The Royal Theatre Presents: Echoes of Melodrama in the Magic Kingdom

by Maria Patrice Amon

in Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience

Abstract:

In March, 2013, Disneyland opened the Royal Theatre, condensing Disney films like Beauty and the Beast, Tangled, and Frozen into 22-minute stage adaptations. The decor of the theatre, the language of the characters, and the costuming of the performers all work together to evoke a nostalgic and loose sense of history that calls on guests to interact with the story in the style of an “old-time melodrama,” booing, hissing, cheering, and singing along to the story. In this essay Maria Patrice Amon argues that tourists are taught how to perform as actors and given a new hybrid identity as both performer and audience that extends to the parks as a whole. The essay explores the theatrical genre of melodrama and asserts that the Royal Theatre’s use of this genre gives the audience a way to exceed their assumed passivity and interact with the performers as actors themselves.

The spy who loved me: Benjamin Christensen and the Danish silent spy melodrama

by Casper Tybjerg

in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema

Abstract:

This article examines the spy melodrama films produced in Denmark from 1909 to 1918, 21 in all. The best-known (and one of only two to survive) is Benjamin Christensen’s Det hemmelighedsfulde X (Sealed Orders) (1914). A coda will briefly discuss the only pre-1945 spy talking film, Damen med de lyse Handsker (The Lady with the Light Gloves) (1942), also directed by Christensen. The article employs an approach similar to James Chapman’s contextual film history, examining the Danish silent spy melodramas in the context of political climate and genre, but with an emphasis on the concerns of film producers and practitioners. Surviving plot summaries, which exist for all 21 films, reveal a considerable degree of consistency in the storylines. The article argues that the melodramatic elements found in nearly all the films suggest a more female-oriented audience appeal than that of many later spy fictions.

Mothers, Maidens and Machos: Demolishing the Myths of Mexican Melodrama in Principio y fin (1993)

by Caryn Connelly

in The Films of Arturio Ripstein

Abstract:

Principio y fin marks the convergence of the two central themes Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garcíadiego had already begun to develop in their previous collaborations: the deconstruction of the mother figure (La mujer del puerto, 1991) and masculinity, specifically the figure of el macho (El imperio de la fortuna, 1986). Through these themes, Principio y fin undoes the traditional tropes of melodrama while it focuses on a struggling middle-class family as it grapples with the failures of Mexican modernization and the hollowness of the middle-class dream. In this chapter, building on Julianne Burton’s classic definition of the Mexican melodrama and how it affirms the values of a patriarchal system, I focus on how Ripstein and Garciadiego subvert the genre to break down the traditional myths it has constructed about mothers, maidens and machos.

Blurb:
Over the past decade, HBO has turned towards domestic melodramas like OliveKitteridge(2014), Sharp Objects(2018), and Big Little Lies(2017) to cultivate its aesthetic brand of“quality television”for women (Imre2009; McCabe& Akass2007) . These series frequently position their themes in dialogue with popular feminisms through melodrama’s documented capacity to seize upon the social problems that mark everyday public life (Linda Williams2001; Christine Gledhill1987). The identification of a“quality television”discourse in the development of HBO’s television slate for women has seized on this melodramatic tradition during a period in which social media networks have provided communities of feminists and allies space to reconsider the value, authenticity,and place of women’s testimony in the public sphere. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings,The New York Times captured the“#WhyIDidn’tReport”phenomena where survivors of sexual assault testified to their silenced experiences on social media. That many recent“quality”domestic melodramas on HBO feature Academy Award-winning or nominated film actresses, such as Frances McDormand and Reese Witherspoon, who advocate feminist storytelling as well as the Time’s Up legal defense fund is a relationship worth examining. While careers of film-turned-TV actresses have previously been thought through heuristics like recycling (Mary R. Desjardins2015), the present circumstances of these actresses reflect not only the renewed cultural place of television but also clear tensions between the re-emergence of middle-class feminist political discourse on television today and its relationship to the racial underpinnings of the film industry’s cultures of prestige. It is precisely this tension that now marks the function of HBO’s recycling of domestic melodrama in its development of television branded as“quality.”

Not Your Mother’s Melodrama: Three Twenty-First-Century Women’s Films

by E.L. McCallum

This essay argues that twenty-first-century melodrama films by female directors rework the core components of classic melodrama form—not only its timing, but also narrative form, agnition, and the underlying fantasy of union. While they retain a focus on objects and setting as bearers of emotion, and on a crisis in intimate relations, the three films by Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Ann Hui considered here reconsider melodrama’s possibilities. They all broach ways of rethinking Oedipal fantasy, moving beyond a story of the fraught emergence of the individual to one focused on a collective problem of how we negotiate a proper proximity to cherished others. All three films turn from what could have been to what the past makes possible now and thus change melodrama from a melancholic genre to a generative one.

Vamps and Virgins: The Women of 1920s Hollywood War Romances

by Liz Clarke

Liz Clarke suggests moving beyond surveying the canonical combat films in order to take a closer look at the representations of women and war in early Hollywood. She points out that in the 1920s, Hollywood studios considered females to be their target audience and so geared their narratives and complex female protagonists accordingly. Exploring films from that time era, Clarke connects melodrama and war and observes the broader relationship between heroism, gender, war, and nation that arises in these films. She argues that when we define war films beyond military training and combat narratives alone, more possibilities exist to look at the multifaceted ways women and war are on screen.