Music, Excess &

Melodrama

Nonverbal signs and audience response

Words vs Images (Embodied)

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”

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)

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

Spielburg’s Close-Ups

Kevin B. Lee’s film essay—the Spielburg face.

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)

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)

Limits of representationmusical 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?

“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

Loie Fuller—Serpentine Dance (1908)

http://archive.org/details/CrationDeLaSerpentine

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)

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

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…?

1950s

Get me out

of those

ruffles!

Gamine

innocence

?

Stick me in

the

suburbs…

Always a masochist?Always an image….?