The Blossom and the Bole: Narrative and Visual Spectacle in Early Film Melodrama

Abstract

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the or bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? -Among School Children, W. B. Yeats Efforts to trace both the parentage and defining features of early film melodrama often crystallize around two distinct lines of descent, the dramatic narrative of theatrical performance and the visual spectacle derived from the elaboration of cinematic elements.' The first line coincides with arguments for historical teleology, locating the melodrama's specificity in its inheritance of a precisely defined theatrical tradition (for our purposes, the bole or trunk tradition), while the second is rooted in more material systems of codification that became associated with the genre as a cinematic form (obviously, the blossom part of the equation). Often, these tendencies are solidified into opposing categories, the first representing direct filiation from the nineteenth-century stage (in terms of a narrative tradition that designates plot functions, patterns of action, and certain repeated character types, for example), while the second concentrates on the heightened symbolization and visual display resulting from the amplification of visual (and auditory/musical) figures and motifs. However, as suggested by both my title and the stanza of Among School Children from which it is derived, the intricate and complex imbrication of these two tendencies is at the base of melodrama's specificity. As with all dichotomies, it is the very interconnection of only apparently contrasting elements that defines the form and in fact makes the perceived entities inseparable. In one way, then, film melodrama can be seen to achieve its effects from the perpetual dialectic of a performance of its cinematic tropes and the atavistic traces of its historical roots as a form.2 It is no accident that these reversible and intersecting categories of melodramatic definition find their most illustrative common ground in the image of