theoretical assumptions. She attempts to construct terms in which the women's picture and family melodrama can be thought through together in terms of a problematic that embraces the dialectic of sex and class. However, attractive as Pollock's conception of the source of potential disruption in melodrama might be, the notion of the 'feminine position' outside of patriarchal and bourgeois social relations is highly abstract, and not much further forward in providing a sense of the articulation of sex and class that she demands.
Class and sex in the maternal melodrama
Christian Viviani (1980) is concerned with 'woman' as an already culturally coded figure capable of mobilising audience response towards new conceptions of social organisation. He attempts an analysis of the ideologies reworked in a subset of Hollywood melodrama that appears to effect a passage between its Victorian forms, epitomised in the work of Griffith, and the woman's film - a subset that Viviani dubs "the maternal melodrama'. His analysis of this subgenre in the 1930s deals with the transformation of European, Victorian themes under pressure from New Deal ideology. In this, the role of woman as mother is pivotal, suggesting something of the way issues around female sexuality and maternity can be dramatised as a displacement or resolution of class issues (see Elsaesscr, 1372). Viviani's con tent ion is that as a fictional mode, melodrama seeks to move its audience emotionally by an appeal to everyday feelings and experiences that are then magnified in intensity through a complexity of baroque incident and coincidence. Tire fallen mother is a figure who can readily summon up such feelings, particularly for the male audience for whom she carries a charge of oedipal eroticism. At the same time, the sexual transgression of the mother is capable of evoking not only a moral but also a class register, for the variations in moral attitude to her speak different class ideologies.
The dramaturgical structure on which this is based, and which was adopted by Hollywood from the European Victorian stage, involved
a woman [who]... separated From her child, falls from her social class and founders in disgrace.The child grows up in respectability and enters
A mother's love: Barb:
established society where he stands for l,rogrL'S*[0m The mother watches the social rise of her chil r afar; she cannot risk jeopardising his fortunes contamination with her own bad repute. Chance draws them together again and the partial or t«» rehabilitation o[ the mother is accomplished, o through a cathartic trial scene. (Viviani, 1980, p-
TbiB basic structure could be organised ideolngiwUy ^ ing to two different codes of judgment, one moral, ^ social. For the European influenced and smaller Jj^j'^ a woman's fall 'was traceable to her adultery, cornrn moment of frenzy and expiated in lifelong maierua s (Viviani, 1980, p. 6). In Hollywood, this vein representea ^ equivalent to Warshow's 'gangster as tragic hero' (see ^^jy ster film as an experience of art, p. 280). Although sti ^ ^ condemned, the heroine's descent into the "more rea jfjj^^jjed tawdry or desperate ambiance of music halls an   ^ boUr-rooms' marked an opposition to the permanence 0 totaliy geois household, a 'veritable ideal of this them" ' ^ fate impregnated by Victorian morality' (Viviani, 1980. p- j'f;iVOUred of'anonymity and silence' was the opposite of the ta
by Hollywood of success and rise to fame. n°^V^sloCx^c moral codes, Viviani argues that this cycle looked dt
admitting its potentially critical slant on European * ^gdly
actionary from the perspective of the New Deal.
Heroines who are submissive, resigned, j naive ... defenceless, lacking in energy or decisiveness were hardly good examples tor
nd 1933who needed
movie-going public of 1932 a to be mobilised to face the economic crisis direct lineage of Madame X was an u!icomion»"-„.„;.^„. T............. „f n„nd which had le«
I'he fortabfe
Ac a i__,H ,„.pnter society thanks to her sacrifices. It is a clear
moral rnCa berame more isolationist a"d «at'™alist,C'thB hL"tC t for att tudc America could adopt in facing its ^ralcodesofthematemalmelodramashtedgear.Thefoun-    metaphor for a" a Wudc
fc* S"ch » shift had been laid in the work of Griffith, who   «^'^oSte«uideffec, such ideologic! work
- w 'orrned the necessary transposition from a European aris- ----ho       UD in the vjcweri
"■■lieu to an American, petit bourgeois and rural wre the bmnt of an ideological cnticisin (as, for .
Down Bast, 1920), but was capable of regenera-   tarn lrec^   ,^ ^™ grounded in eroticism --------
deology, according to Viviani, 'is incarnated   am   _ |m"    don the power „f such eroticism to effect dis i city and country' (Viviani. 1980, p. 12), and it is   P-   1 J   V resoluU()|, of class difference lies in the flexible MR of woman with her culturally given connection to   piai woman. On the one hand, this is depend
-w* both castigates and sexuaI placing, transgression of which
p oduces the woman in the posiuon of outcast. On the other, dcologies Of maternity and femininity - for example, the
--!—~ „,__reau and Whitman', in u»...... ,u     *    rirtei sclf for child, or acts out of true love for a man
(19^nial melodrama of the 1930s, epitomised by Stella Dallas woma" utilised ([) argue for an ideological shift in the moral to H       motif of maternal sacrifice is rearticulaled in relation   - a between different class forces.
"lemes Cl0ser to American society of that time: 'prejudice, 1 dr ' 3'lon'fem* understanding, the "good marriage" of the chil-~ n (Viviani, 1980. p. 10). In this context, moral sin is replaced -  — :_,,.an emerge whose sac-
taphor lor an a...----
national crisis'(Viviani, 1980, p. 14).
The figure of the mother could effect such ideological work '~     "Pessary transposiuon from a t—-r- f mc ,,owerful emotions she calls up in the viewer,
one"t" milicu    an American, petit bourgeois and rural   Dec ^ njujjon destined to mobilise the public in a cer-
iW'       1 bolh borc *e bmnt °f an ideological criticism (as. for   proti     K ^ transpose(| lhe anguish of an era,
sc>nce, in Way Down East, 1920), but was capable of regenera-   tain cl.recu   • grounded in eroticism' (Viviani. 1980,
halh       Deal id™logy, according to Viviani, 'is incarnated   an il usio n J, powe, of SL,ch eroticism to effect dis
the r   be,we™ <% and country' (Viviani, 1980, p. 12), and it is   P- lb> "y   Z resolution ol class difference lies in the flexible "gure of woman with her culturally given connection to   1 „oman. On the one hand, this is depend
e'who can facilitate this incarnation, which both castigates *. „f whicl
e res,due 0f an outworn morality' hung on to by the idle city isti' d"d *« rigidity of rural society in the name of the 'panthe-nJ Ph'lo;,0l>1'ies of Thoreau and Whitman'. In the American torn' mebdrama of the 1930s, epitomised by Stella Dalta to ,i   'he "10tif of maternal sacrifice is rearticulaled in rclatior
hemes closer to American society of that time: 'prejudice, — drT3"0"' female understanding, the "good marriage" of the chil-
,en Wviani, 1980, p. 10). In this context, moral sin is replaced    ppminiSt apprOaCneS
eiror and a new kind of heroine can emerge whose sac JTCli ™* is less dumb acquiescence to an inevitable and remote fate ,visual pleasure and narrative cinema
*** * Juggle to survive in a society whose values need cor    Laura Mulvjr^ J        ing the role the figure of womar rated into the world of work, she unconscious!: .re. as she has sincr
she' ' ~~~'" *e general effort to bring America out of the cnsis rer,V* UP « an antagonist to a hoarding, speculating society. P°*t0^falsean,l........-
les3 fji(    3 UeW ^inci °' 'lero*nc (-an emerge whose sac---
itrtMri '.f ycquiescence to an inevitable and remote fate
'Intel C" ° MUrvive   H society whose values need cor-   Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual pleasure and Danam ates J|?ted lnt0 the world of work, she unconsciously   has been seminal in suggesting the role the figure of woman general effort to brin^ America out of the crisis;   plays in patriarchal fiction. Her concern there, as she has since J:— mcctllatillg society,   explained it (see Mulvey, 1981), was to examine the mncufin-isation of spectator position and identification in classic Hollywood cinema. However, as she herself argued (1977/78), a female protagonist at the centre of the narrative disturbs this structure. This view has led to work by feminists on the possible aesthetic consequences of gender difference. Pam Cook (1978) argued that Mildred Pierce (194b) represented a mixed-genre film in which the male voice of film noir combated the
igomsttoahoardin^. sopl2).
.....outworn values tvm'erationi not ta
crrua Becomes a stake in this regeii s ^ ^ven up a*ay from the mother as in the European cy . ^ f well. l° insure him an education, a moral train" g f]lnu P'aced family can give him' (Viviani, 1980, p of con-
„.!,...',_ JL .____,„.«1nss due to a mans. .
e'«cea tamily can give him (Vivian., — ■ ,.ick 0i «... "eount the tale of a woman's loss due to a. ^ helping science and show her reconquering her digi
reminder of an earlier state of mind whu to the Wall Street rrash. (Viviani, 1980, PP
9-10)
324   "HE CINEMA BOOK
female voice of the woman's film, with both narrative structure and mise en scene enacting the subordination of the latter to the former. Barbara Creed (1977) considered the narrative consequences of the generic necessity of the woman's melodrama (in her terms, any melodrama that supports a central heroine) to produce the figure of the woman as leading protagonist. She investigated the differences between the narrative structures developed to cope with a female protagonist and those that characterise most other genres. The problem the melodramatic structure faces is one of producing drama while conforming to social delinitions of women in their domestic roles as wives and mothers (Creed, 1977, p. ?8).
From a small group of women's pictures, she derives a typ ical narrative stnicture capable of suppoiLing a central feminine protagonist 'which involves a pattern of female role transgres sion; the entry of an exceptional male; marked change in the heroine's point of view; suffering and sacrifice; and, finally, her acceptance of a more socially desirable role' (Creed, 1977, p. 28). She goes on to show how in the three women's pictures she studied, the discourse of the doctor is used to bring the transgressing woman's viewpoint into line with the accepted codes of feminine behaviour. For Creed, the displacement of the female protagonist's dilemma into mise en scene and into a range of other characters, far from combating an ideology of individualism, simply restates her problem in terms of other people's needs - reproducing a scenario in which the woman does not speak, but is spoken for (Creed, 1977, p. 29). Like Kleinhans, she sees melodrama as interesting for the questions that an analysis constructed elsewhere  by Marxism or feminism -can show it touching on but not able to ask. Whereas in Klein-hans's case there are questions of capitalist relations of production and class, Creed suggests that the unspoken question of women's melodramas is to do with the taboo subject of female sexuality.
Melodrama and the status quo
Most accounts of melodrama in literature and cinema, including those discussed above, agree on one thing: that in its post-revolutionary bourgeois forms, the boundaries of the field in which it operates are those of the established social order as lived in everyday domestic terms. For instance, Stephen Neale argues that whereas in most other genres the establishment of law and order is the object of the narrative, melodrama focuses on problems of living within such order, suggesting not 'a crisis of that order, but a crisis within it, an "in-house" rearrangement' (Neale, 1980, p. 22).
Jean-I.oup Bourget presents the same idea in ideological rather than moral terms: 'America after questioning the myth of progress, urbanisation and socialisation, is content with a rhetorical question and at the end of the story reinstates the same belief (Bourget, 1978, p. 32). Elsaesser concretises these generalities in an acute description of the mise en scene of the domestic, arising from an account of Hilda Crane (1956), which, he argues, 'brings out the characteristic attempt of the bourgeois household to make time stand still, immobilise life and fix forever domestic property relations as the model of social life and a bulwark against the more disturbing sides in human nature' (Elsaesser, 1972, p. 13). Thomas Schatz, in a survey of 1950s melodramas, notes the paradoxical narrative function of marriage and the family, which provides both dramatic conflict and resolution. Of Young at Heart (19S5) he argues: 'We have seen the central characters as either victimised by or utterly hostile to the existing social familial-marital system, but somehow romantic love and parenthood magically transform familial anxiety and despair into domestic bliss' (Schatz, 1981, p. 229).
The necessity for melodrama to produce dramatic action while staying in the same place gives it a characteristically circular thematic and narrative structure - many cinematic melodramas start out from a flashback so that their end literally lies in their beginning. And it gives melodrama a characteristically ambiguous modality and address, which has given rise to different interpretations. Bourget, writing about the romantic dramas of 1940s Hollywood, describes their hesitation between, on the one hand, a heavy-handed moralistic realism, operating in parable-like fashion in support of the bourgeois family, and on the other, the disbelief of whimsy, of escape offered by 'romance'. Stephen Neale, writing from a psycho311 nlytir perspective, describes this ambiguity of melodrama as a form of pathos to do with the narrativisation of desiie, whic ,
by its very nature, can never be fulfilled (Neale, 1980, p. 30).
which they see
While these accounts vary in the degree to __jversive potential within, or despite, such c( are alike in concentrating on formal analysis of the gen
n oi""j— lives oi
a feminist interest in the relation of the films to t i ^.^^ their audiences has suggested that the formal ambiguity ^ which the genre works is neither simply a meretna°a^mung soak the drama for all the pathos it is worth without COnu serious issues, nor a mass medium's attenuation o ^ ^ vision, but provides a structure that relates to the materu
ditions of women's lives.
ie critical coi
ntext
What appears as the affect of form in one """7   ^ „0t is given a material reality in another. This observa i ^ quite the same as noting the 'real life' occurrence of e^en tne seem exaggerated or absurd in the films, links bet*re coffl-form and the lives of the presumed female aud'enjerenlinist5. monly made by industry, establishment critics and e The audience for women's pictures and melodramas^ often characterised as composed of frustrated holf exUal oppressed by the duties of motherhood and marriage, (he frustration and lost fantasies of romantic love. In t*J1f^50s gave women's pictures and melodramas of the 1940s and cultural expression to these frustrations, offering in 0f outlets escapist fantasy, rage, or sublimation. In the Molly Haskell (1979), the films represent 'soft-core ei porn for the frustrated housewife'. . cornrn°n
What the industry and Marxist feminism have in ^ jt is an implicit view of the housewife's life and the aI1(j calls forth as being narrow, circumscribed, petty, 0
frustrated. Critics, and many of the directors an i ^ ^ involved in these films, regard them with W^0*^ situa-
°  tinteres'
d wri«£j themVith contempt^'ff patronage, looking for value in what can be made c tions in terms of the 'human condition'. Hence the gre ^ ^ in the notion of the form's power lying in its capacl >^ has vert its content. Recent work on melodrama, h°w^ ^ue to ceased to look for textual progressiveness. This is      Jllv con-
the displacement of mise en scene by a psychoana.
lyrically ideology
strued concept of narrative as the key to a film s
'ons
Ion
0f-the same
ical
precisely1 aer social, sexual °\"nc°^"' to
engage with 'difference1 - but always from the reassuring perspective
which everything is returned at the end. From I"1"5 "Qine sus approach, the notion of progressive reading has bei
differe"1 sus-
ning
t-ps rnea'
pect because of the formalism that constitutes textually, without reference to the reading situation ^e
lodrania an
tices of actual audiences. Further work on me.--- feiniiust=. woman's film has been pursued predominantly by vc,/(ijs-proceeding in two main directions: one a formal, na '     g 0n
course-orientated approach; another, frequen
tly focu
sing c forme'
TV soap opera, an audience-orientated appro*01, ^ve suuc-is concerned to analyse the work performed by narra goruSt ture and the process of enunciation when a female p
rather than its
is posited as subject of desire and discou ^ ^ latter object (see Lea Jacobs, 1991; Mary Ann Doane^ • ^ ^ braces a homology between the ambiguous '^.^^ witi,in drama, its circular structure, and the conn<*. film and which--------'-       — rnnmructed. The wo
,Falea, Woman' films °< ^ and embodied a chal-
fal      ..usa in many ways represei femininity.
which women's lives are constructed. 1 he w ,easure   »*"   tradi,ional ideologies or raou lf.censorshiF
melodrama provide fictional structures and fonns^ ^ 15Sue of •f^^SU study demon
uce a 'female' subject, ana » Mod-    10LU°".'<'-   erific archival case , diepractice
"men women's lives are consuu
■"elodrama provide fictional structures and forms of pleasure that reproduce a 'female' subject, and at the level of the text ■some of the matenal conditions in which women live (see Mod-■eski, 1979; Brunsdon, 1981). In these terms, the duplicitous complexity with which Kleinhans charges All That Heaueii Allows
- where the displacement of problems to do with class, age,   - ^ ^ p[u^
^xuality into female problems of personal relations renders   on t , ^ or sometimes a tluee or iuu.-
»«n simply confusing - is not so much a question of ideolog- >hose resuta the films themselves - were often
[«1 poverty in the analysis of class or age. but of the difficulty   w_ y t' ambiguous and contradictory.
of "raping the 'question of femininity', of women's issues, highly c V™^^ ^ a,so stressed by Mayne m her a"°ss other social definitions. „ 1of the work of Dorothy Arzner, and in Francke's account
" Z work of several generations of female scriptwriters in , , -j .i-ohasis of Basinger's account ol
Melodrama and the woman s ~1 since the 1990s
2NEALE
film
STEVE
H above were collected In 1987, many of the articles discussed auo : ^ B wherc together and introduced by Christine Gleain ^ m from ftt Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the W°m ^ publica signalling the culmination of work in tries additional ■' i coincided with and helped to promote an ^ Jacobs ----•   ,      ..u„i.olml.ailt (1989). v ...crionot
tion
tne culnnnauu.. ». •----- , focus auu.«-
idedwiLhandhelpedtopromot (l991), Jacobs
including books by Lang (198J). *& colleCtiQn of v^v.Ba^^rtl993)lKlingw(1994)an^ ul(i994), based on Stieles edited by Bratton, Cook and weu nce 01l melo-t>anpTs delivered at a major international ^ Kaplall
ia held in London m 1992. In addv^n, ^ m discuF-^__^A^n anri the woman s tum ^rtftndaGnpt-
research, (1991).
'Fallen Woman uum*.
1940s - which in many ways represented and fTTummm Irnge to traditional ideologies of motherhood and femininity. Focusing on the issue of self-regulation and self-censorship, and using specific archival case files, /acobs's study demon-states on tiie otie hand how social ideologies and the practices of the film industry interacted at a specific point in time, and on the other how that process of interaction was always also a process of negotiation, a two-way or sometimes a tluee- or four-y process whose results - the films themselves - were often jhly complex, ambiguous and contradictory. These characteristics were also stressed by Mayne in her study of the work of Dorothy Arzner, and in Francke's account of the work of several generations of female scriptwriters in I lollywood. They also formed the basis of Basinger's account of the woman's film. For Basingei, as for many others:
What emerges on close examination of hundreds of women's movies is how strange and ambivalent they rrally are. Stereotypes are presented, then undermined then reinforced. Contradictions abound, which at First sight seem to be net ely the result of carelessness, the products of commercial nonsense But they are more than plot confusion. They exist as an integral and even necessary aspect of what drives the movies and gives them thuir appeal. These movies were a way of recognizing the problems of woman, of addressing their desire to have things be other than the way they were offscreen. (Basinger, 1993, p. 7) - J-e«Wni
paper:; Qeuverea ai a uis^w*
drama held in London in 1992. In * ^tsolM length in discussed melodrama and the woman m ^ &nA SCI1pt-
Mothertood and Representation (1992), andthc sed by Jud>th ing of v______hv women were disc
the way tney
Unhke others, Basinger offers a 'working definition' of the woman's film that extends well beyond the traditional canon, Ma'yne7°me" S P'ctllres "y «»"» ^e traditional label and the traditional confines of 'melodrama'.
and by Lizzie Francke (1994) respectively. 'A woman's film', she writes, 'is a movie that places at the center
^id/or °f tlleSe books antl studies presented new insights of its universe a female who is trying to deal with emotional, "f.i._ , """^search. Lang's book was the first systematic study   social, and psychological problems connected to the fact that
------' directed by Griffith, Vidor and Min    she is a woman' (Basingei, 1993, p. 20). It thus includes - or
- -4 (iq?8), as should include - 'Rosalind Russell's career comedies, musical biographies of real-life women, combat films featuring brave nurses on Bataan, and westerns in which women drive cattle west and men over the brink' (Basinger, 1991, p. 7).
The point that Basinger makes here is clearly both polemical and logical. It is also a point that raises questions about generic labels and tenns, and about the relative weight to be accorded institutional terms - the terms used by Hollywood, and by con temporary reviewers, critics and journalists - as opposed to those in cf"*^ ^ cano» of films tradirrc used and defined by subsequent theorists and subsequent his-
A S[etail t0 hlms such as Picnic (1955), From Here to Eternity (iwji,   torians. Similar questions have been raised by Ben Singer (1990) latioret'tcar Named Desire (1951), All That Heaven Allows and lmi-    and by Steve Neale (1993), who have researched the deployment ""fLiJe (1959) s]le ajso a(jc|resset] issues of class and race,    and definition of'melodrama' as a term both inside and outside dire      W a'S0 focused on the 1950s, specifically on the films   Hollywood, and its relationship to female-centred narratives on ectod by Douglas Sirk. Eschewing traditional auleurism and   the one hand, and to the woman's film on the other. Both find —v_h Mineer's concern was to trace   significant differences between the understanding and use of '   <;iryis. their   the term in and around the film industry and other contcmpo-;*..tinns of entertainment - the theatre, and in Neale's *Wcf ending and use of thc
fj**j    Representation (1992), and the directing • ^ayne fnT^" S pictures by women were discussed byluditl
Each anti by L'Zzic Fra"clte f1994' respectively. Uld/or, °f "'eSP books and studies presented new insight; of the 'f10* resea,<;''- l-angs book was the first systematic study tiellj n am'ly molodramas' directed by Griffith, Vidor and Min Well us s"1C'uded extensive discussion of The Crowd (1928), as fi'ms Zj^*"*' <1958) and Home from the Hill, placing these issi,„   '   n thc Context of familial, oedipal and patriarchal
Su« and concerns, and h^n 'S b°0k WaS 3 study of Sender in the films of the 1950s, on an!j gllted the extent to which the films themselves drew reprp "'teracted with wider social and cultural debates and ext™**nt«tion«. Focusing on men as well as women, she in det 1 U'e °ano" of flIms traditionally discussed by referring *■ — ">..-..irn 955), From Here to Eternity (1953), ■ ""■hi and /mi-
«xtended th« S"'s "
ill detal cano» of films traditionally discussed oy .w— A S[re ,r t0 (ilms such as Picnic (1955), From Here to Eternity (1953), 'otion fr Namrt Deiire (1951). A" T',at Heaven Allows and /mi-"/ Mfe (1959). She also addressed issues of class and race. direct 'h86' a's° focuscd °" tne 195°s. specifically on the films COnv ■ ■ Douglas sirk- Eschewing traditional auteurism and the enti0,lal textual analysis, Klinger's concern was to trace devi °ntemPorary contexts within which Sirk's films, their ap_ Ces' t,leir stars and their style were understood. Her inter0^ represents - and seeks to bring together - renewed one l°St i ,,is'ori°graphy and historiographical research on pip . lri"d' and interest in audience research and in the multi-
eadings of Films produced by audiences on the other. ferer,31*" Situated an array of films and film cycles from dif-• and' Per'ocls in Clnema's history within and across changing "nchanging - ideologies and representations of mother-
Hollywood, and ns jew.—
the one hand, and to the woman's film on tne uum. significant differences between the understanding and use of the term in and around the film industry and other contemporary institutions of entertainment - the theatre, and in Neale's case television and radio - and the understanding and use of the term in and around film, media and cultural sudies.
Broadly speaking, both Singer and Neale have found that 'melodrama' meant 'thriller', and hence was used principally to describe and to label crime filins, adventure films, war films, westerns and horror films. Singer, who is concerned with the 1900s, the 1910s and the 1970s, quotes from a 1906 article enti
v r.
326
T»L CINEMA
BOOK
lied "The Taint oi Melodrama': 'Ask trie next person you meet casually how he defines a melodramatic story, and he will probably tell you that it is a hodge-podge of extravagant adventures, full of blood and thunder, clashing swords and hair's breadth escapes' (Singer, 1990, p. 9'i). Neale, who is concerned with the sound period through to the end of the 1950s, quotes from an issue of Life magazine (27 August 1925, p. 26):
Melodrama, on the screen, is identified almost entirely with fast physical action; cowboys or sheiks or cavalrymen riding madly across country, men hanging by their teeth from the ledges of skyscrapers, railroad wrecks, duels, heroines floating on cakes of ice toward waterfalls, and every known form of automobile chase. He also quotes from numerous trade reviews, and notes that the only two films made by Hollywood with the word 'melodrama' in the title - Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and Washington Melodrama (1941) - were both thrillers or crime films.
As Singer and Neale both point out, women's pictures - and films marked generally by domestic settings, by romance and/or by pathos and sentiment - were called dramas, not melodramas, and Neale goes on to speculate that this use of the term may derive from theatrical genre, 'drama'.The only female-centred films regularly described as melodramas were, precisely, action films and thrillers of one kind or another, from the 'serial queen' adventure films that Singer discusses - The Perils of Paulim (1914), The Exploits of Homo «» „,a„ -r-
Despite the fact that elements of nineteenth-century melodrama fed into the latter, the former became the site of an equation between 'melodrama' and thrills, spills and action, blood, thunder, villainy and vulgarity upon which commentators, critics, audiences and reviewers in film and in the theatie increasingly drew. Neale's argument is similar, though, drawing on Rahill (1967), he places the division further back in time, arguing for a correspondence between the woman's film an what Rahill calls 'modified melodrama', a form of melodrama that emerged initially in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which:
The 'heart' became the target of playwrights rather than the simple nervous system, and firearms and the representation of the convulsions of nature yielded the centre of the stage to high-voltage emotionalism, examination uf soul-slates, and the observation of manners ... The unhappy end became common. (Rahill, 1967, p. xv)
—->y,
------. »i another, from the 'serial
u ouventure films that Singer discusses - The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Exploits o/Elaine (1914-15), The Hazards of Helen (191S) and others - through such female-centred aviation films as Tail Spin (1939) and Women in the Wind (1939), to the numerous female-centred detective films and Gothic thrillers of the 1940s - Murder among Friends (1941), Second Chance (1947), Mary Ryan, Detective (1949) and Gaslight (1944), Shadow of a Doubt (1948), Undercurrent (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948). (For further discussion of the aviation films, see Paris, 1995, pp. 114-16; for further discussion of the Gothic thriller, see Waldman, 1983; Walsh, 1984; Doane, 1987; Barefoot, 1994.)
Neither Neale nor Singer denies a relationship between the woman's film, as traditionally defined, and nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama. But they both point to the heterogeneous the multi-generic - nature of nineteenth-century melodrama. And they both point to the possibility that the meaning of melodrama as a term may have altered as melodrama itself altered and changed. Singer argues that there was a division between cheap, popular, sensational melodrama and highbrow and middle-class theatre at the turn of the century.
A Fool There Was (USA 1915 p.c - William Fox/ Box Office Attractions Company; d - Frank Powell) This film plays on a typical theme of nineteenth-century stage melodrama - the disaster that besets a respectable family when its head falls prey to a fashionable vamp (a stereotype instituted in Thee Bara's role here, and which made her a star). Examples of early film melodrama style can be found in the film's use of the static camera, the lack of close-ups and the reliance on natural light sources. Viewed from the perspective of 1950s family melodramas, this can be seen as a lack of technological development; or it can be understood
., iau(, p. XV)
Neale argues that it was this form of melodrama, an mhc^_ of drome, which became known simply as drama. The ac based forms fed first in the theatre and then in the cmenw ^ action-based genres of various kinds and tended to retai ^ melodrama label. Some of these points were made som<:ntury ago by Michael Walker (1982), who sees nineteenth-ce ^ melodrama as a matrix both for action genres and what 'melodramas of passion'. . ( _re.
It is clear that melodrama, the woman's film and t cise nature of the relationship between them remain key ^ of debate and research. It is equally clear, as numerous ^ mentators have pointed out (for example, Vardac, 19  ■ ^ 1974) that melodrama is related to other genres, and » ' ther research - and debate - is needed in this area as we
Selected Reading
Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: Houi Hollywood Sj>o1* toVJomen,
1930-1960, London, Chatto & Wintlus, 1993. m0 Christine Gledhill (eil.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in *'
and the Woman's Film, London, BFI Publishing, 1987. s 0j
Barbaia Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning. History, Cute* ™* ' 'liana Douglus Sirfe, Bloomingtou and Indianapolis, University o Press, 1994.
Ben Singer, 'Female power in the serial-queen melodrama: the etiology of an anomaly', Camera Obscura 22: 94 -5. January Reprinted in Abel (ed.), Silent Film. New Brunswick. NJ, Kutg University Press, 1995.
>eda
as the continuity, even fulfilment, of certain nineteenth-century theatrical traditions (see Vardac, 1949). Melodramatic effects, for instance, are produced by the crosscutting between pathet scenes of the wife with her angelic daughter or 1» church, and the scenes of dissolution at the vamp apartment or of despair in the husband's home, wrecked through his squandering time and mon y on his mistress and drink. The husband himselt becomes the site of a struggle between two representations of women: the wife, who hearing of the vamp's desertion declares 'If he is as you W my place is with him', and the dark haired sexua woman. Melodramatic expression is carried, as i
°^tali!%/^,nJS,hi"Sand fittinSs - a chaise"
the.
C0»tUJne ^ table' half"emPfy bottles and glasses, and silkv 'S sa.uashed-down hat, the furs
gesture   ,h°WnS °f *e vamp' and significant her hi..*,.   ,, vamP's stare that drives the wife from
er husband s arms. The scene utilising the staircase was to become a standard feature of a C1nematic rhetoric in the expression of melodramatic confrontation (see also Written on ("e Wind, 1957). Here, the husband is tempted to return to wife and daughter until the vamp appears 'h her nightdress at the top of the stairs to drive J-hem away, causing the husband to collapse, his hand reaching through the banister in a gesture of helpless appeal. The necessary reliance on natural "ght is turned to theatrical affect by lighting schemes exploiting the dramatic conflict of darkened rooms pierced by shafts of light as attains and blinds are drawn or closed. And a substitute for the play of light and shade is found m the wreaths of incense that swathe the vamp in her apartment, evoking an atmosphere of decadence and mystery.
CHRISTINE C1.EDHILL
D.W.
Griffith)
(USA 1920 p.c - D. W. Griffith;
'photographically realistic'; we are shown - we see -concrete realities, with locations and interiors 'made real' through meticulous detail. In narrative terms, Griffith usually chooses to show us events rather than allowing them to take place offscreen. For example, with the ice-flow rescue of Anna at the film's climax: 'In the play, we only hear of Anna's incredible rescue. In the film, her rescue becomes credible because we see it happen ..." (Cardullo, 1987, p. 17). The rescue offstage allows Poetic Justice to claim at least a partial role; in the film, the rescue is all down to David's (and Barthelmess's) courage in actually braving the rapids. It becomes an almost strictly human act.
Significantly, whereas the play opens with Anna's arrival at the Bartlett farm, and only gradually reveals her secret, Griffith chose to tell the story chronologically. In the play, therefore, Anna's guilty secret is gradually revealed to both spectator and other characters at the same time. In the film, the spectator knows the secret as it happens, well in advance of the scene that finally reveals it to the other characters. Thus viewers are positioned with Anna throughout the film, intensifying the emotional affect of the melodramatic chain of events.
MICHAEL ALLEN
Wq
°f the0UW £aSt W3S oased on a Victorian melodrama Same name. Criffith bought the rights in 1920,
Sunrise A Song of Two Humans (USA 1927 p.c -Film Corporation; d - F. W. Murnau)
Fox
rneloHv   wben films were moving away from 'n conr^13 to become more naturalistically rooted
at a tim, le'odra
Ko2°0ff^nporaiy issues- Both play and film, as have oh    8S)' Lenrlig (198r) and Kauffmann (1972) event ■ Served' drew on certain themes and specific .,s In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilks.
in the ■     oriramatic origins of the film are evident clean- S ereotypica' characters (virginal heroine, shrewjC ih her°'idealised mother, stern father, nar   .    busybody), as well as in instances of Anna ?J? coincidence, such as when the heroine anot[    '"an Gish), having started a new life in JandlaTt0Wn' happens to be seen by her ex-illgpj . y' *ho knows the secret about her dead ineL!mate baby- The film also contains several what p'Cab'e mom™ts that seem to operate from fcrer      r Brooks (1976) calls the 'occult realm'. Davjd °st among these are the scenes showing Ann       hard Barthelmess), who has yet to meet mar 3' *aking from a bad dream while she gets 'sen »» t0 the villain' and the one in which David sPaM e>i Anna's arrival at his farm although it is
Bld"y impossible for him to see her. WeloH Way Down Ba5t is not Just unadorned *ho]    ma' Accord'ng to Cardullo, 'Filming the of j, e of Anna's story, as opposed to solely the plot CouM Piay' gaVe Griffith °ne large advantage; he he c  "i"ake " aDPear less melodramatic, or better, (Car*) i  enhance the realism of the melodrama' form'1987, P 17'' Melodrama, although often alw    8 the emotional core of Griffith's films, is ays accompanied by a sense of the
The plot of this film is typical of nineteenth-century domestic melodrama, involving the temptations held out to a young farmer, living happily with his wife and child, by a city vamp, who consumes his small financial resources and finally suggests murdering his wife. The iconography of the domestic melodrama is everywhere: the oil lamps, soup bowls, peasant bread and chequered tablecloth signifying domestic virtues; conflicting representations of femininity -the wife and mother with blonde hair pulled back flat in a bun, associated with traditional peasant country life, the sexual woman in silky garb, black bobbed hair, smoking, jitterbugging and associated with the modern city; the moon and mists over the marshes as the site for the young farmer's succumbing to the murder plot. This iconography contributes lo the extreme moral polarities between which the man is pulled, and which are intensified by the non-individualisation of the protagonists, designated only as the man, the wife and the woman from the city.
While much of the film's iconography, melodramatic structure and mise en scene looks back to nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, it aiso looks forward in its style to the full development of cinematic melodrama. Notable in this respect is, first, the influence of German Expressionism that Murnau brings to Hollywood, particularly in the distorted perspectives of the interior sets, the stereotyping of the woman from the city, the dramatisation of typography in the
i I
328
THE CINEMA BOOK
329
High emotions: cow,lr/ boy George O'Brien i
educed by city vamp Margaret,.™,,,
intertitles that spell out the murder plot, the split screen, superiniposilions and dissolves that link the woman and the city; second, Murnnu's development of the moving camera, which led Bazin to put him on the side of the realists. Arguably, however, the moving camera (for instance, to bring the young farmer to the city woman on the marshes) and the long-take, deep-focus tracking shot that allows us to travel with the young couple on the trolley from lakeside to city are part of the externalisation ot emotion into cinematic mise en scene that Elsaesser (1972) describes as the hallmark of full-blown Hollywood melodrama in the 1940s and 1950s.
Finally, the film's use of sound marks its transitional status. For while it utilises a synchronous soundtrack, it fulfils the nineteenth-century melodramatic ideal of reducing dialogue in favour of music and pictorial mise en scene, adding only a few expressive sound effects.
QIRIST1NK GLEDHUL
Stella Dallas (USA 1937 p.c - Samuel Goldwyn Inc; d-KingVidor)
This is a classic and much-debated woman's film, so designated because of its central woman
on in Muniau's 'kmib'1
protagonist, its 'feminine' subject matter and l -address to a female audience. These features overlap with the melodramatic mode insofar 3^ domestic subject matter, family relations and ot expression of 'feelings' are seen as both sourc » the melodramatic and belonging to the fernm"1 province. In this context, and given the cultuif ghetto in which the woman's film existed un" recently, the melodramatic becomes a Pei"ra designation, associated with tear-jerking pa''1 ' and sentimentality, provided frequently by 01 presentation of women as victims of their circumstances or nobly self sacrificing. Christ < Viviani (1980) has described a shift in the articulation of the maternal self-sacrifice «,e' 1930s Hollywood when, under pressure from Deal ideology, the motif of the mother's fall •*» &l degradation gave way to her energetic attemp recovery, providing a more upbeat ending- It1    .f 0[ spirit that motivates Stella Dallas, where the i ^ maternal sacrifice is called on to collaborate l portrayal of the family as a means to upward mobility and social hope. Stella's (Barbara of Stanwyck) 'failing' is not so much the utilisal her charms to catch a rich man as a means o ^ escaping her Depression-oppressed family. »l
refusal to tone down her ambitions and lifestyle in u™er U) match those of her upper-class husband, or I  suPpress her sexuality once a mother, and then ■>ter allowing her bonding with her daughter to replace conjugal relations. Stella's punishment la t»e crushing realisation that her lack of financial and social capital will hinder the possibility of a nappy' upwardly mobile marriage for her daughter, ■he therefore proves her superior motherhood by deliberately alienating her daughter to make such a marriage possible, thereby loses for ever the relationship that motivates the sacrifice.
i'he debate about the film is how to understand he miplicatjons of the ending. Does it represent the Punishment of the erring mother, or is it more contradictory? Arguments that this is the case point t0 the difference in the maternal sacrifice theme when played out in a woman's film. The scene in which Lauiel (Anne Shirley) turns down the offer of a fur coat is an interesting example of this, where Laurel is entranced with the 'good taste' and economic well-being of the Morrison household to the detriment of Stella's good-hearted vulgarity. The scene is plnyed out through women's magazine iconography - the dressing table, mirror, cold cream and hair bleach - and the activities of the 'feminine' world. However, this iconography does not simply dramatise the problem of female upward mobility; it also plays on the dependency of such mobility on the right appearance, a rightness that has little to do With the real underlying relations between mother and daughter.
This suggests a second twist to the maternal sacrifice theme offered by the woman's film. E. Ann Kaplan has argued (in Gledhill, 1987) that the mother/daughter bond characteristic of the woman's film is potentially threatening to Patriarchal social and sexual relations. This, Kaplan argues, gives a special meaning to the film's ending when Stella is forced to accede to the sacrifice of the bond so that her daughter can enter heterosexual monogamy and contribute to social progress, while she herself is reduced to mere sPectatorship, outside the scene of action. However, Linda Williams gives a different inflection to the ending by concentrating on its address to a female audience (in rjledhill, 1987). Williams argues that the multiple identification through which the feminine' is constructed in the film means that the female audience identifies with the contradictions of Stella's position itself. The only possible unifying Point of identification is Stephen Dallas (John Boles), who, however, is totally lacking in empathy, ■he audience stand-in at this point is Helen Morrison (Barbara O'Neil), the only person to recognise Stella's sacrifice, and who purposefully Wdudes Stella into the scene patriarchy would exclude her from by leaving the wedding parlour curtains open. We see Stella's patriarchal placement, but feel the loss of mother and daughter to each other.
CHRISTINE GLEDH1U
Gaslight/The Murder in Thornton Square (USA 1944 p.c - Loew's Inc/MGM; d - George Cukor)
The nineteenth-century theatrical roots of Hollywood melodrama are explicitly drawn upon - and transformed - in Gaslight. The film's stage origins, its Victorian setting and its melodramatic narrative led Variety to comment that the film verges 'on the type of drama that must be linked to the period on which the title was based', but also to compliment it for 'lacking the ten-twenty-thirty element that had been a factor in the stage play'. The reviewer's reference is to the 10, 20 and 30 cent admission charges levied at the beginning of the century by theatres specialising in lowbrow melodrama (see Rahill, 1967, pp. 272-83). The MGM production values clearly indicate more prestigious aspirations, but the Victorian furnishings displayed in Gaslight have the additional function of forming a decorous surfare that conceals but at the same time accentuates the force of the film's melodramatic material. Thus the scene in which the married couple attends a musical recital lends itself to the display of production values characteristic of many period films, but also allows the melodrama to be acted out behind this ornate facade. Indeed, the decorum of the occasion partly serves to heighten the force of the disruption.
Charles Boyer in Gusliynt
330  THE CINEMA BOOK
The fart that in Gaslight the husband (Charles Boyer) and wife (Ingrid Bergman) have a relationship tantamount to that of oppressor and oppressed has allowed it to be interpreted as a critique of patriarchy and the institution of marriage. Key issues here are the confirmation or denial of the heroine's perception, and her ability to articulate her fears.Thomas Elsaesser lists Gaslight as belonging to a cycle of'Freudian feminist melodramas' -films 'playing on the ambiguity and suspense of whether the wife is merely imagining it or whether her husband really does have murderous designs on her' (Elsaesser, 197?, p. 11). Other writers have related the cycle to a 'female Gothic' tradition, given a particular inflection by the shifting demands made on women in wartime and postwar America (see Waldman,1983).
In Gaslight, there is confirmation of the heroine's point of view. But if this signifies a validation of female experience, it can be argued that it also ushers in a restoration of the patriarchal order. The detective who comes to the wife's rescue and confirms what she has seen and heard provides a sympathetic male to counterbalance the Figure of the tyrannical husband.The narrative closure also serves to locate the film within the codes of classic Hollywood cinema - the sensationalism of the melodrama is ultimately contained by the film's narrative resolution. The question here is to what extent can this resolution accommodate what has gone before?
GUY BAREFOOT
Written on the Wind (USA 1957 p.c - Universal-International; d - Douglas Sirk)
This film was central to the rediscovery of melodrama in the early 1970s, when a revaluation of Douglas Sirk as auteur (see also Douglas Sirk, p. 4b 1) pointed to the ideological critique that his ironic mise en scene operated on 1950s middle-class America.
Its plot enacts a typical family melodrama in which the constriction of its range of action is reinforced by the circularity of its flashback structure and the hopeless, limited and incestuous channels for its protagonists' desires, locked as they are within the bourgeois patriarchal family. Behind Kyle Hadley's (Robert Stack) impotence lies his father's (Robert Keith) failure as patriarch, further manifested in the excessive, misdirected desire of his daughter Marylee (Dorothy Malone), expressed here in the displacement of her desire for Mitch (Rock Hudson) into her active pursuit of a lower-class petrol-pump attendant. In this respect, the plot foregrounds the interconnection of class and sexuality that Elsaesser (1972) and others contend is central to melodrama, class struggle being enacted as a problem of desire, in which female sexuality plays an ambiguous but central role (see Pollock, 1977).
The play of class and sex is carried in the iconography of the film - all the signs of conspicuous bourgeois consumption of the Hadley
Mismatched: Dorothy Malone lusts after Rock Hudson in Written on Ok wirnl
mansion, the oil pumps working incessantly against the skyline, the contrasting colours and costume or the conflicting couples - particularly reds associated with Marylee (sports car, flowers, negligee) and the cool green twinsets of Lucy (Lauren Bacall). Such use of decor, costume and consumer goods is typical of Hollywood family melodrama, as is the use of the space of hallway and landings where characters cross paths, eavesdrop, exchange confidences, malicious innuendo or accusations. Overlaying 1950s melodramatic plot structure and iconography is the special injection of Sirkian irony into its excessive mise en scene; his play with cliche (the nodding mechanical horse and grinning child that confront Kyle at the moment he believes himself impotent), an obsessive play with mirrors (Mitch's entrance with a drunken Kyle over his shoulder is first caught in a hallway mirror); screens and windows (Marylee looking through her window panes to the policeman and the petrol-pump attendant); and above all an Expressionist use of colour, which breaks with realist conventions for the sake of wresting ironic contrasts from objects and faces
(the harsh lighting and make-up on Lucy Mitch's faces as they attempt to soothe Kyle at ^ country club, where the palm-court music is als striking contrast to the extreme emotions expressed by Kyle). . m5
Sirkian mise en scene can also be read in ter of the repression so often said to provide melod with its outbreaks of expressive excess, which in turn draws its audience into the emotional dram ^ rather than putting them at a critical distancenorid breaking out of repression at the level of plot, mise en scene and crosscutting typical of melodramatic style are epitomised in the clinrac ^ scene where the father falls to his death down ^ staircase while daughter Marylee dances *nWI!Lhe erotically to blaring pop music in her bedroom. ^ scene also exemplifies the extension of 'musica counterpoint' so crucial to nineteenth-centuiV ^ ^ theatrical melodrama into visual and aural mis scene (see Elsaesser, 1972). ,11L!.
CHRISTINE
s and
[n the Mood for Love/Huayang Nianhua Hong Kong/ France 2000 p.c - Block 2 Pictures/Jet Tone/Paradis Films/Orly Films; d - Wong Kar-wai) Though melodrama has largely been discussed as a western European phenomenon, as a popular form it extends beyond national boundaries. One °f the richest examples occurs in Chinese culture, Where melodrama is found in theatre, opera, literature and film (see Chinese cinema, p. 192). Many of the tropes perceived as specific to Hollywood melodramas and women's pictures are Present in Chinese cinema, from the social realist dramas to the stylised art movies of the Fifth Generation film-makers. But although these sonographic, narrative and thematic elements resonate across national contexts, their expression ls specific to their cultural and historical origins.
Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai is known for his stylish, postmodern adaptation of Hong Kong genre movies, themselves indebted to Hollywood Ne Hong Kong cinema, p. 224). In the Mood for low has been seen as a tender reworking of Chinese cinema melodramas such as Fei Mu's 1948 Springtime m a Small Town/Xiaocheng Zhi Chun, which to\d the
Ilesrrc deferred: Tony LeungandMagg j'or LtMf
story of a married woman's unconsummated love for a young doctor, and her inability to free herself from a loveless marriage. Fei Mu's film, which was controversial in China because of its focus on interpersonal relationships rather than politics, had at its centre key melodramatic themes: the passage of time, memory and coincidence. The heroine's decision to stay with her ailing husband has been perceived as conservative and nostalgic, harking back to a period of moral and social stability. Springtime in a Small Town resonates with David Lean's World War II women's picture Brief Encounter (1945), which told a similar story of fnistrated adulterous passion and was received with ambivalence by contemporary audiences because of its nostalgia for prewar values (see David Lean, p. 432).
Several commentators have remarked on the similarities between these films, Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas and Wong's In the Mood for Lone, which is set in 1960s Hong Kong and concerns a married woman, Mrs Chan/So Lai-chen (Maggie Cheung) who suspects her husband of having an affair with the wife of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), living in the same crowded apartment building (see Teo, 2005). As these two share their fears, they embark on their own tentative affair, though it is not clear whether it is consummated, and the story ends with So Lai-chen returning to her husband, leaving Chow Mo-wan bereft. Wong's exquisite I   staging of this scenario of passion deferred is poetic I   in its play with ritual, repetition and lost I   opportunities, and it wears its debt to Hong Kong I   cinema and culture on its sleeve, both in its allusive I   visual design and in its eclectic use of music. The film's use of classic melodrama to evoke the transience of Hong Kong's culture and communities testifies to the enduring power of the genre and to |   its transnational nature.
PAM COOK
Far from Heaven (USA/Trance 2002 p.c - Vulcan Productions/Focus Features/Killer Films/John Wells Productions/Section Eight/USA Films/Clear Blue Sky Productions/TFI International; d - Todd I Iaynes) Todd Haynes's appropriation of Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas in far from Heaven has been the subject of much debate. Its strategy of quotation and allusion has been seen by some as draining Sirk's films of their powerful emotional affect, and by others as using pastiche and irony to intensify emotion (see Dyer, 2006). Indeed, on its release, the film sparked a controversy about the value of pastiche. Its reworking of classic melodrama has also been controversial among feminists (see Camera
Obscura, 2004).
Haynes's film can be approached from a different perspective. It borrows from several different Sirk films to create a new, multi-layered object: a reflection on the limitations of 1950s melodrama in dealing with its socio-political context, and a retrospective look at 1950s America
332
W   TOE CINEMA BOOK
Asenseot!oss:ju]lann,M .
JndDenms Hubert reliVf,lne
that attempts to make visible the social problems that Sirk's films could not confront or express directly. The result is a poignant play on 'then' and 'now' in which both are interleaved with one another, creating a sense of loss that echoes the tragic scenarios of Sirk's films, while allowing a fragile intimation of hope. The film may be seen as using nostalgia politically to activate a sense of lost ideals in its post feminist, post-civil liberties audience, at the same time as recognising the achievement of some political aims. Thus it can be said to encourage historical reflection by generating the emotion of loss (see Cook, 2005).
As an essay on melodrama, Far from Heaucn takes the famous visual excess of Sirk films such as All That 1 Ieauen Allows (1956) and Written on the Wind (1957) a stage further. Haynes uses costume,
Pas'in Todd Haynes's
iirk nil
nirfmm I fa
props, saturated colour and high-contrast lighting as a self-conscious homage to Sirk, but also to create a different aesthetic that might be called 'hyperbolic'. Hyperbole is a literary term that rete to a form of rhetoric; it employs exaggeration to produce a vivid impression in the reader, and it can be linked to the 'purple prose' characteristic of pulp romance fiction. In Haynes's Sirk tribute, i is represented by a knowing, symbolic use of costume and visual design that both alludes to its source texts (and the way they have been discuss in film studies), and refers to its own creative rei -terpretation of those films. Like Wong's In the Moo [or Love, Far Jrom Heauen is both a love letter to pa melodramas and a celebration of the genre's enduring relevance and vitality. rooK
THE MUSICAL
STEVE NEALE
he Hollywood musical is a product of the advent of sound, of industry's commitment to an ethos and to forms of entertainment represented, among other things, by the theatrical musical, by Broadway and by Tin Pan Alley, of its stake in the "™fjc publishing, recording and radio industries (acquired during the conversion to sound in the late 1920s), and of developments in and on the musical stage in America and elsewhere fring the previous SO to 90 years. Film versions of stage musicals such as The Merry Widow and The Student Prince, and of operas such as Carmen and La Bohéme, had been produced during the silent era. So, too, had filmed records of dancers and dances. ** Collins (1988) points out, these and nearly all other films Were usually accompanied by live music, and were often shown n contexts and venues that included musical performances of one kind or another. As he goes on to argue, it was the presence and popularity of these musical acts that helped prompt "e first experiments with sound in the mid-1920s, and that helped function as a model for the preludes and shorts produced by Warners and others at this time. And as he goes on to suggest, the ensuing 'tension between live musical acts and I'm presentation', between 'the increasing technological sophistication of the medium ... and the sense of nostalgia for a direct relationship with the audience' has marked the musical ever since, providing the focus for such studies as those by Feuer '  9:i) and Altman (1987), and the motivation for his own concentration on the 'ever-shifting relationship between Performance, spectacle, and audience' (Collins, 1988, p. 270). In "•e meantime, as Wolfe (1990) has pointed out, the established nature and shape of the musical short helped govern the use °f musical sequences in The/azz Singer (1927), the film usually "ted as the first feature-length musical. During the course of tne next three years, over 200 musical films of one kind or another were made, and despite a decline in the number of musicals produced and released in the early 1930s, the musical had re-established itself as a routine component in ^0g%wooďs output by 1934 (Altman 1996; Balio, 1993; Barrios,
The musical has always been a mongrel genre. In varying measures and combinations, music, song and dance have been its only essential ingredients. In consequence, its history, both on stage and on screen, has been marked by numerous tradi-"°ns, forms and styles. These in turn have been designated by numerous terms - 'operetta', 'revue', 'musical comedy', 'musical drama', 'the backstage musical', 'the rock musical', 'the integrated musical' and so on. As we shall see, historians, critics and theorists of the musical sometimes disagree about the meaning of some of these terms. As we shall also see, some invent their own. Nevertheless, it is possible to provide some °asic definitions, to indicate areas of debate and disagreement, and in the process to highlight the extent to which the musical has always been, despite its accessible and effortless image, multifacetPd, hybrid and complex (Collins, 1988, p. 269).
Revue, to begin with, is usually uncontentiously defined as a series of comic and musical performances lacking a narrative framework (lacking what in the theatre is called a 'book'), and unified, if at all, only by a consistent style, design or theme, ^ a common set of comir targets, or a single producer, director
or venue (Bordman, 1985; Kislan, 1980). Pure revue in the cinema is rare, though there was a vogue for revue in the late 1920s and early 1130s when as Balio, citing Walker (1979), points out, it 'was used by producers to showcase stars and contract players and to offer "proof positive that everyone could now talk, sing and dance at least passably well'" (Balio, 1993, p. 211). And as Delameter points out, the influence of revue is evident in the backstage musical, where the show in preparation is usually a revue of one kind or another (Delameter, 1974, p. 122).
One oi the distinguishing marks of operetta, by contrast, is the presence of a book. Important too, though, is the nature of the book, the nature of the setting, and the nature and importance of the music (in 1946, Variety argued that 'In operetta the score is the primary consideration ...Thebook, dancing (if any), comedy (if any), production and acting (if any) are all secondary to the music and singing' (p. 49). To quote Rubin: 'Operetta is characterized by its European origins, its elegance and sophistication of tone, its use of melodic, waltz-time music, its picturesque and exotic settings, and its strongly integrative organization around a melodramatic, romance-oriented book' (Rubin, 1993, p. 48). In the cinema, operetta is usually exemplified by the films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy (Sweethearts, 1938; Rose-Marie, 1936) and others, all based on stage hits by proponents of American operetta such as Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg, and all produced as a series by
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