Melodrama Unbound Across History, Media, and National Cultures
Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
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Introduction
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
P ro m e t h e u s, a n d M e lo d r a m a , U n b o u n d Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to humankind, was punished by a jealous Zeus. Bound to a rock, his liver was pecked out each day by an eagle, only to have it regenerate each night for more painful pecking. This image of the bound Prometheus has survived in Greek tragedy as an emblem of heroic suffering, but the story of Prometheus did not end on that rock. Piecing together surviving fragments of other plays, classicists have shown that Prometheus Bound was followed by a sequel that greatly appealed to a later romantic imagination. In Prometheus Unbound the Titan hero was freed from his chains by Hercules, who killed the liver-pecking eagle. And in yet a third play, forming a trilogy, Prometheus is finally reconciled with Zeus and celebrated for his feat of stealing fire for humankind. It is the unbinding of Prometheus that inspires this volume. Melodrama, like the Prometheus plays in toto, is more various than any singular image of suffering. Critics of melodrama have been so obsessed with this suffering side of the mode, at the expense of its exciting sensational actions, romantic thrills, or even its frequent comic undercurrent, that, as with the blind person and the elephant (chapter 12), they have missed many of its important characteristics. Prometheus is more than an eternal victim, he also is a bold action hero, the stealer of fire, a buddy of Hercules, and is even reconciled with Zeus in a happy ending. Ever since melodrama was named by linking the Greek word melos (music) with the Greek word drama (action), it has wormed its way into the most fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. The melos of melodrama is not simply the addition of music to drama but what that music represents: the opening up of drama—on stage, in fiction, then in film, radio, and television—to waves of feeling that would have been unthinkable in Greek tragedy. Indeed, the very notion of the power and value of feeling is a sign of the pervasiveness of melodrama in contemporary life. In its long history since emerging in the late 1790s as a named theatrical form, melodrama has never been limited to the isolated genre of antirealist excess supposed by film studies; it demands understanding as the most prominent of modern cultural forms.
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2 Introduction By unbinding melodrama from many critical misconceptions, we do not, however, suggest everything is melodrama. Comedy, romance, and realism are equally distinctive modes that frequently mix with melodrama as well as with one another. However, melodrama is crucial to understanding popular dramatic fictions in modernity. By freeing it from narrow generic definitions, we are able to show how melodrama, as part of an evolving modernity, emerged as a distinct mode that changed the course of dramatic and media histories.
The Unbindings Our primary goal is to free melodrama from numerous misconceptions about its origins, nature, and function in order to stake out the claim that in mainstream cinema and much television the central aesthetic is melodrama, not something called “classical cinema.” As many of our contributors show, melodrama is a protean form that leaps from one medium to another in the many cultures of a globalizing world. The “unbindings” our contributors undertake stem in part from a growing concern to historicize melodrama in relation to its past intermedial forms and diverse cultural contexts. Our volume divides these unbindings into two complementary, but intersecting, clusters: part one, “Melodrama’s Crossmedia, Transnational Histories,” focuses on institutions and practices, and part two, “Cultural and Aesthetic Debates,” emphasizes questions of melodramatic textual practice, interpretation, and cultural-critical theory. Because our unbindings connect history with specific cultural and aesthetic questions, we detail the main topics of both parts of the volume here.
P e t e r B ro o k s There is no doubting the importance of Peter Brooks’s 1976 study, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, in countering the patronizing and largely ignorant stereotypes of melodrama as an old-fashioned, simplistic, and moralistic form of outdated Victorian culture. Brooks’s distillation of a melodramatic mode of imagination gave it cultural gravitas, enabling modern critics to take melodrama seriously as an aesthetic of intense emotionality that recalibrated morality as feeling and empathy, endowing ordinary lives with significance. However, Brooks’s ultimate purpose was to explain the fiction of Balzac and Henry James, not melodrama more broadly. His focus on a narrow thirty-year span of French post-Revolutionary melodrama and these two novelists allowed neither for the diversity of melodrama’s national-cultural roots nor its commercial production practices arising from that other—Industrial—revolution, nor for its later role in the emergence of a mass popular audience and modern mass media. These practices of production and circulation are crucial to understanding melodrama’s global travels and significance.
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Introduction 3 Opening part one, Matthew Buckley offers a far-reaching historicization of melodrama’s sources, in the process unbinding it from two widely held myths about its origins and purpose. He begins with its supposed origin in the French Revolution, arguing that when it emerged as a named form at the beginning of the nineteenth century, melodrama was “a cosmopolitan hybrid, composed entirely of parts, techniques, emphases, and aims already developed in earlier, often pre-Revolutionary work produced all over Europe” (chapter 1). With deep roots in England and Germany as much as in France, and with distinguishing elements already well established and well mined by the rising tides of late eighteenthcentury sentimental drama, opera, gothic literature, and popular spectacles of all kinds, it is not possible to claim, as Brooks does, that melodrama emerged spontaneously in response to the sudden end of the ancien régime. Buckley’s second myth is that melodrama is a drama of morality. In Brooks’s argument, the Revolution overthrew a hierarchical social framework based in the authority of church and king, which had been invalidated by the loss of the “traditional Sacred” and its commanding form, tragedy, whose goal was to reconcile the individual to higher powers. Melodrama arose to fill the gap created by multiple and ongoing cultural disruptions, seeking to recover and make palpable the continuing but occulted presence of ethical forces at work in the world. Buckley argues instead that melodrama, arising in a theater increasingly commercially driven, lays only “superficial claim to be moral” drama, because its economic success is dependent on audiences for whom the “criterion of feeling and emotional affect—the demand that we be moved, not instructed”—was paramount (chapter 1). This does not mean that the category of virtue, so important to melodrama, must be discounted; however, one of its most perennial stereotypes—its moralism—is often secondary to its investment in sensation and spectacle, for which the conflict between “good” and “evil” serves as pretext. A further challenge to Brooks’s paradigm is taken up from a different direction by Richard Allen (chapter 2), who questions not only the argument that the French Revolution marked “the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred” (Brooks 1976, 15) but that this was followed by the triumph of secularism. Allen shows that from the Middle Ages onward the traditional Sacred had been adapting to a new, incipiently modern sense of selfhood within a continuing religious framework. He studies medieval painting and sculpted representations of the Passion of Christ, observing the shift from Christ as Godhead to Christ as human body, subjected to extreme suffering. He notes also the importance of the surrounding witnesses to this suffering—in particular the three Marys and St. John—whose agonized gestures and postures prefigure the gestural repertoire of melodramatic performance. In the shift from transcendental awe to personal empathy, Allen draws on art history to suggest a realization of the “Christianity of Pathos.” In this new form of pathos, melodrama does not replace “the Sacred,” nor is Christian morality “occulted”; rather, it is realigned with a newly emerging humanism that would eventually support the socioeconomic forces of a nascent capitalist order based on the individual. This recalibration of Christian sources helps explain melodrama’s persistence and proliferation. It is all the more crucial to understanding twentieth-century
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4 Introduction cinematic melodrama in South European or Latin American Catholic rather than North European Protestant countries, not to mention East and South Asian countries rooted in different religious formations. Louis Bayman (chapter 16) focuses on postwar Italian cinema, for example, demonstrating just how intertwined in a Catholic ethos and dramaturgy were both neorealist films and popular melodramas. For a country emerging from fascist rule, characters established within a Christian ethos of humility, poverty, and contact with the land provided signs of melodramatic virtue based in authenticity against the excesses and artifice of a regime given over to ostentatious wealth, corrupt political and business practices, and violent oppression. In a similar vein, extracts from the writings of the Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis, translated by Kathleen Vernon (chapter 9), address the role of Catholicism in a different elaboration of the melodramatic aesthetic as it intersects with other entertainment traditions in Mexican popular culture and cinema from the 1930s through the 1960s. Attempts to understand the transnational travel of melodrama outside the boundaries of Western thinking, when it meets with other cultural practices and religious traditions, makes the notion of a “loss of the Sacred” even more tenuous. Ira Bhaskar (chapter 15) argues that in Indian cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, the Sacred intertwines with the stylization of a transformed German expressionism to realize a modernizing subjectivity, calling on a combination of diverse religious and aesthetic traditions including, in particular, Sufi poetry and song. As in Catholic countries, the experience of the Sacred is not lost but ever present in everyday life and culture.
Mode, Genre and Gender One of the most important concepts Brooks has offered film studies is that of melodrama as a flexible mode of aesthetic perception and affect that could travel from stage to screen, from the nineteenth to twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and, as is now apparent, across national cultures. We define mode as a general form of expressiveness using the drama of light and dark, staging, color, music, speech, intonation and, importantly, plot. Brooks’s description of familiar dramaturgical motifs of melodrama—the opening garden of innocent pleasure, the moment of the villain’s self-nomination, the role of recognition—had already implicitly challenged film studies’ displacement of melodramatic expression from plot into a subversive mise-en-scène. Through its neglect of interdisciplinary study, born of the need to establish cinema’s own unique institutional status, film melodrama appeared to be a new discovery in the 1970s, detached from work already developing in theater studies. Narrowly defining it in its Sirkian manifestation as a form of ironic ideological subversion, or as a late addition to the successive mapping of Hollywood’s genres in only one generic form, the family melodrama of the late 1940s and 1950s, film studies missed the pervasive cross-generic modality of melodrama. Feminist film scholars also defined melodrama too narrowly as part of women’s culture under patriarchy, focusing in particular on the emotional, personal, and
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Introduction 5 psychosexual problems of the Oedipal family. Whereas many of Hollywood’s other genres were granted the dignity of masculine and “classical” labels—western as epic, gangster as tragic hero—melodrama’s emotional effects were siphoned off into a separately gendered genre, precluding consideration of melodrama’s broader significance across popular cinema’s genre systems. However, as Christine Gledhill’s Prologue shows, theatrical melodrama never existed as a singular genre. Rather, through its popularity, voracious adaptation of diverse sources, and competition to win or amalgamate different audiences—male and female, working and middle class, and in the United States, white, African American, and immigrant European—melodrama generated a diversity of subgenres. Never itself a singular genre, melodrama as a pervasive mode has functioned historically as a genre-generating machine. Moreover, to the development of Hollywood’s genres, theatrical melodrama contributed not only a series of generic types but an organization of theatrical production that prefigured the studio system. Constituting an expressive mode of aesthetic articulation that shapes the operation of generic worlds, melodrama does not determine the specificity of locale, character type, décor, or situation that characterizes specific film genres. In a concept we retain from Peter Brooks, the most central function of the mode of melodrama lies in its recognition of the personalized virtues and vices of characters whose actions have consequences for others. The contest between them is not played out according to fixed moral values; rather, it enacts a struggle for a felt sense of justice that operates differently within different generic worlds. The point is that although conflict between perpetrator and victim is shared across genres, any body can fill these positions, and conflicts can be played out in innumerable ways. The modality of melodrama thus enables interchange and overlap between genres, and between other modalities such as realism, romance, and comedy, as well as between different media, historical moments, and national-cultural contexts. Such interchange has been crucial to melodrama’s role in modernity and to modernizing the dramatic functions of gender, class, and race. As Hilary Hallett (chapter 7) points out, at the turn of the nineteenth century, women as stage actresses, playwrights, and theater managers and in cinema as scriptwriters and film stars—and, we add, as film company owners and producers—contributed to modernizing popular culture. Hallett demonstrates the mutually productive interaction between melodramatic scenarios and popular cross-dressing actresses on stage and emerging film stars such as Mary Pickford and the serial queens. As melodrama transitioned into twentieth-century popular culture, its production of convention-challenging heroines contributed to the establishment of Hollywood as a worldwide entertainment form, making the “modern American girl” a driver of social change. At the same time, Hallett underscores the modernizing role of gender change as women journalists and publicists contributed to the travel of melodramatic scenarios from stage to screen to newsprint, magazines and back to films. The failure in film studies to discuss the relationship between the melodramatic mode and genre has been particularly problematic for the introduction of melodrama into television studies, which perhaps, like film studies before it, is still preoccupied with establishing its own intellectual credentials. Linda Williams
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6 Introduction (chapter 10) outlines the history of melodrama’s serialities across nineteenthcentury fiction into early film fiction, radio, and television, and reappearing now with the flowering of multiseason serials on American television. She explores the way serials have melodramatized television fiction and even documentary, suggesting that the impediments to the recognition of this process lie in film and TV studies’ investment in the assumed integrity of—and often critically masculinized— self-contained, discrete genres, especially when opposed to the pejorative feminization of serialization under the label of soap opera.
E xc e s s Both Thomas Elsaesser and Peter Brooks, writing in the 1970s, deemed excess to be melodrama’s most distinctive feature. For Elsaesser, the excess of characters’ emotions—siphoned into an orchestration of flamboyant color, baroque set design, strident music, expressive camera movement and performance—worked to critique the middle-class ideologies underpinning their narratives. For Brooks, excess was less a matter of ironic subversion than an inherent feature of the stage melodrama’s “text of muteness,” in which characters rendered mute by the machinations of the villain’s plotting or by the inadequacy of language itself nevertheless found new, often corporeal, forms of expression. For both these foundational thinkers, melodrama was more than mere theatrical hyperbole; in an era of psychoanalytic fascination with forms of repression, excess took on new meaning and significance. As long as melodrama was defined as, and confined to, familial or romantic dilemmas, excess appeared to have found a legitimate outlet, seemingly justified by the feminization of the domestic sphere. But once the argument was made for extending melodrama as mode across Hollywood’s genres, its association with emotional or stylistic excess cut across their assumed gender specialization and rubbed up against a new paradigm of Hollywood cinema as a “classical” form of narrative. Within this paradigm, all other dimensions of film—genre, spectacle, and theatrical affiliations—were supposedly subordinated to the efficient, linear, psychologically motivated norms of classical narration. We argue instead that melodrama is not the always-exceptional excess to Hollywood’s presumed classical narrative norms. Rather, it fulfils other normative expectations; for example, that Hollywood films will supply spectacle, excitement and pathos as well as recognitions of villainy and virtue. A number of our contributors challenge the “excess” with which melodrama has been identified. For theater historians Helen Day-Mayer and David Mayer (chapter 6), what is perceived by later generations as excess conforms to melo drama’s development within conditions of theatrical performance, dramaturgy, and musical underscoring that demanded of actors an expressive use of the body and voice. They explain how reliance on the static poses illustrating actors’ handbooks underpins a common but mistaken conception of melodramatic acting as “exaggeration” that neglects the flow of movement between gestures. Moreover, they show how such practices evolved with changes in theater construction and
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Introduction 7 lighting, in audience demographics, and in new codes of naturalism that influenced acting theory and practice. Thus in its first decades, cinema drew on a diversity of acting styles according to character type or dramatic moment, including performance traditions now felt to be alien as well as those then being recognized through the power of cinematography as a new modern. From a perspective rooted in cultural studies, Deidre Pribram (chapter 14) releases the notion of emotional expressiveness from its initial limitation in film studies as object of irony or distanciation. For Pribram, taking emotions seriously means undoing the binary that opposes emotion to reason and feeling to thinking. Not only does emotion fuel thought and reason run through feeling; the intertwining of thought and feeling manifests the sociality of emotion and the individual as a “socioemotional” being. Whereas melodrama’s personalization of the social is often critiqued as a displacement of the political, Pribram argues that emotion is both generated by and channeled into social discourse and practice. Far from excessive, the reason of emotion recalibrates the so-called cause-and-effect logic of Hollywood narrative and television serial drama within an emotionalized aesthetics of melodramatic expressiveness that should no longer be identified as excess.
W e s t e r n F i l m T h e o ry a n d T r a n s nat i o na l M e lo d r a m a Expanding interest in the category of melodrama in film studies coincided with the exploration of transnational cinemas, especially those of China, Japan, India, and Latin America. Drawing indigenous traditions of art, religion, and entertainment into new cinematic practices, these cinemas have challenged the application of concepts developed to explain Western forms. To Western eyes, the seeming exoticism of these moving-image cultures—complexities of plotting, intensity of emotional incident, and often seemingly unmotivated outbursts into expressive song and dance or violent action—appeared to warrant their description as melodrama, even if they were not so named in their home cultures. Such observations raise questions about whether melodrama is a universal mode of imagination or an import from the West and the North via colonization, modernization, or, more recently, corporate globalization. Film studies has predominantly viewed melodrama as a product of Western modernity, formally established with the twin revolutions of the late eighteenth/ early nineteenth centuries—French and Industrial. However, the new histories of European melodrama, offered not only by Matthew Buckley and Richard Allen but by other contributors charting its emergence in the southern and eastern hemispheres, foreground the different temporal-geographic and religious contexts in which melodrama has been formed and, upon traveling, reformed. Thus, another key unbinding challenges the automatic application of Western concepts. Several of this volume’s chapters detail not only how theatrical and cinematic melodramas circulated between the West and countries distant from it but explore what happened to them as they encountered indigenous cultural practices and critical
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8 Introduction traditions, producing hybrid forms that only in retrospect and through different aesthetic lenses can be understood as performing the functions of melodrama in modernizing societies. Kathryn Hansen (chapter 3) traces the history of a traveling theatrical troupe, who, following early careers as childhood entertainers in England, became established in Australia and from there took popular plays to emerging entertainment markets in China and India. Using Dion Boucicault’s well-loved Irish melodrama, The Colleen Bawn as case study, Hansen shows how in Parsi theater it became Bholi Jan, adapted to the social, aesthetic, and cultural horizons of its spectators. Although never called melodrama, it was recognized in the 1870s as belonging to a new dramatic category. Breaking away from popular mythological plays about gods and demons to concentrate on social problems enacted on and through familial relationships, and later transitioning into cinema, this new genre became known as the “social.” Kathryn Hansen’s conclusion “that melodrama is a living organism that mutates to survive . . . and, in turn, creates conditions for its own evolution and metamorphosis” illustrates the power of melodrama to travel into local contexts and make a new home through cultural change (chapter 3). Chinese culture, similarly, had no term for melodrama. In a Shanghai fraught with processes of modernization coming from different political directions— including the circulation of American culture through imported films—Zhen Zhang (chapter 5) shows how “Griffith fever” merged with the form known as wenyi, already constituted as a vernacular cultural genre that absorbed foreign content (Japanese, American, and European) as part of its appeal. Focusing on the pathos of broken love matches and families, Zhang shows how the figure of the orphan and abandoned woman, common to nineteenth-century and early film melodrama across different national cultures, serves as potent trope for the deracination of modernization and colonization, and thereby a powerful tool for transnational and cross-cultural analysis. Conversely, emphasizing difference rather than shared tropes, Panpan Yang’s case study (chapter 1) of Chinese cinema’s response to Hollywood’s Gone with the Wind (1939) and Waterloo Bridge (1940) draws on the romantic dimension of wenyi to offer a transnational address to the problem of melodrama’s identification with excess, demonstrating how one culture’s excess may be another’s aesthetic normal, born of native sociocultural traditions. The intermedial dimension of such transnational travels is emphasized by Hannah Airiess (chapter 4) in her examination of the convergence of English melodramatic fiction with traditions of Meiji-era serial literature in turn-of-the century Japan. She argues that the transition from feudal hierarchy to specifically Japanese forms of modernization was being processed before Hollywood’s arrival in popular vernacular forms such as shinpa drama and ninjōbon novels, a process further intensified in the cinema. Tracing similarly transnational and cinematic conjunctions across Indian cinemas of the 1930s and 1940s, Ira Bhaskar (chapter 15) explores how the cinematographic practices of German expressionism merged with the sacred musical and poetic traditions of Bhava to produce a distinctively Indian form of melodrama.
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Introduction 9 Taking human emotion as melodrama’s central core, Bhaskar shows how Indian cinemas merged sacred feeling with personal dilemmas of modernization through the use of music, and especially the song, giving emotion both amplified form and social force in a distinctively Indian articulation of melodramatic aesthetics. These contributions demonstrate that melodrama’s global circulation is never a matter of a single European or Hollywood source, nor is the resulting melodrama the same as the “original” imports. In all these examples, we see how interactions between traveling cultural artifacts and existing practices and traditions generate new forms of melodramatic possibility.
“ C l a s s i c a l” Na r r at i v e Ci n e m a The terms “classical realist” and “classical Hollywood cinema” reference historically contradictory ideas. In post-1968 thinking, classical realist narrative often meant an ideologically bourgeois form, representing the height of false consciousness, which only the avant-garde or countercinema could rupture. More influential today is Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), which borrows terms from art history and André Bazin to argue that American film from 1917 to 1960 had reached the classical harmony and fullness of causally motivated, linear narratives. Linda Williams (chapter 12) argues against the odd reversal that makes the classical—in art and theater history associated with earlier traditional forms— the exemplar of modern media and melodrama—which was actually born and so named with the rise of modernity—the exemplar of the old-fashioned. This wildly ahistorical deployment of both terms is entirely too static, whether concerning melodrama as the atavistic throwback to an older medium of theater—as if theater too were not capable of change—or taking “classical” cinema as the modern to melodrama’s archaisms. In contrast, we encourage the kind of provocative investigation begun by Jane Gaines (chapter 19) that shows the way melodrama invokes relations between different experiences of time. Introducing the notion of three different modes of historical time, Gaines addresses the asymmetry of the relations between past, present, and future in the pathos of melodramatic timing. We are also struck by Martin Shingler’s finding (chapter 8) that, despite its by then frequent pejorative connotations, both stage and film critics could positively apply the term melodrama to The Petrified Forest both as Broadway play (1935) and Warner Bros. film (1936). Whether in praise or contempt, this usage demonstrates that circa 1935–1936 the term was far from discarded and retained relevance at the height of Hollywood’s supposed classical maturity. From such fluctuations in its use, Shingler suggests that melodrama has long been engaged in a continual process of renewal, adapting to cultural and technological changes. By unbinding melodrama from its identity as oppositional “other” to the classical’s harmony and linearity or to realism, we begin to discover more fully what melodrama is and what it historically has been.
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10 Introduction
M e lo d r a m a Opp o s e d to R e a l i s m To touch its audiences’ lives, melodrama has to command recognition, whether of human feeling, social experience, or moral dilemma. Recognition is essential to melodrama’s ends: for suspense or pathos to work, we have to feel for characters and recognize the forces at work in situations they may not understand themselves. Here it is useful to recall the distinction between verisimilitude—that which is accepted as true—and realism, which appeals for the recognition of classes of people, of social conditions, or of areas of life hitherto unrepresented. Such expansion of the range of representation is often a matter of contesting the codes of verisimilitude and thus changing the way reality is perceived and understood. Melodrama is, then, not the opposite of realism but in ongoing engagement with it. The history of melodrama’s evolution across the centuries and across media, from nineteenth-century popular entertainments to cinema and television, can be traced through shifting conceptions of realism concomitant with changing production conditions, audience demographics, and performance practices. Louis Bayman’s discussion (chapter 16) of Italian postwar cinema shows how melodrama, emerging from opera and later verismo forms in a culture steeped in Catholicism, cannot but inhabit frames of both verisimilitude and a realism expanding to meet the political crisis of the times. In the context of the United States in the 1970s, Drake Stutesman (chapter 17), describing the costuming of the black male hero of Super Fly, argues the melodramatic power of a tuck, hem, or material texture, of the flair or swing of a garment, to express metaphorically an emerging African American refusal of socioeconomic marginalization and political repression. In her concentration on costume, Stutesman both foregrounds a means of contemporary cultural recognition and directs our attention to neglected languages of melodramatic expression. Conversely, Despina Kakoudaki (chapter 18) contrasts the generically spectacular qualities of the disaster melodrama with the chilling realism of Steven Soderberg’s Contagion, which presents the threat of a global pandemic in tones that downplay thrills and excitement. Yet despite its almost clinically detached style that eschews emotion, Kakoudaki shows that the film starts and ends with family relationships as ground zero and ultimately produces melodramatic victims, villains, and heroes. The presence of melodrama in such an extreme realist text indicates that we need to articulate more complex relationships between the modes of melodrama and realism, without which we cannot understand the way melodrama and its various subgenres have adapted to changing conditions of the twentieth century, nor how they have remained central to contemporary popular culture.
M e lo d r a m a Opp o s e d to A rt If, as Martin Shingler (chapter 8) suggests, appreciation of melodrama was still available to theater and film critics in the 1930s, the new century, seeking to free itself from its Victorian moorings, frequently rendered melodrama a source of
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Introduction  11 parody (Day-Mayer and Mayer chapter 6). However, melodrama continued under other names not only to generate the Hollywood genre system but also to inspire avant-garde producers of theater and film. The speedy transition of The Petrified Forest from stage to screen suggests how a melodrama of ideas could be created from the encounters of opposing personality types and performers embodying action and pathos. Understanding the reach of melodrama across conventional divisions between popular culture and art, Amanda Doxtater (chapter 11) enlarges the reputation of Carl Dreyer by tracing the productive presence of melodramatic practices in his work, which he had absorbed in his early years working for the Danish film industry. These practices, she argues, are at work in that definitive art house movie, La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc. These examples suggest ways in which melodrama, under pressure from new aesthetic, social, and technological circumstances, transitioned from the cultures of the Victorian stage and adapted to processes of cultural modernization and transnational circulation. Melodrama may have lost its relative theatrical coherence and its name, but it continues to inhabit contemporary aesthetic forms worldwide in a diversity of ways. Despair is often expressed at the difficulty of pinning melodrama down in modern cultures. As we and contributors to this volume suggest, however, the need now is to identify not a singular generic form but elements and practices through which film and television activate the significance and power of the melodramatic mode.
* The unbindings discussed here are not definitive. Our aim has not been to eliminate Peter Brooks’s influence on melodrama studies. Nor have we sought to reduce the importance of gender within genres, or the perception of melodrama as heightened expression. Even notions of the classical will undoubtedly continue to denote the efficient operation of melodramatic production of the kind shared by nineteenth-century theater and twentieth-century film studios because the two categories are not antithetical. Similarly, we traverse the boundaries between melodrama and realism while claiming melodrama as a form of art. If this anthology opens the way to the possibilities of such unbindings, then our victimized yet heroic Prometheus will be a little less stranded on his rock, his unbinding rendering the real power and endurance of the melodramatic mode.