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Moving away from leisure institutions and building types to the transnational diffusion of specific cultural genres and experiences, this chapter traces the origins of ‘melodrama’ as a modern theatrical genre. It explores its impact in late eighteenth-century French Enlightenment discourse and early nineteenth-century Paris boulevard theatres, and analyses the subsequent diffusion and selective appropriation in England and Italy. As a new mixture of gestures, music and words, which spoke directly to the heart of men and women, the French genre of melodrame changed the theatrical experience of both popular and elite audiences. From 1802 onwards, melodramas of popular authors such as Pixérécourt et Ducange were extensively translated in Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Achieving an extraordinary success as the most original product of a new theatrical era, melodramas were, however, appropriated in different ways in different national contexts. In England, the radical playwright Thomas Holcroft, a central figure in Anglo-French cultural exchanges, actively imported the French melodrama and helped to adapt it as a new theatrical genre to the specific English context. In Italy a relative lack of state control stimulated the smooth absorption of melodramatic forms and plots in Italian opera, with the unintended result that melodrama did not develop into a separate genre.

Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.

This chapter explores Harkness’s first novel in the context of socialist fiction and the future of the modern novel in the 1880s. A City Girl pivots on one of the staple formulae of earlier nineteenth-century domestic melodrama and its radical political possibilities: a cross-class romantic relationship in which a working-class girl is seduced and abandoned by a gentleman. Unpicking how this novel reworks the inherited forms of radical melodrama helps to shed new light on Friedrich Engels’s famous critique of the work’s relation to realism and the status of literary naturalism in 1880s Britain. The Princess Casamassima – Henry James’s self-consciously experimental foray into naturalism and the political activism of 1880s London – serves as a counterpoint to illustrate the pressure of representation in the modernity of late Victorian mass culture. The chapter ends by returning to Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel, and Harkness’s time spent there researching A City Girl. Drawing on the correspondence and record books of Ella Pycroft, the resident lady rent collector, and Harkness’s cousin Beatrice Potter Webb, this chapter presents a counter-narrative that suggests how the residents themselves tried to write back their own life stories against an interpretative community of social activists, philanthropists, novelists, and political agents.

Margaret Harkness’s serial story ‘Connie’ appeared in the socialist Labour Elector in 1893–94, but was left unfinished when the periodical folded, reaching no conclusion to the cross-class romance between actress Connie and her lover, the son of a rural landowner. This chapter explores how Harkness uses melodrama in the serial to create a specific form of socialism: one based on the Tory narratives of duty, guidance, and a harmonious relationship across social classes. By focusing on Harkness’s use of the dual lenses of melodrama and Tory socialism, this chapter demonstrates the ways that Harkness uses the former to elucidate working-class women’s precarious social position under capitalism, and the latter to indicate possibilities for the amelioration of this compromised position.

Li Yu, one of the few female Chinese film directors, has focused on female characters and issues women face. Lost in Beijing (2007) tells the story of Liu Pingguo, a migrant worker in Beijing who is raped by her boss. When she becomes pregnant, her husband and boss bargain over possession of her and the child she is carrying. She is reduced to a commodity function exchanged for its value in conceiving and bearing a child. Nevertheless, over the course of the film, a Mercedes-Benz serves not only as the basic status symbol for her boss but also a much more ambivalent role as the space of negotiation between the characters in the film. The final images of the film show this car breaking down on a major Beijing street. Simultaneously, Pingguo has left her situation, in an audacious recapitulation of Nora’s departure at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It is in this symbolic deployment of the car in combination with her escape that the film subtly but provocatively dismantles the patriarchy’s power over Pingguo.

Since Perry’s plays share with his film production a similar thematic focus on Christian morality, Keith Corson’s contribution to this collection charts the rise of regional theatre and the translation of the financial, aesthetic, and political model of “gospel theatre’s” urban circuit to the multiplex. In the process of identifying the evangelical influences of some contemporary African American films, which Corson calls “gospelcinema,” the chapter compares Perry’s films with televangelist T.D.Jakes’s in order to argue that their films have helped reshape notions of a Black film audience. Gospel cinema narratives often function as morality tales that align closely with the rise of the Black mega church as they express a middleclass idealism that is rooted in a doctrine of prosperity, self-help, and individualism. Yet, as Corson defines it, gospel cinema also features a unique blend of melodrama, folk humor, and camp aesthetics that complicate a simple faith-based reading.

This chapter sets out to clarify Wong Kar-wai’s reliance on popular genre, qualifying the critical perspective that Wong is an “anti-genre” filmmaker. Rather, genre is seen here to facilitate three interlinked objectives for Wong: it functions to commercial advantage, attracting financiers and audiences; it animates major authorial preoccupations; and it permits Wong’s cinephilia full play. The chapter goes on to offer a large-scale analysis of In the Mood for Love and the ways in which it negotiates the conventions of traditional melodrama. This analysis isolates the prime thematic concerns that inform so many of Wong’s characters and stories, manifest within In the Mood for Love through a narrative emphasis on fate, personal responsibility, authenticity, chance, and coincidence.

Chapter 6: “Cinema and Prison Reform” examines how penal reformers appropriated cinema for their cause, addressing not only the moral rehabilitation of individual prisoners, but also changes in institutional policy. Paying specific attention to films made by prison reformers like Katherine R. Bleecker, who in 1915 shot footage at three of New York State’s biggest penal institutions (Auburn, Sing Sing, and Great Meadow), the chapter explores where these films circulated (in prisons and outside), what publicity they generated, and in cases where the films no longer survive, evidence of their impact (if any) on prison conditions. The chapter expands the optic of prison reform films to an analysis of commercially made films from the late teens and twenties whose narratives and object lessons were hailed by the press as powerful propaganda for reformist measures, as even more powerful in affecting change as films made specifically for that purpose.

The introduction of a regular television service in Greece coincided with the establishment of the Colonels’ dictatorship, and some of the most popular and best-remembered programmes from the dictatorship era were made and shown by its own army-run channel (YENED). This chapter examines two highly popular drama serials from the period, The Unknown War (Ο Άγνωστος Πόλεμος) and Our Neighbourhood (Η Γειτονιά), seeking to account for their popular appeal. Although both appear to embody values promoted by the dictatorship and might be read as highly effective television propaganda, the author argues that their appeal relies heavily on long-established ingredients of melodrama, realism and sentimentality and does not necessarily depend upon audiences embracing the political values of the Colonels’ regime.

Using the 1976 serial Muž na radnici (Man at City Hall) as a case study, this chapter investigates the Czechoslovak ‘seriál’ as emblematic of the ‘normalisation’ era of Czechoslovak television. The authors argue that the Czechoslovak ‘seriál’ combines two types of storyline – ideological and melodramatic – with the former dominant but reliant on the latter to legitimise it. They trace the sophisticated relationship between ideological and melodramatic storylines in Man at City Hall and argue that the popular acceptance of the serial arose largely from viewers’ ability to identify with the emotional elements within the melodramatic line. However, the ideological content of the serial, which supported the aims of the Czechoslovak communist party, was necessary for its production to be approved. Finally, the authors argue that the co-presence of ideological and melodramatic storylines is a factor in explaining the popularity of the serial genre among Czechoslovak audiences of the time.

The closing chapter examines Almodóvar's films as a contemporary reformulation of the “utopia of film.” As exemplary yet singular works of Western Cinema, they do not follow the logic of deconstruction, but instead connect a postmodern play of signs with the reflection on aesthetic forms in classical Hollywood cinema in order to stage figurations of a new sensitivity—one that seeks to ground itself in the worn-out platitudes, stereotypes, and cliché forms of a feeling and thinking that has become thoroughly mediated. Newly accentuating the physical basis of social being, the films are at the same time condensed reflections on the primary constellation of western European cinema. They work diligently on the media formations of an everyday world of feelings, a world marked as much by memories of fascism as by the entertainment of Hollywood.

Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.

In the midst of Princess Margaret’s 1950s romance with RAF Captain Peter Townsend, Malcolm Muggeridge wamed that the new celebrity coverage of the royal family would end in tears. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen proved that tears could enhance the popularity of the British monarchy, creating what film critic David Thomson called “the most sophisticated public relations boost HRH had had in 20 years”. In this depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, docudrama - the fictionalized representation of real people and events - is trumped by melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition and its highly expressive mise-en-scene. The fanner (represented by actual news footage) is the genre of the film’s “queen of hearts”, Diana. The latter (represented by the dramatic fiction written by Morgan) is that of its “queen of a nation”, Elizabeth II. In its opposition oftwo ambitious queens, one romantic, one worldly, the film echoes Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 proto-melodrama, Mary Stuart. More than two centuries later, the older genre triumphs, rendering the Queen’s fictional world more vivid and affecting than the actual images ofthe real-life Diana. Much of this triumph can be attributed to Helen Mirren, who brings the prestige of her star persona to a monarch in danger ofbeing overshadowed by the celebrity of her rival. In an unusually forthright discussion of royalty and celebrity, The Queen draws the two regimes of power together in a single figure, who finishes the film with a declamation on “glamour and tears”.

The King’s Speech is paradigmatic of the contemporary trend of representing the British monarchy through melodrama, a mode the traditionally sides with the powerless. “Bertie” (George VI) is a melodramatic figure whose integrity is underscored, in Linda Williams’ phrase, by “the literal suffering of an agonized body”. His speech impediment literalizes the psychic wounds caused by both the demands of royalty and his austere father in this Oedipal melodrama. Like his familiar nickname, his stammering renders him identifiable, despite his selfconfessed ignorance ofhis common subj ects. Melodrama, in Peter Brooks’ influential formulation, offers moral legibility in a post-sacred era, but only in individualized terms. Bertie’s hysterical symptoms confirm his virtue and that of the monarchy as institution via a relentless focus on the private realm, with the spectre of class antagonisms and republican protests evoked only to be dismissed. Bertie’s stammering speaks the burden of royalty, while also providing a vehicle for exploring the effects of the reterritorialization of the public/private distinction in the wake of the new mass media. His final broadcast unites the nation, reinvigorating the national body ailing from his brother’s abdication, triumphantly readying it for war.

This chapter shows how Shakespeare innovated his unique brand of romantic comedy under the influence of prose romance and Lyly’s dramatized romance. The resulting hybrid form was so successful that it is an underpinning structural formula for romantic comedy in many modern movies, even ones where Shakespeare is not a direct source. His most successful examples became conflated through the Western educational system into a recognisable and very flexible genre, tracing how ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ through successive stages involving centrally an exotic, transforming location such as a forest. Even twentieth century critics such as Northrop Frye played their part in popularising the genre and paving the way into movies, because of their strong influence on students in the twentieth century.