Melodrama, Ideology and the Cinema

This subject analyses the history, aesthetics and critical discourse of cinematic melodrama across global art cinema and Hollywood filmmaking traditions and contemporary practices. It addresses melodrama’s origins in, and continued engagement with, other visual and performing art forms, especially those heavily reliant upon musical expression. Melodrama represents the social and political world in domestic and personal terms. Students will consider the way cinematic melodrama addresses questions of ideology in terms of audience, emotion, embodiment, identity, psychology, gender and sexuality. Extrapolating on melodrama’s concern with the local, this subject focuses on the work of the filmmaking ensemble itself and considers melodrama as a mode of aesthetic address relying on specific creative practices and performative traditions.