This document discusses the concept of melodrama in classical Hollywood cinema. It defines classical Hollywood cinema as utilizing continuity editing to achieve clarity, identification with stars/emotions, and spectacle. Melodrama operates through cinematic effects like music and editing that elicit emotional affects like pathos, empathy, and suspense in the audience. It explores how audiences can both identify with and critically question the emotions of melodramatic heroines. The document also discusses the role of music in setting utopic ideals and how melodrama both conforms to and challenges social norms around gender, race, and class.

1. Music, Excess &
Melodrama
Nonverbal signs and audience response

2. Words vs Images (Embodied)

3. Melodrama IS CHC
“…melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American
form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and
emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action.
It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood move.”
Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised”

4. What is CHC?
Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC) is defined by
continuity editing with goals of—
 Clarity—spatial, temporal and narrative
 Identification (star system and emotional pathos)
 Conflict (misrecognition leads to clarity, authority)
 Spectacle (impressive to look at/listen to)

5. Melodramatic Mode
How does cinema get the audience to feel?
Williams: “cinematic effects…operate in the service of
melodramatic affects”—a “dialectic of pathos & action.”
Effects:
Mise-en-scene, music, close-ups, low angles, wide angles,
Editing for “too late” and “in the nick of time.”
Affects:
Loneliness, suffering, injustice/justice, empathy, pathos,
suspense
Audience knows more than the victim & may identify with many
characters. The King’s Speech

6. Spielburg’s Close-Ups
 Kevin B. Lee’s film essay—the Spielburg face.

7. Is it OK to cry at a film?
“the surprising power of identifying with victimhood”
 What happens when we identify with Stella Dallas,
standing in the rain outside of her daughter’s
wedding? Can we both identify with her sadness and
feel some critical anger as well? Is Stella feeling both
things?
 “unlike tragedy…rather than raging against a fate that
the audience has learned to accept, the female hero
often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially
questions” (Williams 47)

8. Progressive or Regressive Emotions?
 Audience is not naively identifying only with emotion. (Well,
maybe on the Hannity show…) Melodrama is “a complex
negotiation between emotion and thought.” (Williams 49)
 Do not mistake melodrama for “failed tragedy or
inadequate realism” (Williams 50)
 Look for moments of narrative or cinematic contradiction—
where truth shines through the character’s (or American
culture’s) belief that it is the “locus of innocence and virtue”
(and, of course--power)

9. Limits of representation
musical loss and return
 Melodramatic music (often) delivers an opening base
(or tonic) in original key, then digressions and a final
return (with musical teases) to the opening key.
 In CHC music proves that “virtue and truth can be
achieved in ..individual heroic acts rather than, as
Eisenstein wanted, in revolution and change.
Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence
Spielburg’s Schindler’s Bach or Mozart?

10. “All Art constantly aspires to the condition of
music.” Walter Pater
 Film music and utopia: “Music extends an impression
of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect,
unintegrated world.” Flinn, p. 9
 Meanings for music go back to Plato (music=social
unrest), St. Augustine (rhythm=spiritual completion).
Because music has no system of signification, it is
both praised and seen as threatening—excessive in
meaning.
 Musicals create utopic/dystopic spaces—Wizard of
Oz, Glee

11. Loie Fuller—Serpentine Dance (1908)
 http://archive.org/details/CrationDeLaSerpentine

12. Female body and Fabric
 “ The magic that Loie Fuller creates, with instinct, with
exaggeration, the contraction of skirt or wing,
instituting a place. The enchantress creates the
ambience, draws it out of herself and goes into it, in
the palpitating silence of crepe de chine.”
 Mallarme played in French with similarities between
the sound of words soi (herself) and soie (silk).
Stephane Mallarme (1893)

13. Embodied difference—
dance=public persona
 The Cakewalk—
Parodic dance of
whiteys and/or
adapted from
Seminole Indians.
First public dance
without makeup for
black women and
men

14. How to get women
into the cinema?
Puffed Sleeves by
Adrian in
Letty Lynton
(1932)
Macy’s sold
500,000 copies
in their
“Cinema Shop”
Did they really…?

15. 1950s
Get me out
of those
ruffles!
Gamine
innocence
?
Stick me in
the
suburbs…

16. Always a masochist?
Always an image….?