Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo ...
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Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.Less
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.
Felicity Dunworth
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719076329
- eISBN:
- 9781781702161
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719076329.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for ...
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This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for the court and universities and for the commercial theatres, including history plays, comedies, tragedies, romances and melodrama. Familiar and less-known plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster are subject to readings that illuminate the narrative value of the mother figure to early modern dramatists. The book explores the typology of the mother figure by examining the ways in which her narrative value in religious, political and literary discourses of the period might impact upon her representation. It addresses a range of contemporary narratives from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother's Legacies, and from the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth and James to the reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and the increasingly popular Puritan conduct books. The relations between tradition and change and between typology and narrative are explored through a focus upon the dramatised mother in a series of dramatic narratives that developed out of rapidly shifting social, political and religious conditions.Less
This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for the court and universities and for the commercial theatres, including history plays, comedies, tragedies, romances and melodrama. Familiar and less-known plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster are subject to readings that illuminate the narrative value of the mother figure to early modern dramatists. The book explores the typology of the mother figure by examining the ways in which her narrative value in religious, political and literary discourses of the period might impact upon her representation. It addresses a range of contemporary narratives from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother's Legacies, and from the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth and James to the reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and the increasingly popular Puritan conduct books. The relations between tradition and change and between typology and narrative are explored through a focus upon the dramatised mother in a series of dramatic narratives that developed out of rapidly shifting social, political and religious conditions.
Gary Needham
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633821
- eISBN:
- 9780748651252
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633821.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it ...
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Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart of American mythology, film spectatorship, and genre. Brokeback Mountain offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés of the Western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of homophobia and the closet. This book examines the film in relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing and homosexuality. In doing so it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a contemporary independent and queer film. The book provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors, and proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into account how editing and cruising relate to one another.Less
Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart of American mythology, film spectatorship, and genre. Brokeback Mountain offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés of the Western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of homophobia and the closet. This book examines the film in relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing and homosexuality. In doing so it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a contemporary independent and queer film. The book provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors, and proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into account how editing and cruising relate to one another.
Irene González-López and Michael Smith (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474409698
- eISBN:
- 9781474444637
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409698.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial ...
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This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema.
The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author.
With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.Less
This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema.
The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author.
With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.
Glyn Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637782
- eISBN:
- 9780748670864
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637782.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film ...
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Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film is a key text in the canon of American independent cinema. This book offers a detailed and perceptive study of Haynes' film, with each chapter centred on a topic crucial for understanding Far from Heaven's richness and seductive pleasures (authorship, melodrama, queerness). The film is also positioned in relation to the rest of Todd Haynes' work, the New Queer Cinema movement, and the history of US independent cinema.Less
Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film is a key text in the canon of American independent cinema. This book offers a detailed and perceptive study of Haynes' film, with each chapter centred on a topic crucial for understanding Far from Heaven's richness and seductive pleasures (authorship, melodrama, queerness). The film is also positioned in relation to the rest of Todd Haynes' work, the New Queer Cinema movement, and the history of US independent cinema.
Bridget Orr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, ...
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This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.Less
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.
Mary Ann Smart
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520239951
- eISBN:
- 9780520939875
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520239951.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by ...
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When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Vincenzo Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Giuseppe Verdi baritone. The book tracks such effects through readings of operas by Daniel Auber, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, it finds resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. The book shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.Less
When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Vincenzo Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Giuseppe Verdi baritone. The book tracks such effects through readings of operas by Daniel Auber, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, it finds resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. The book shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.
Hikari Hori
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714542
- eISBN:
- 9781501709524
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714542.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist ...
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The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this book reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period. The book examines the ways in which Japanese film and visual culture responded to the issues of the day, producing adaptations of Hollywood genre films; admiring pioneering film theories from Russia and Britain; and examining the techniques of German animation and Disney films. Importantly, the veneration of the emperor’s portrait photograph is a key to understand and contextualize the era’s media-scape. It is crucial to note that domestic film manifested the inherent promiscuity and transnationality of its medium. Japanese films did play a familiar role as propaganda, but because of their heterotopic aspects, the medium also negated, opposed, and undermined the ideologically and nationalistically defined demands of the wartime state. For other visual cultural media, too, careful examination reveals they were a site of contradictions of the dominant totalitarian discourse. (192 words)Less
The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this book reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period. The book examines the ways in which Japanese film and visual culture responded to the issues of the day, producing adaptations of Hollywood genre films; admiring pioneering film theories from Russia and Britain; and examining the techniques of German animation and Disney films. Importantly, the veneration of the emperor’s portrait photograph is a key to understand and contextualize the era’s media-scape. It is crucial to note that domestic film manifested the inherent promiscuity and transnationality of its medium. Japanese films did play a familiar role as propaganda, but because of their heterotopic aspects, the medium also negated, opposed, and undermined the ideologically and nationalistically defined demands of the wartime state. For other visual cultural media, too, careful examination reveals they were a site of contradictions of the dominant totalitarian discourse. (192 words)
Glyn Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637782
- eISBN:
- 9780748670864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637782.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the ...
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Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the best efforts of the gay/queer directors who sent a flurry of melodramas into cinemas in the first years of the twenty-first century, attempting to revive the genre, it remains mostly elusive on the big screen. His film undertakes seriously a large number of substantial questions — about authorship, about the persistence or loss of melodrama as a genre, about the queerness of particular narrative devices, and so on. Far from Heaven is genuinely unique and idiosyncratic. It is perhaps this uniqueness that most clearly marks Far from Heaven as a truly independent film.Less
Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the best efforts of the gay/queer directors who sent a flurry of melodramas into cinemas in the first years of the twenty-first century, attempting to revive the genre, it remains mostly elusive on the big screen. His film undertakes seriously a large number of substantial questions — about authorship, about the persistence or loss of melodrama as a genre, about the queerness of particular narrative devices, and so on. Far from Heaven is genuinely unique and idiosyncratic. It is perhaps this uniqueness that most clearly marks Far from Heaven as a truly independent film.
Paul Turner
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122395
- eISBN:
- 9780191671401
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122395.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
‘A Slough of Despond in the wide well-tilled field of English Literature’. That was how one of the period’s best playwrights, Henry Arthur Jones, described Victorian drama up to 1891. For him plays ...
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‘A Slough of Despond in the wide well-tilled field of English Literature’. That was how one of the period’s best playwrights, Henry Arthur Jones, described Victorian drama up to 1891. For him plays were primarily pieces of literature, and ‘the worst and deadliest enemy of the English drama [was] — the English theatre’. For a history of literature this seems an appropriate criterion. All the plays mentioned in this chapter acted well enough to succeed in the theatre: the only question asked will be how well they read. To start with ‘theatrical rubbish’, a popular melodrama in the 1830s was Maria Marten; or, the Murder in the Red Barn. This anonymous dramatisation of a real-life murder illustrates two of the most pervasive influences on early Victorian drama: those of William Shakespeare and of an illiterate, working-class audience.Less
‘A Slough of Despond in the wide well-tilled field of English Literature’. That was how one of the period’s best playwrights, Henry Arthur Jones, described Victorian drama up to 1891. For him plays were primarily pieces of literature, and ‘the worst and deadliest enemy of the English drama [was] — the English theatre’. For a history of literature this seems an appropriate criterion. All the plays mentioned in this chapter acted well enough to succeed in the theatre: the only question asked will be how well they read. To start with ‘theatrical rubbish’, a popular melodrama in the 1830s was Maria Marten; or, the Murder in the Red Barn. This anonymous dramatisation of a real-life murder illustrates two of the most pervasive influences on early Victorian drama: those of William Shakespeare and of an illiterate, working-class audience.
Tom Ryan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496817983
- eISBN:
- 9781496822406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496817983.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his ...
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Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his reputation as one of the 20th century cinema’s great ironists. He did things his own way: for him, rules were there to be broken, whether they were the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or of studios insisting that characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, providing what Sirk used to call “emergency exits” for audiences.
This study of Sirk is the first comprehensive critical overview of the filmmaker’s entire career, examining the ’50s melodramas for which he has been rightly acclaimed – films such as All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life – and instructively looking beyond them at his earlier work, which includes musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies and westerns.
Offering fresh insights into all of these films and situating them in the culture of their times, the book also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including the author’s own conversations with the director. Furthermore, it undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical overview of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s to the present day.Less
Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his reputation as one of the 20th century cinema’s great ironists. He did things his own way: for him, rules were there to be broken, whether they were the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or of studios insisting that characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, providing what Sirk used to call “emergency exits” for audiences.
This study of Sirk is the first comprehensive critical overview of the filmmaker’s entire career, examining the ’50s melodramas for which he has been rightly acclaimed – films such as All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life – and instructively looking beyond them at his earlier work, which includes musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies and westerns.
Offering fresh insights into all of these films and situating them in the culture of their times, the book also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including the author’s own conversations with the director. Furthermore, it undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical overview of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s to the present day.
Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology ...
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All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology undergirding Buffalo Bill's and Turner's imperialistic fantasies. Nowhere is this energizing dismantling more evident than in the way Dion Boucicault uses the two plots of his “tragic mulatta” melodrama The Octoroon (1859) to dispute the frontier's “legacy of conquest.” This chapter thus argues, first ,that Boucicault employs the play's main plot to critique the theatrical practice of performing the frontier melodramatically, that is, as a “black-or-white” dialectic that reinforces the ideology of American imperialism, insofar as that ideology depended on a clear division between the white, civilized “self” and the racial, savage “other.” More important, by then focusing on the play's largely ignored subplot, centered on an Indian played by Boucicault, the chapter develops the idea that Boucicault emplots the frontier as a necessarily blurred, “black-and-white” set of performative practices that challenge the “black-or-white” opposition that defines both melodrama and imperialism.Less
All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology undergirding Buffalo Bill's and Turner's imperialistic fantasies. Nowhere is this energizing dismantling more evident than in the way Dion Boucicault uses the two plots of his “tragic mulatta” melodrama The Octoroon (1859) to dispute the frontier's “legacy of conquest.” This chapter thus argues, first ,that Boucicault employs the play's main plot to critique the theatrical practice of performing the frontier melodramatically, that is, as a “black-or-white” dialectic that reinforces the ideology of American imperialism, insofar as that ideology depended on a clear division between the white, civilized “self” and the racial, savage “other.” More important, by then focusing on the play's largely ignored subplot, centered on an Indian played by Boucicault, the chapter develops the idea that Boucicault emplots the frontier as a necessarily blurred, “black-and-white” set of performative practices that challenge the “black-or-white” opposition that defines both melodrama and imperialism.
Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place ...
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This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place where civilization conquered savagery and a fundamental wildness that critiqued America's imperialist ideology. These two visions, which had already become separated in the competing plots of The Octoroon, split completely apart in Daly's and Miller's plays. For Daly, the frontier was a site of memory that needed to be regulated theatrically, and thus he concretized a set of performative practices that systematically erased the “other” in support of imperialism—the same set of practices that helped Buffalo Bill mythologize the Wild West. Daly's memory of the frontier was, however, already just a memory of the frontier, for at the moment of its articulation, it was being challenged by Miller's play, which used what Miller referred to as the frontier's unsettled, “plastic” qualities to disrupt the script of an imperialism that consolidated its power by insisting on rigid social categories.Less
This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place where civilization conquered savagery and a fundamental wildness that critiqued America's imperialist ideology. These two visions, which had already become separated in the competing plots of The Octoroon, split completely apart in Daly's and Miller's plays. For Daly, the frontier was a site of memory that needed to be regulated theatrically, and thus he concretized a set of performative practices that systematically erased the “other” in support of imperialism—the same set of practices that helped Buffalo Bill mythologize the Wild West. Daly's memory of the frontier was, however, already just a memory of the frontier, for at the moment of its articulation, it was being challenged by Miller's play, which used what Miller referred to as the frontier's unsettled, “plastic” qualities to disrupt the script of an imperialism that consolidated its power by insisting on rigid social categories.
GILLIAN RUSSELL
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122630
- eISBN:
- 9780191671500
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122630.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime ...
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After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime establishment entailed fewer soldiers, sailors, and officers. Some provincial theatres were not able to recover from the patronage decline, while other metropolitan stages opted to re-enact some of the most significant battles through making use of nautical melodrama and other such elaborating forms. As such, the war and theatre sustained each other politically, culturally, and even ideologically, and this is viewed through several different aspects that include language. In this concluding chapter, the author focuses more on various implications of the reflexivity of soldiering and acting during the late Georgian period.Less
After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime establishment entailed fewer soldiers, sailors, and officers. Some provincial theatres were not able to recover from the patronage decline, while other metropolitan stages opted to re-enact some of the most significant battles through making use of nautical melodrama and other such elaborating forms. As such, the war and theatre sustained each other politically, culturally, and even ideologically, and this is viewed through several different aspects that include language. In this concluding chapter, the author focuses more on various implications of the reflexivity of soldiering and acting during the late Georgian period.
Sos Eltis
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121831
- eISBN:
- 9780191671340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121831.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Drama
In 1880, Oscar Wilde sent a copy of his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, to the American actor, Hermann Vezin, and wrote ingenuously that ‘I have just found out what a difficult craft playwriting ...
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In 1880, Oscar Wilde sent a copy of his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, to the American actor, Hermann Vezin, and wrote ingenuously that ‘I have just found out what a difficult craft playwriting is’. Such a statement does not excite any great expectations of merit in the play. Vera was Wilde's first dramatic work and has almost universally been condemned as a youthful mistake, an apprentice piece without intrinsic interest or merit. The play was widely viewed as an unrealistic and highly conventional melodrama. Cautiousness and ambivalence are reflected in Vera, where Wilde attempted to present a more complex picture of Russian revolutionary politics than popular opinion allowed, while taking care not to alienate his audience with overtly radical sentiments. Wilde's Vera Sabouroff (named Vera Katinski in the 1880 edition) is an idealist who embraces assassination as a weapon against injustice and tyranny.Less
In 1880, Oscar Wilde sent a copy of his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, to the American actor, Hermann Vezin, and wrote ingenuously that ‘I have just found out what a difficult craft playwriting is’. Such a statement does not excite any great expectations of merit in the play. Vera was Wilde's first dramatic work and has almost universally been condemned as a youthful mistake, an apprentice piece without intrinsic interest or merit. The play was widely viewed as an unrealistic and highly conventional melodrama. Cautiousness and ambivalence are reflected in Vera, where Wilde attempted to present a more complex picture of Russian revolutionary politics than popular opinion allowed, while taking care not to alienate his audience with overtly radical sentiments. Wilde's Vera Sabouroff (named Vera Katinski in the 1880 edition) is an idealist who embraces assassination as a weapon against injustice and tyranny.
Sos Eltis
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121831
- eISBN:
- 9780191671340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121831.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Drama
Lady Windermere's Fan ends with the triumph of the dandyesque Mrs. Erlynne; A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde's second successful ...
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Lady Windermere's Fan ends with the triumph of the dandyesque Mrs. Erlynne; A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde's second successful society drama, first performed only fourteen months later, ends with the joint triumph of an evangelical puritan and a reformed magdalen, while the dandyesque Lord Illingworth is discarded as ‘a man of no importance’. The plot of the latter play seems to lack all the moral complexity of its predecessor. A Woman of No Importance appears to be a conventional melodrama of seduction and judgement, a play whose only originality is to plead for greater leniency for repentant fallen women and harsher punishment for fallen men. Yet, in spite of its conventional appearance, A Woman of No Importance is as radical a drama as its predecessors.Less
Lady Windermere's Fan ends with the triumph of the dandyesque Mrs. Erlynne; A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde's second successful society drama, first performed only fourteen months later, ends with the joint triumph of an evangelical puritan and a reformed magdalen, while the dandyesque Lord Illingworth is discarded as ‘a man of no importance’. The plot of the latter play seems to lack all the moral complexity of its predecessor. A Woman of No Importance appears to be a conventional melodrama of seduction and judgement, a play whose only originality is to plead for greater leniency for repentant fallen women and harsher punishment for fallen men. Yet, in spite of its conventional appearance, A Woman of No Importance is as radical a drama as its predecessors.
Barry Forshaw
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781906733650
- eISBN:
- 9781800342071
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906733650.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's bestseller, was a game-changer in the fields of both horror and crime cinema. FBI trainee Clarice Starling was a new kind of heroine, ...
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The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's bestseller, was a game-changer in the fields of both horror and crime cinema. FBI trainee Clarice Starling was a new kind of heroine, vulnerable, intuitive, and in a deeply unhealthy relationship with her monstrous helper/opponent, the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Jonathan Demme's film skillfully appropriated the tropes of police procedural, gothic melodrama and contemporary horror to produce something entirely new. The resulting film was both critically acclaimed and massively popular, and went on to have an enormous influence on 1990s genre cinema. This book closely examines the factors that contributed to the film's impact, including the revelatory performances of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles.Less
The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's bestseller, was a game-changer in the fields of both horror and crime cinema. FBI trainee Clarice Starling was a new kind of heroine, vulnerable, intuitive, and in a deeply unhealthy relationship with her monstrous helper/opponent, the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Jonathan Demme's film skillfully appropriated the tropes of police procedural, gothic melodrama and contemporary horror to produce something entirely new. The resulting film was both critically acclaimed and massively popular, and went on to have an enormous influence on 1990s genre cinema. This book closely examines the factors that contributed to the film's impact, including the revelatory performances of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles.
Torben Grodal
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159834
- eISBN:
- 9780191673719
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159834.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The ...
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This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The eight prototypical genre-patterns in visual fiction, based on their emotional effect on the viewer, are: lyricism, canonical narratives, obsessional fictions, melodramas, horror fictions, schizoid fictions, comic fictions, and metafictions.Less
This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The eight prototypical genre-patterns in visual fiction, based on their emotional effect on the viewer, are: lyricism, canonical narratives, obsessional fictions, melodramas, horror fictions, schizoid fictions, comic fictions, and metafictions.
Peter Kivy
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159216
- eISBN:
- 9780191673566
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159216.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter aims to show the roots of movie music in the tradition of Western art music for the stage and the consideration of the specific musical practice music in the movies in this chapter. The ...
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This chapter aims to show the roots of movie music in the tradition of Western art music for the stage and the consideration of the specific musical practice music in the movies in this chapter. The chapter's stand makes another contribution to this domain of study as it poses a question on the convergence of the debate in film studies concerning the functions of sound and music in film with the consideration of the history of musical forms. The chapter's question is of particular interest to film scholars for two reasons: it demonstrates how conceptual questions may arise out of and are interrelated with empirical ones and it sheds new light on the debates around melodrama in film studies. It also tackles the chapter's conjecture on the addition of synchronous sound, filmic representation which lacks the expressive fullness of live theatrical performance. According to this chapter, music is the essence of modern cinema.Less
This chapter aims to show the roots of movie music in the tradition of Western art music for the stage and the consideration of the specific musical practice music in the movies in this chapter. The chapter's stand makes another contribution to this domain of study as it poses a question on the convergence of the debate in film studies concerning the functions of sound and music in film with the consideration of the history of musical forms. The chapter's question is of particular interest to film scholars for two reasons: it demonstrates how conceptual questions may arise out of and are interrelated with empirical ones and it sheds new light on the debates around melodrama in film studies. It also tackles the chapter's conjecture on the addition of synchronous sound, filmic representation which lacks the expressive fullness of live theatrical performance. According to this chapter, music is the essence of modern cinema.
Torben Grodal
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195371314
- eISBN:
- 9780199870585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371314.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general ...
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This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general brain mechanisms by which superior goals temporarily modify reactions of unpleasure to support coping in the service of goals, as in action and adventure films. Second, it argues that such general mechanisms cannot explain films with negative endings. It argues that viewer preferences for such stories may be explained as adaptations created during the evolutionary process. Third, it argues that there are two adaptive mechanisms at play: a general mechanism that makes negative events fascinating to support information about negative events (enhancing learning), and a cluster of more specific adaptations that support bonding—pair-bonding, male bonding, and tribal bonding—based on rituals of mourning. Rituals of mourning are often linked to scenes that elicit awe and submission to some higher power (fate or divine forces); the chapter discusses the biological-evolutionary underpinnings of such emotions and behaviors and analyzes Saving Private Ryan, The Last of the Mohicans, Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth, and others, in this light.Less
This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general brain mechanisms by which superior goals temporarily modify reactions of unpleasure to support coping in the service of goals, as in action and adventure films. Second, it argues that such general mechanisms cannot explain films with negative endings. It argues that viewer preferences for such stories may be explained as adaptations created during the evolutionary process. Third, it argues that there are two adaptive mechanisms at play: a general mechanism that makes negative events fascinating to support information about negative events (enhancing learning), and a cluster of more specific adaptations that support bonding—pair-bonding, male bonding, and tribal bonding—based on rituals of mourning. Rituals of mourning are often linked to scenes that elicit awe and submission to some higher power (fate or divine forces); the chapter discusses the biological-evolutionary underpinnings of such emotions and behaviors and analyzes Saving Private Ryan, The Last of the Mohicans, Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth, and others, in this light.
