Film Melodrama Research Articles

Book Review: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television

Book Review: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television

Change of the Home: Investigation of Melodrama Film Themed on Chinese Family

Change of the Home: Investigation of Melodrama Film Themed on Chinese Family

Beyond Sadness: The Multi-Emotional Trajectory of Melodrama

In this article we investigate the astonishing variety of emotions that a brief scene in a film melodrama can evoke. We thus take issue with the reductive view of melodrama that limits this genre’s emotional effects to sadness, pity, and tear-jerking potential. Through a close analysis of a melodramatic standard situation—a “news of death” scene—in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams (2003), we reveal the emotional dynamics and the high density as well as rich variety of affective phenomena likely to be experienced during the trajectory of this two-minute scene.

Modern Women, Modern Egypt

This article places existing discourses on Egyptian cinema, revolution, and global feminism in conversation with theories of film melodrama. The text examines the tradition of Egyptian melodrama as a site for analogizing women's liberation with national modernization in the wake of the 1952 Revolution—an analogy facilitated by the careful manipulation of melodramatic vernaculars of emotionality, and the endurance of affective cultural memory. In this context melodrama functions as a specific critical tool for understanding how popular film culture then and now organizes people politically and affectively, on- and offscreen. The article further investigates the “method of contradictions” that seems necessary to think critically about comparative melodrama at three levels of discourse: melodrama in general; the Egyptian melodramatic tradition specifically; and within melodramatic scholarship that tends to resemble its object of study.

Christian Petzold’s melodramas: from unknown woman to reciprocal unknownness in Phoenix, Wolfsburg, and Barbara

Stanley Cavell’s theory of film melodrama is used for Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, Wolfsburg, and Barbara. Key for Cavell’s understanding of classical Hollywood melodrama is his notion of the ‘unknown woman.’ Remarkably, Petzold’s more contemporary melodramas feature unknown, i.e. unacknowledged, desires not only of female heroines but also of male protagonists. In Petzold’s melodramas, male and female unknownness is reciprocated: the men and women are unable to have a romantic relationship based on mutual acknowledgment. Petzold shows how the private lives of his protagonists are constricted by public, social circumstances. These restrictions do not relate to what Cavell calls ‘front-page moral dilemmas’ but rather to ways in which, as Cavell points out, the everydayness of the protagonists’ lives is determined by their lack of being at home. In Petzold’s melodramas, the protagonists find themselves in a place-in-between-places, which cannot harbor mutual trust, mutual acknowledgment. Typically, the three films feature the negotiation by the protagonists of the significance of public artifacts for their personal lives. These are key scenes determining the moral relevance of melodramas in the everyday appearance of social confinement away from front-page moral dilemmas.

Zhang Yimou's Coming Home: a depoliticized melodrama adapted from a Scar Literature novel

Zhang Yimou's 2014 blockbuster Coming Home (Guilai) displays many characteristics of the film melodrama genre, such as, hyperbole and excessive emotionalism. It also engages with areas of unusual human suffering and ethical encounters during specific historical and political contexts such as the socialist revolutions of Maoist China. However, one particularly stereotypical feature of melodrama – extravagant and intense moral polarization – is a notable omission in this movie. This essay contends that Coming Home exhibits the continuing attitudes of Zhang Yimou toward historical and political sensitive topics and themes, which are best exemplified by his filmic adaptations of famous writers’ novels. In his adaptation of the American based Chinese writer Yan Geling's novel, The Criminal Lu Yanshi (Lufan Yanshi 2011) into Coming Home, a melodramatic metamorphosis is created in order to further the ‘depoliticizing’ and ‘commercializing’ trend in his filmic world. This trend combines exaggerated emotions and rhetorical profligacies; however, it is devoid of critical moral judgments, and is thus accepted and welcomed by both the public and political conservatives.

‘Io posso offrirle soltanto l'immenso calore del mio affetto’: Masculinity in Italian Cinematic Melodrama

This article addresses the representation of masculinity in Italian film melodrama of the 1950s. The introduction outlines the reasons for which Italian film studies has tended to focus above all on female characters in this popular genre. The subsequent argument is structured in four parts. In the first, I offer a typology of the various masculinities employed within these films. In the second, I examine the relationship between the dominant models of masculinity in the melodrama and socio-political changes in gender dynamics that took place in Italy during the 1940s and 1950s. In relation to two examples (Traviata ’53, L'angelo bianco), in the third part I analyse the ways in which melodrama, in its representation of a masculinity in crisis that is opposed to fascist virility, engages with emasculation. The conclusive fourth section offers a brief reflection on the relationship between male desire and the melodramatic trope of the suffering heroine.

The portrayal of family in early Chinese melodrama films

This article establishes melodrama as a contextually and culturally conditioned subject, by drawing attention to Chinese melodrama films produced during the 1920s and 1930s – a period in which moral, social and political issues seemed to be most urgent and problematic. It begins with a clarification of the term ‘melodrama’ and then focuses on cinematic constructions of the family within Chinese melodrama films. Derived from the notion of Chinese family that is firmly anchored in two relationships – the individual and the family, as well as the nation and the family – the article examines how melodrama films of this period engaged with issues related to China's modernisation, such as changing family relationships and the inevitable conflict between China and Western powers. The article concludes by suggesting that the popularity of melodrama films in the 1920s and 1930s marked the growing maturity of China's narrative cinema, and therefore challenges an assumption that early Chinese cinema completely conformed to the established pattern of Hollywood cinema.

Cinematography in Motherhood: a Hong Kong film adaptation of Ghosts

<p>This is a study of a Hong Kong Chinese film adaptation of <em>Ghosts</em> made in 1960. It deals with processes of cross-cultural and cross-media adaptation, and probes issues of how stage techniques are turned into cinematographic devices. Ibsen’s plays, except <em>Ghosts</em>, have been adapted numerous times for the Chinese stage and screen in Hong Kong and China. Unlike in China, the reception of Ibsen in Hong Kong is not meant for political purposes. In most Hong Kong adaptations, Ibsen is valued for the purpose of theatrical experimentation. Among the stage adaptations, <em>A Doll’s House</em> and <em>The Master Builder</em> are the most popular. However, there was a film adaptation of <em>Ghosts</em> in 1960, which has never been discussed in Ibsen scholarship. In this adaptation, Director Tso Kea borrowed the plot from <em>Ghosts</em> and made a perfect Chinese melodrama film highlighting the Chinese emotions and relations in a wealthy family that undergoes a crisis. In traditional Chinese drama, there is the lack of psychological rendering in characterization and characters act according to moral considerations. In Tso Kea’s film, the portrayal of the mother provides a new sense of characterization by combining Mrs Alving with the traditional Chinese mother figure. The borrowing from Ibsen makes it possible for the Chinese film to create a character with emotional and psychological complexities. Images from the film are selected as illustration in the article.</p>

Other scenes: space and counterpoint in Cold War Korean melodrama

This essay discusses how cinematic counterpoint functions spatially in South Korean film melodrama, as well as in some North Korean productions. Drawing from canonical studies of melodrama, including Thomas Elsaesser's work, it argues that focusing on mise-en-scène and sound in readings of film melodrama can bring to light the ambivalences, or contrapuntal connections, between its moods and its narrative and thematic discourses. It understands film melodrama as a self-consciously post-psychoanalytic mode that stages psychic conflict in and through spatial configurations. Employing three spatial figures – topos, screen and cosmos – it attempts to understand how such conscious staging of psychic conflicts leads film melodrama to visualize contrapuntal spaces that include both spatial expressions of the dominant themes of the narrative and undercurrents of invisible and unspoken traumas and desires.

Suffering without Meaning

Suffering without Meaning Kyle Stevens (bio) Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects by Augustín Zarzosa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 184 Pages. $80.00 hardback, $79.99 ebook. Augustín Zarzosa’s Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects participates in an ongoing rethinking of melodrama pioneered most prominently by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. This view maintains that melodrama ought to be conceived as a mode rather than a genre—indeed, as the dominant narrative mode. As such, it should neither be opposed to realism nor linked to objectionably normative levels of emotionalism and excess. Gledhill’s and Williams’ theories of melodramatic pleasure and spectatorship occur largely within a framework shaped by psychoanalytic film theory, and Zarzosa’s book is timely, even fresh, for developing new tools for thinking about melodrama for our posttherapeutic age. This is not to say that his methods are freewheeling. Zarzosa translates the view of melodrama-as-mode into Deleuzian idiom, which, given the proliferation of interest in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, is a contribution that many will surely welcome. Indeed, Zarzosa appeals not just to Deleuze but also to a range of key central European philosophers to clarify his interventions. Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that Brian Price recently included Refiguring Melodrama in a list of works that indicate “the theoretical new wave” in film and [End Page 298] television scholarship, a wave that is recognizable for its imbrication with continental philosophy or, at least, with the writings of a coterie of continental philosophers who never forget that thinking deeply about the image has always been important to philosophy.1 (One can trace a direct line from Saint Augustine’s thoughts on the image in Confessions to Deleuze’s, after all.) This sort of theoretical work is often associated with a certain diffuseness of thought, or a willingness to accept vagueness and contradiction that reveals itself in prose that replicates such vagueness even as it purports to clarify. Zarzosa’s style, however, is clear and direct. He has a particular talent for condensing complex arguments, even traditions of argument, into accessible, efficient, and quotable nuggets. That said, Peter Brooks’s seminal work on melodrama functions as Zarzosa’s primary target throughout the book’s chapters, and it would be nice to see Zarzosa engage at a deeper level with more recent scholarship specific to cinematic and televisual melodrama. Zarzosa seeks to rescue the notion of melodrama from a Brooksian history in which it might, according to him, fall prey to charges of vagueness and reification, particularly if we do not keep in mind that melodrama both dramatizes experience and is the model that results from this dramatization. A mode, for Zarzosa, is more basic to the dramatization of human experience than a genre. In his picture, melodrama is—to borrow a logic from Cornelius Castoriadis—constitutive of and constituted by reality.2 With this in mind, Zarzosa offers an inversion of how we typically think about melodrama, arguing that it is not a model of reality but a strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Melodrama seems to offer up suffering as an effect of systems of moral ideas, whereas in fact, he claims, it defines those ideas. Moreover, as a dominant form, melodrama has a privileged position to shape how we think about and test these problems. Zarzosa makes this case by analyzing a pleasing array of examples including movies, such as Home from the Hill, The Piano, [Safe], and Year of the Dog, and television series, such as Torchwood and Lost. Although this presents a diversity of budgets and media, there is not an enormous variety of emotional registers within this selection. That is, the stories of these texts could be seen to fit within a generic perspective of melodrama. This move left me to wonder whether the melodramatic mode encompasses categories that are arguably also modes (e.g., the farce or the tragedy) or whether the melodrama is one mode among many. Across his analyses, Zarzosa’s overarching aim is to flesh out “the concept of melodrama as an elastic system that redistributes the visibility of...

Modern Argentine Masculinities ed. by Carolina Rocha (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Argentine Masculinities ed. by Carolina Rocha Patrick O’Connor Rocha, Carolina, ed. Modern Argentine Masculinities. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. 299 pp. Carolina Rocha’s sociological approach to literature and film has been immensely productive for her: in the last seven years she has published her own book Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Palgrave, 2012), and no less than five edited or co-edited anthologies. This most recent collection definitely shows her own shaping hand. Less obviously, it is an intervention on the conflictive field of Argentine identity. The book’s introduction argues that the question of Argentine masculinity is relatively untouched territory, perhaps with the exception of Eduardo Archetti’s 1999 book on early twentieth-century masculine models in tango, soccer, and polo. Rocha cites heavily Australian sociologist R. W. Connell’s work on masculinities [End Page 608] since 1995, and seems to have encouraged her other contributors to do so, in part because Connell’s work emphasizes plural and conflictive ideas about manhood within “hegemonic masculinities,” but also, one suspects, because Connell’s work argues that traditional masculinity has undergone further shifts in the last thirty years due to neoliberalism. None of the sixteen essays is bad, and some are terrific. Of the ones covering the early twentieth century, Pablo Ben’s brief piece questioning the “Mediterranean” model of homo/hetero relations is perhaps the liveliest: through examination of court cases, bathroom graffiti, and dirty poems of the pre-1920 world, Ben calls into question the idea that active and passive roles in gay sex would have defined the active male as masculine. Most of the other authors of these essays take their material from loftier cultural productions. And yet not too lofty: as the essays march from nineteenth-century statesman poets through Arlt, then Quiroga, then Peronist film melodramas, the reader may notice the absence of Florida and the Sur intellectuals, from Rojas and Girondo, through Borges and Bioy, through Cortázar and Bianco. Of course, one can’t cover everybody, but the book’s introduction gives space to those topics that Rocha feels have been covered well by others—work on the compadrito or the tango singer—with the result that all upper-class masculinities disappear in these chapters. Rocha thus seems to be equating Argentine identity with mid-century Peronism, the working-class movement brought into the middle class but devastated by the military junta of the seventies and by deindustrialization; it is this “modern” Argentine masculinity that the book as a whole focuses on. Within this self-limitation, the essays cover ground not always part of an Argentine cultural historian’s purview. Currie Thompson notes the irony that the cult of sacrificial heroism in military film melodramas was invoked but not actually practiced by the various military governments that funded these propaganda films; correspondingly, Erin Redmond reads Puig’s thoroughly ironic take on Perón-era machismo in La traición de Rita Hayworth. Rocha mentioned in her introduction the next lacuna in the book’s range: she remarked that gender roles loosened in the sixties except among Argentina’s guerrilla groups, which “followed Peronism’s traditional gender-role doctrine” (7); the chapters leap over these years. In any case, Rocha’s greatest interest is in Argentina’s neoliberal turn, imposed by Menem and only fitfully undone by the Kirchners. Masculinity in the age of neoliberalism tends to combine the reality (or identity) of the loser, and the practices (or the identity) of the criminal. Nicolas Poppe studies the delinquents of disaffected youth culture in the new Argentine cinema: aggrieved masculinity results from the loss of working class options and values, and is performed within the gangs of Pizza, birra, faso (among other films). Viviana Plotnik’s essay reads father-son conflicts in three films where the “loser” son rejects the successful upper-class father who has adopted neoliberal internationalism; the sons accept the loser identity as a more authentic Argentinity than the father’s model. Assen Kokalov returns to criminality, in his reading of Piglia’s Plata quemada and Piñeyro’s film adaptation, marking the homophobia of the novel’s 1963 moment and the questioning of it in the 1990s novel...

Screen Сodes of Moscow

Examines the melodrama film “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” by film director Vladimir Menshov which is one of the most significant and successful Soviet movies of the 1970s. The author analyses the imagery of the film that vicariously represents the image of metropolis using a method of formula analysis proposed by John G. Cawelti. It is assumed that there is a sustainable melodrama structure that was borrowed from the literary texts connected to the Russian capital. Menshov’s picture was chosen as a bright example of “Moscow melodrama” representing Moscow as the city of trial and exploring the key concept Moscow Home.

‘How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?’ The Guest and Die Wonderwerker

Comparing and contrasting two film versions of Eugène Marais's life by means of close analysis, this article explores the relationship between film and history, where history includes both that of the film-makers and that of the referential world they seek to represent, in this case specifically history as it is embodied in the enigmatic figure of Eugène Marais – naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict – whose protean nature enables individual film-makers to appropriate those aspects of his life and persona that mesh most creatively with their own creative and ideological sensibilities. Thus the contexts out of which Ross Devenish and Katinka Heyns develop their respective projects are examined, taking note of the key roles of their collaborators, writers Athol Fugard and Chris Barnard. Central to the discussion are the choices and effects of casting (especially drawing on the work of Jean-Louis Comolli's idea of the ‘body too much’), genre (the art film and domestic melodrama) and formal aesthetic (realism, formalism and heritage cinema). The shifting forms of representation of Marais speak to the multiplicities of his own identity, the shifting forms of his own biography.

I Think, I Am Mad. Derrida, Gaslight and the Irony of the Cogito

At the climax of George Cukor's Gaslight, a film melodrama from 1944, the female protagonist utters the phrase ‘I am mad’ which Stanley Cavell takes to reveal her Cogito. As such, the formula seems to be a perfect exemplification of Derrida's central point in Cogito and the History of Madness, namely that there is ‘a value and a meaning of the Cogito’, detectable in Descartes's Mediations, which welcomes madness as its genuine and necessary possibility. But how can we conceive of the ‘I think’—the supreme principle of transcendental philosophy constituting the objectivity of cognition and experience—as embracing unreason as its own condition? This article attempts to highlight a quasi-transcendental interpretation of Derrida's answer to this question: deconstruction reveals a certain irony at the core of the primary text of transcendental philosophy. I argue that the formula ‘I am mad’ contains the decisive key to the argument: the irony of the Cogito consists in the fact of its double transcendental functioning—a transcendental function in the ‘middle’ form and a transcendental function in the active form.

Stepping into the Newsreel: Melodrama and Mobilization in Colonial Korean Film

As part of a project on melodrama in Korean film, this article examines the ways that films from the late colonial period (1937–1945) blurred the traditional boundaries between newsreel documentary and fictional features in an attempt to suture the film spectator into the cinematic representation of what Andre Bazin called, in relation to the newsreel, “total history.” Drawing on theoretical discussions of sentimentality and melodrama, the article compares the earlier fictional film to the wartime film Korea in order to trace how melodrama was transformed through its incorporation into political propaganda. It discusses how narrative cinematic techniques such as point of view, shot/reverse shot, and crosscutting allowed Korea Strait to draw the viewer into spectacles of mobilization that were formerly represented through the more anonymous mass medium of the newsreel documentary. The remainder of the article touches on the films and , discussing how the interpretive excess enabled by melodrama remained visible after the hybridization of fictional film and newsreel, primarily through the disjuncture between the films’ melodrama narratives and their spectacles of mobilization. In conclusion, the article suggests that the gradual elimination of any narrative excess in 1940s films reflects an apprehension about the multiple codings, identifications, and interpretations enabled through the combination of melodrama narrative with political propaganda.

Choosing Yiddish: new frontiers of language and culture

Hip Hop, a nineteenth century Slasher, obscure writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture. Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of scholarship in academia today. Organized into six thematic rubrics, Choosing demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push boundaries with vigorous disciplinary exchange. Writing on the Edge focuses on the realm of belles lettres; Yiddish and the City spans the urban centers of Paris, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Montreal; Yiddish Goes Pop explores the mediating role of between artistic vision and popular culture; Yiddish Comes to America focuses on the history and growth of in the United States; Yiddish Encounters showcases interactions between and Hebrew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Hear and Now explores the aural dimension of in contemporary settings. Along the way, contributors consider famed and lesser-known writers, films, and hip-hop, as well as historical studies on the press, film melodrama, Hasidic folkways, and culture in Israel. Venerable scholars introduce each rubric, creating additional dialogue between newer and more established voices in the field. The international contributors prove that the language-far from dying-is fostering exciting new directions of academic and popular discourse, rooted in the field's historic focus on interdisciplinary research. Students and teachers of studies will enjoy this innovative collection.

Television: Horror’s ‘original’ home

Abstract Unquestionably, horror has always existed on television. Nevertheless, a number of scholars and critics have argued that the horror genre belongs properly to film, that television is too much a product of the industrial conditions that both regulate and create it to achieve ‘true’ horror. Not only is this position no longer viable (if it ever was) but it is based upon an assumption about what the horror genre is or should be. If we consider modern horror in relation to the Gothic novel and its immediate counterparts the stage melodrama and the sensation novel/drama, it soon becomes clear that television has a special and perhaps unique affinity with the genre as cultural and literary product. Television can do what film cannot, through its historical and contemporary strengths in the deployment of melodrama, particularly in serialized form. Through seriality, television horror reveals the melodramatic nature of the genre. Moreover, it (re)creates that original horror in a way that speaks, perhaps, to some of horror’s less appreciated pleasures and less acknowledged audiences. This article examines this claim through a sketch of Gothic and melodramatic traditions, tracing these through sensation novels, early film melodrama and ultimately contemporary serialized genre television, particularly the CW series Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. In both series, the Gothic elements are manifested in the show’s manipulation of any and all elements of fantastic lore alongside plentiful gore and intense family drama.

Cold Love: Silence and Otherness on the Northern Frontier

Silence, Otherness, and Frontier RomanceHistorically, fictional narratives have played an important role in establishing frontier as geocultural imaginary for articulating essence of identity, manhood in particular, as hard-won triumph over inhospitable landscapes, harsh climates, and resistance of native people. As national Sinnbild and ideological concept, frontier represents an energetic, expansive vision of American triumphalism (Nagel 82), with highly romantic language of conquest and desire that mimics cultural norms for courtship and gender behavior. In love stories set in WestAnnie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain being notable exception-romantic love is typically ingrained in cultural discourses that represent heterosexual love as universally meaningful part of masculine quest for self-realization and fulfillment of desire. Whether seen as myth, history, or social reality, the cross-cultural encounters and conflicts engendered by 'frontier' are still with us (Limerick 83), and remain surprisingly stable elements in contemporary literature in frontier settings.The geocultural imaginary of frontier as mythical space of violence, destiny, and character building sustains countless westerns and romantic novels. Even contemporary film melodramas like Dances with Wolves (Dir. Kevin Costner) and its futuristic retelling Avatar (Dir. James Cameron) pursue central motif of frontiersman crossing into primitive territory and ultimately stepping into his true masculine self through romantic encounter with woman from other side. In both film and popular fiction, frontier, whether it be somewhere west of Mississippi, in future space, or in Alaska, offers a way of imagining self in boundary situation (Tompkins 14), that is, in liminal, ambivalent place which simultaneously evokes fears and desires of losing oneself to or in other. In classic frontier love story, Western hero's struggle between fear and desire of merging with other is often resolved by singling out woman he desires as different from her own people (as in Dances with Wolves where John Dunbar's sweetheart is white woman, who was taken captive by Lakota as toddler, and whose speedy recovery of her English language and manners in Dunbar's company helps to distance her from doomed Lakota), or by Western hero going native and becoming leader among natives (as in Avatar where paraplegic ex-marine Jake in end transforms into an able-bodied, fully acculturated avatar). Both options fulfill criteria of genre of wilderness romances, which according to literary critic M. H. Abrams project distinctively male imaginings of escape to an unspoiled natural environment, free of... an effete, woman-dominated civilization, in which protagonist undergoes test of his character and virility (99).The effect of this narrative tradition is twofold: one, marginalization and silencing of other in wilderness romance helps to authorize [masculine, Western] self, recognize its priority, fulfill its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its references and still its fractured gaze (Bhabha 98); two, supposed alterity of indigenous other legitimizes romanticization of native women as subservient, sexually compliant bridges between colonizer and native culture.The ethnocentric perspectives that are historically embedded in seeing frontier as natural stage for manhood to conquer unknown (land, woman) continue to reinforce stereotypes about gender and ethnicity. In literature featuring romantic couple as willing native woman and virile white frontiersman, as in Kathryn Harrison's The Seal Wife (2002), colonial desire for land and control through knowledge of natural environment is narrated in parallel to desire for native woman's body and quest to dismantle her mysterious otherness. …

Falling, Looking, Caring: Red Road as Melodrama

This article examines Red Road as a melodrama and woman's film. It argues that the film is traductively real and melodramatic, and that conceiving the film in melodramatic terms is contrary to the way in which it has been defined in public discourses and academic analysis. Red Road is film melodrama in a number of related ways, via: tropes of narrative and character; a tendency to look back, work through and act out in a melancholy and melodramatic fashion; an emphasis on familialism and redemption; and the nomination of its central character as a woman and mother. Red Road is a maternal text in familiar and complex ways – for example, in the way in which CCTV is inscribed with guardianship and care, and also via Jackie's presentation as a sexual and narrative riddle and other-worldly figure. Jackie's sphinx-like status, the paper argues, connects with Red Road's multiple and twilight qualities, and this is supported by the film's affective elements, including its treatment of the Red Road flats. This treatment helps to engender Red Road's qualities not only of redemption and rebirth, but also of memory and revision.