Melodramatic Form Research Articles

‘It envelops’: elementality and form in nineteenth-century Scottish melodrama

ABSTRACT This article addresses the apparent paradox between the critical emphasis on melodrama’s mobility across place, time and media, and its founding in material, embodied formal components: the combination of music, drama, and theatre in the nineteenth century. This article finds that an early melodrama, Isaac Pocock’s 1818 stage adaptation of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, used elemental qualities to establish its melodramatic form. Drawing on theories of the elements and of theatre by Timothy Morton and Matthew Wagner, and on contemporary geological writing by James Hutton, the first section formulates the historical and theoretical relationships that exist between the theatre, geology and the elements. The second and third sections examine how the formal characteristics of Pocock’s play – set, song and characterisation – enact the elements’ strange enveloping movements. The play’s elemental form, I discover, facilitates the mediation of its characters and concepts beyond its own borders, into wider popular culture. But, at other moments, the play insists on marking the contours of its own aesthetic and material bounds. I argue that this dramaturgy, that trembles between elementality and human embodiment, sustains melodrama’s transmediality, transtemporality, and its endurance over time.

Пьесы Б. Джейкобс-Дженкинса: традиции мелодрамы и этнически нейтральный кастинг

The article concerns with the plays An Octoroon and Gloria by contemporary American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The dramaturgy of one of the most notable authors, writing for the US theatre at the present time, is thematically varied; besides, it includes both Jacobs-Jenkins’ original works (e.g., Gloria, 2015) and his adaptations of plays by other authors and/or other epochs. Among the adaptations there is the most famous of Jacobs-Jenkins' plays so far — An Octoroon (2014), which is the author's treatment of 19th century melodrama The Octoroon (1859) by Anglo-Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault. Working with the play of the 19th century, which reveals the problems of slavery in a simplified, melodramatic form, allows the contemporary playwright to actualize the consideration of racial conflicts and to reconstruct/deconstruct the generic model of melodrama. The author of the article draws attention to the reception of the minstrel tradition in the play An Octoroon, both at the level of interaction of D. Boucicault's work with American minstrel show coinciding with it in time, and in connection with the comprehension and overcoming of the “minstrel archetypes” by B. Jacobs-Jenkins. The question of casting is very important to Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright puts forward his requirements for ethnic conformity between actors and roles in his plays, and this brings together An Octoroon and Gloria, though the works are diverse in genre and subject matter. The cultural context for the works of the American playwright is, first of all, the drama and theater of the United States throughout their development. For further studies it also seems interesting to consider B. Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays in connection with folklore traditions or, e.g., in the context of sacred genres.

Variant Rebellions: Psychic Compromise in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack

Abstract: This paper explores certain fundamental aspects of melodramatic theatricality used to depict the colonial world on the London stage at the turn of the century. As melodrama was a hybrid of comedy, tragedy, pantomime, and sentimentalism, the juxtaposition of a variety of these compositional strategies opens up the interpretation of John Fawcett's successful pantomime Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and its later 1830 melodramatic adaptation by William Murray. As examples of racial melodramas, these plays disrupt the otherwise conventional moral polarity typical of melodramas by situating archetypal melodramatic characters in a morally ambiguous, theatrically conceptualized colonial space. Stage apparatus and performance were but two aspects of melodramatic theatricality that were deployed to recreate the colonial world. The basic argument in this paper explores the contrary pulls within these plays. On the one hand, the spectators' cathartic celebration of the rebels' expulsion at the end of the play entrenches their identification with British imperial ideology by arousing collective feelings of patriotism, thus consolidating the national identity of spectators as British imperialists. On the other hand, the visuals and the music that depict the colonial social order of a slave colony and the heroic feats of the rebel slave opened up a space of possible critique of British imperial ventures. These contrary drives within the melodramatic form are reformulated in terms of a "psychic compromise" in which the act of rebellion is endorsed for its dramatic potential to arouse fantasies of heroic revolt but is ultimately compromised in a larger ideological frame that celebrates the empire and the reconstitution of colonial order. This paper offers insights into the popular cultural perception of the empire, obliquely illuminating the larger historical processes of empire building during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Backwards into the Future: Melodramatic Affect and the Vicissitudes of Time in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017)

This article interrogates the reworking of melodramatic form in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), exploring how the film’s innovative structures are founded upon—and draw us toward —familiar orientations and erasures. While Dunkirk disrupts the standard rhythms of melodrama and forgoes its full range of emotional appeals, it takes inspiration from the melodramatic development of crosscutting in the service of suspense, an affect informed by visceral and moral entanglements on the part of the spectator. Investigating these entanglements illuminates the connective tissue of melodrama as it operates through affective rather than strictly linear modes of resonance and causality. In the context of Brexit and the 2015-2016 ‘migrant crisis,’ Dunkirk taps into conservative impulses of nostalgic fantasy and the imagination of national collectivity they embody, even as it draws upon contemporary images of the migrant body at sea, suggesting the complex work of melodramatic affect in blowing us backwards into the future.

Melodrama of Possessive Agency

In the last decades, streams within posthumanism and new materialism, have turned their attention to the phenomenon of agency. And they have done so in ways which open the phenomenon for social and cultural historical investigations, relevant for cultural studies and literary studies alike. This article uses a concrete case—the melodramatic novel Koloss by Norwegian author Finn Alnæs—in order to speculate on how a literary form can be seen to co-evolve—or in this case, clash—with fluctuations in the cultural history of agency. In the 1960s—the heydays of cybernetics—a discrepancy can be observed, between the nourishment of individualism in politics and advertisement, and the distribution of individual agency in the new emerging technologies of cybernetics, which pushed agency as a question in the forefront of a series of novels, Koloss included. However, the novel’s discussion of agency was ignored by the critics, as well as in the scholarly literature to follow. In an effort to get closer to the co-development of ideas of agency and aesthetic form, the article asks why this has been the case. Did the melodramatic form of the novel stand in the way of its aesthetic reflection on agency? And could the novel and its reception therefore be seen as an example of the existence of complex feedback-loops, between ideas of agency in a given culture and aesthetic form?

Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints

Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints

When Boucicault was ‘Boucicaulted’: The Octoroon, Race, Photography, and Pre-adaptation

Boucicault’s Octoroon was famously ‘adapted’ by the author in response to British audience’s discomfort with Zoe’s death in 1861. As it turns out, however, a play very similar to Boucicault’s appeared in England nearly a year before its British debut. The Quadroon; or, the Sun Picture (1860) is not simply an act of plagiarism, or even simply an adaptation of Boucicault’s play. Instead, it is a pastiche of the sources Boucicault drew on for his play, along with unmistakable elements of Boucicault’s – a kind of meta-adaptation. I focus on how The Quadroon incorporates The Octoroon’s use of photography and his sources for the idea of a camera capturing a murderer in the act. What emerges is a play that offers a different representation of the figure of the photographer, the dynamics of racial justice, and the dynamics of racial visuality. By focusing on the use of photography in The Octoroon, The Quadroon, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), I explore more broadly how the spectacle of photographic technology on stage itself offers a self-reflexive commentary on melodramatic form and structure. Melodramas that stage photography both highlight the strange temporality of the tableau and ask us to think of photography as both a frozen image (a product) and kinetic act (a process and performance).

A study on the characteristics of totalitarian propaganda in <Binghwa> of Seon-gyu Im

본고는 2019년 한국 연극계에서 있었던, 임선규의 <빙화> 공연 취소 사건을 계기로 다시 수면 위로 떠오른 <빙화>의 친일성 논란에 대해 하나의 견해를 제출하고자 하였다. 이 논문은 <빙화>가 지닌 저항적 요소, 혹은 민족주의적 요소에 대한 긍정적 평가에 대해 반론을 제기하면서 이 작품이 어떻게 이런 평가를 이끌어낼 수 있었는지, 그 극적 전략에 대해 분석해보았다. 이를 위해서 쟈끄 엘륄의 저서, <선전>을 그 분석의 방법론으로 삼았다. 정리하면, 이 논문은 임선규의 <빙화>를 ‘선전’이라는 개념을 통해 분석함으로써 이 작품의 친일성 여부를 새롭게 짚어보고자 하였다. 첫째 이 작품은 증오를 활용한 전복적 선전의 성격을 지니고 있다. <빙화>는 조선인들에게 방화, 살인, 강간을 일삼은 러시아에 대한 증오를 불러일으켜 반공산주의 선전을 함으로써 조선인들의 내면에 잠복되어 있는 공산주의에 대한 호감 등을 전복시키고자 하였다. 둘째 이 작품은 역사적 사실을 활용한 합리적 선전의 성격을 지니고 있다. <빙화>는 1937년에 실시된 러시아의 조선인 강제이주 사건이라는 역사적 사실을 제재로 하여, 합리성의 외장을 한 채 제시되고 있다. 그러나 사실과 증거에 근거한 합리적인 선전을 통해서 선전자가 이끌어내고자 하는 것은 관객들의 비합리적 반응이었다. 그것은 곧 조선인들이 자유주의, 개인주의를 청산하고 내선일체를 수용하는 것이고, 제국의 전쟁에 동참할 것을 유도하기 위한 것이었다. 셋째 이 작품은 멜로드라마를 활용한 통합선전의 성격을 지니고 있다. 통합선전의 목적은 사람들을 사회활동에 동참하게 하는 것을 목표로 한다. 임선규는 당대 관객의 교양 수준을 생각하고 멜로드라마 형식을 통해 관객들의 감수성을 자극하여 그들에게 심리적 동조를 얻어내고, 지식인 주인공을 통해 감정이입을 하게 함으로써 관객들을 총력전에 동참케 하고자 하였다. 이때 운명 조국 형제 등과 같은 민족주의적 단어들은 선전을 위한 마술적 단어들로서 사용되었다. 이 논문은 임선규의 <빙화>가 선동 선전의 세 가지 차원을 고루 실현하고 있는, 그 어떤 작품보다도 강렬하고, 명백한 친일 작품임을 밝히고자 하였다. 소재로서의 러시아 강제 이주 사건은 ‘합리적 선전’을 위한 방법론일 뿐이며, 민족주의적인 의도와는 거리가 멀다는 사실을 제기하고자 한다. 이로써, 작년에 불현듯 제기된 바 있는 <빙화> 논란에 하나의 의견을 더하고자 한다.This paper attempted to submit a point of view on the controversy over the identity of Seon-gyu Im’s “Binghwa,” which resurfaced following the cancellation of its performance in Korean theater in 2019. This paper analyzed the dramatic strategy that pertains to how this work was able to elicit such an evaluation; the paper also puts forth a counter-argument to the positive evaluation of the play’s resistance or nationalist element. Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda was used as an analytical lens. In summary, this paper attempted to reconsider whether Seon-gyu Im’s “Binghwa” reflects pro-Japanese intentions by analyzing it through the concept of propaganda. Firstly, this work uses the emotion of hatred as subversive propaganda. “Binghwa” attempts to overthrow the crushing communism that is hidden within the Korean people by promoting anti-Communist propaganda through the arousal of hatred for Russia via arson, murder, and rape. Secondly, with its utilization of historical facts, the work has the characteristics of rational propaganda. Based on the historical fact of the forced migration of Russians in 1937, “Binghwa” presents a rational exterior ; however, the intention is to use rational propaganda, based on facts and evidence, to elicit an irrational reaction from the audience. This is intended to make Koreans abandon liberalism and individualism, accept internal unity, and participate in the empire’s war. Thirdly, through its use of melodrama, the work has the characteristics of integrated propaganda, which aims to engage people in social activities. Seon-gyu Im’s intention is to involve the audience in an all-out war, which he accomplishes by assessing the audience’s level of sophistication and exploiting audience members’ sensitivity using the melodramatic form in order to elicit their psychological sympathy and encourage them to empathize with the intellectual protagonist. At this point, nationalistic words, such as “destiny,” “nation,” “brothers,” are used as magical words for propaganda. This paper’s thesis attempted to reveal that Seon-gyu Im’s “Binghwa” is a more intense and more clearly pro-Japanese work than any other work that realizes the three dimensions of propaganda. Taking forced migration to Russia as a subject is just a “rational propaganda” method, and I would like to point out that it far from proves nationalistic intentions. Thus, I would like to add one opinion to last year’s unexpected “Binghwa” controversy.

Tableaux and Melodramatic Realism

If in many ways its aims are comparable to those of novelistic realism (a focus on ordinary characters and contemporary social issues), melodrama exhibits a form of realism all its own. This essay focuses on several elements of that form, especially on the workings of the tableau. At the moment of tableau, acting bodies suddenly freeze to make a silent and still stage picture whose significance can be interpreted. Though the critical history of the tableau is tightly related to genre painting, its formal operations within melodrama are more complex than the aim to offer verisimilitude in the depiction of ordinary life. Tableaux establish the melodramatic narrative form characterised by intermittent pictorialization. They interrupt the dramatic action, summing up the plot so far and adumbrating action to come; they form ‘points’ on which the suspense of dramatic unfolding might hang; and these sudden moments of silence and stasis carry affective and intellectual points as well. Using exemplary readings of melodramas across the English 19th century, this essay demonstrates the formal potentialities of the tableau, including the metatheatrical self-consciousness of its role in constructing melodramatic realism.

(In)visibilities: Iñárritu's Cinema and the Melodramatic Regime

This article examines how some melodramatic films intimately attend to the outcasts of globalization and commit to their visibility. In doing so, these films highlight the interconstituency of aesthetics and politics embedded in the melodramatic form. Taking the films of Alejandro G. Iñárritu as a case in point, the article reads melodrama in terms of a visual regime that foregrounds its critical capacity, particularly when it draws on popular narrative conventions to make perceptible fraught everyday realities that are often overlooked.

Bollywood in Manila: the spectre of moral comparisons

ABSTRACTThis article explores inter-Asian media reception using the example of Bollywood films and the setting of Metro Manila in the Philippines. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with both the existing audience and “unexposed” viewers from the “mainstream,” this study takes an interest in how audiences establish the “common ground” that allows them to decode Bollywood narratives. By rescaling the dynamics of inter-cultural media exchange from geopolitical competition down to the grassroots experience of ordinary people, this article demonstrates how Bollywood films provide the basis for imaginative comparisons that open up everyday affinities based on shared economic situations and moral dilemmas. Developing the further intuition that the comparative aspects of global imagination are felt as much as considered, this article seeks to demonstrate how the melodramatic form of Bollywood generates emotional responses that inculcate empathy and an ethic of care. Our larger purpose is twofold: firstly, to explore the potentials of inter-cultural exchange between two societies on opposite sides of “Asia” and, secondly, to encourage reflection upon the ways that mediation facilitates the comparative functions of the global imagination in everyday experience.

Narcisismo e autocrítica em Vergonha, do Coletivo Bruto (Antiteatrodocumentário 2)

O ensaio busca descrever, analisar e interpretar Vergonha, obra teatral encenada pelo Coletivo Bruto em Piracicaba em outubro de 2016. Com isso, visamos refletir sobre as potencialidades de expandir o teatro documentário para além de sua forma mais habitual, exibicionista, individualista e melodramática, devolvendo ao teatro sua força não de ser real, mas de enfrentar um Real além da mera realidade, para melhor pensar o seu tempo.

Variations on a Melodrama: Imagining the Author in Pierre and Of One Blood

This essay proposes a trajectory from a romantic to a modern author figure that incorporates, rather than abandons, melodrama. Melodrama’s faith in spectacle renders this successful modern author a priest, not a prophet—an artist who is the vessel for truth’s performance, not the heroic seeker of its hiddenness. I chart this trajectory across two novels (Herman Melville’s Pierre and Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood) written fifty years apart. Melville’s novel uses melodrama to puncture the romantic ideal. Hopkins uses melodrama to push toward a recognizably modern figure: Reuel at the end has become an Ethiopian precursor to T.S. Eliot’s impersonal poet. This comparison recognizes modernism’s religious investments, showing how the prophet-to-priest shift relied on an assertion of the legibility of transcendence embedded in melodramatic form. Hopkins’s melodramatic author figure also models a productive stance for historicist criticism, one that self-consciously stands as a catalyst between past and present.

Theatre and the Publics of Democracy: Between Melodrama and Rational Realism

The theatre that developed in late nineteenth-century India, especially in the Bengal and Maharashtra regions, catered to an audience that was much wider than the new educated middle-class males who introduced the European stage form in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. Driven by private capital, the new Indian theatre adopted the melodrama as its main dramatic form. When performance capital shifted to the more lucrative field of cinema in the middle of the twentieth century, the melodramatic form again became the chief narrative mode. Such is its power that it has become the principal rhetorical form of popular democracy in India. In the decades after independence, theatre was rescued from imminent death by the support provided by state agencies which sponsored the production of a national theatre canon and style, as opposed to the prevailing regional ones. However, with bureaucratization and political interference, theatre in India today must revert to its one inherent superiority over the cinema – the immediacy of its encounter with small audiences.

Environmental melodrama, coal, and the politics of sustainable energy in The Last Mountain

The Last Mountain is a 2011 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) film. It examines an aggressive form of strip mining in West Virginia known as mountaintop removal (MTR). The Last Mountain was the first of more than 40 MTR films to be distributed nationally and, as such, marks the entry of the issue onto the political scene in the USA. This essay analyses the film’s use of environmental melodrama to define the problems related to MTR and create identification between victims of MTR and viewers. However, the latter portion of the film attempts to scale up from the melodramatic depiction of MTR to advocacy on broader issues regarding renewable energy and global climate change. In doing so, the film breaks with melodramatic form, draining its emotional power, foreclosing systemic political action, and limiting its overall effectiveness as a sustainability narrative.

Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier (review)

Matthew Rebhorn. Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 207 + 13 b/w illus. $65.00 casebound. A commonly held idea about theater in the United States is that it somewhat miraculously emerged fully formed in the twentieth century with the arrival of works by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, among others. All that had come before was merely prologue. A similar idea holds in the popular imagination regarding westward expansion, that only after the frontier had ostensibly ceased to exist at the end of the nineteenth century did the United States fully emerge as a modern entity. While it may be said that each of these overgeneralizations is informed by certain elements of truth, they both have long served to obscure or render irrelevant the many complexities and complications of cultural history in what was in fact a radically transformative century. Both the history of nineteenth-century American theater and the history of nineteenth-century American expansionism are best understood as processes and events marked by often contradictory engagements with dominant ideologies. And in the contradictions, according to Matthew Rebhorn, may be found the keys to appreciating cultural history not as a single path toward inevitability but rather as a constant and vexed negotiation between differently empowered entities. Tracking the performance and reception histories of a variety of widely popular and highly influential theatrical events--including Edwin Forrest's career-defining performance as the title character in Metamora; the long-standing influence of James Kirke Paulding's The Lion of the West; the connection between blackface minstrelsy and cliches about the frontier; and frontier-themed works by Dion Boucicault, Joaquin Miller, and Augustin Daly--Rebhorn's Pioneer Performance offers a much-needed analysis of how the twin paths of frontier and theatrical history intersected over the course of the nineteenth century. Overall, this book makes it abundantly clear that far from being a mere prologue to the twentieth century, theatrical productions in the United States prior to 1900 that focused on the so-called frontier proved vital to the interrogation and articulation of ideas about identity based on race, gender, and nation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that in 2006 I edited a special issue of this journal in which I included an essay by Matthew Rebhorn about the vocal innovations that defined Edwin Forrest's performances of an Indian chief in Metamora. (1) Now expanded and further developed as the opening chapter of Pioneer Performances, Rebhorn's explication of Forrest's challenge to classical, prevailing forms of vocal performance very nicely establishes the grounds upon which to read performances of the frontier as something other than mere reiterations of dominant ideology. Of particular note in this regard is the elegantly simple but frequently overlooked idea that attention to the material evidence of actual performance would almost certainly affect how one reads the extant text of a play. Responding to critics who have read the text with which Forrest worked as a fairly unambiguous endorsement of expansionist ideology, Rebhorn avers that [b]y exploring the way Forrest constructed his 'savage' voice, we see that in performance the play had a much more qualified and resistant relationship to the juggernaut of American imperialism (28). In short, Rebhorn argues persuasively that Forrest deserves credit for radically reconfiguring through his theatrical presentation of a Native American that which may be called a quintessentially American voice. Equally compelling is Rebhorn's argument that the foundational precepts of both frontier rhetoric and melodramatic form are subjected to scrutiny and criticism in the blackface minstrelsy of T. D. Rice's farce The Virginia Mummy. Tracing a series of comparisons between Rice's performances and those called for by the text of the widely popular Lion of the West, which tells the tale of a prototypically Davy Crockett-like frontiersman's triumphs over elite society, Rebhorn suggests a tantalizing redefinition of nineteenth-century melodrama that emphasizes the political engagement common to both racial satire and the earnest performance of frontier heroism. …

Black Women's Labor and the Melodrama of Class Mobility in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed

May the work I've done for me , May the work I've done for me , When I'm resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said , May the work I've done for me . --African American spiritual (1) For the past two decades, scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in Gilded Age America. (2) As scholars note, struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of late nineteenth-century newspapers, religious tracts, and novels, as writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers' sentiments toward work and class. Yet studies seldom have examined how African American writers contributed to these literary mediations of work. As Carla Peterson has observed, this inattention to black labor reflects scholars' privileging of certain interpretive paradigms to the exclusion of others. as well as a narrow focus on only the most canonical postbellum black texts (104). (3) For example, well-known authors Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles W. Chesnutt all wrote about the relation between labor conditions and black advancement in their lesser-known fiction, speeches and essays; however, these authors' most frequently studied novels--Iola Leroy (1892), Contending Forces (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), respectively--belie the writers' fuller engagement with labor issues. (4) In order to recover the discourse of labor in African American literary history, this essay builds upon Peterson's observations by examining a little-studied black narrative whose focus is on work, Sutton E. Griggs's second novel, Overshadowed (1901). The novel's title has unintentionally prophesied its critical neglect. Even as scholars including Arlene Elder, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, and Finnie Coleman have aimed to restore attention to the author's oeuvre, Griggs's second novel is overshadowed by critical attention to his first, Imperium in Imperio (1899). (5) In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, as well as his nonfiction social theory, Griggs (1872-1933) highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. (6) Yet Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents' death. Focusing primarily on Erma's precarious work conditions as a black female laborer, the novel features African Americans performing a range of domestic service, self-employment, homemaking, industrial work, imprisoned labor, and professional occupations. As African Americans determine the extent to which their labor can speak for them in shaping their identities, the novel refutes the stigma of physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) to further affirm the work ethic. Yet the text ultimately notes how white prejudice and black intraracial class tensions often inhibit advancement by even the most diligent black workers. Though Griggs's melodramatic novels often have been dismissed as artistically flawed, I argue that in Overshadowed, melodramatic form productively aligns with the novel's thematic focus on labor and class mobility. (7) Characterized by stark changes in characters' social positions, emotional excess and trauma, and life-altering moral choices, melodrama demonstrates the extreme possibilities of an individual's fate. As such, melodrama's multiclimactic narrative structure simulates the serial, sudden reversals of fortune that may occur for workers in an unstable job market, especially for African American female workers facing hiring discrimination, sexual vulnerability, and other unfavorable conditions related to employment. In elucidating how melodrama conveys the exigencies of black women's labor, I draw on Peter Brooks's analysis of the genre as primarily concerned with establishing virtue through trials: The reward of virtue . …

Review essay: Spectacle, apocalypse and the telepathic fruitarian pacifists from Mars

Atlantis (August Blom Denmark 1913). Danish Film Institute. PAL region 0. Original ratio. 20fps.Verdens undergang (The End of the World; August Blom 1916) and Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars; Forest Holger-Madsen Denmark 1918). Danish Film Institute. PAL region 0. Original ratio. 17fps and 20fps, respectively.For half a decade, beginning in 1910, Denmark was the most influential filmmaking nation in Europe after France. Of more than two dozen production companies, many of which lasted only long enough to make a handful of films, Nordisk Films Kompagni was the most successful.1 Established in 1906 by cinema-owner Ole Olsen, it quickly became the second largest European production company, after France's Pathe,2 making, for example, over 140 films in 1915 alone. Indeed, Nordisk's fame and influence was such that the Hungarian theatrical actor and film director Mihaley Kertesz - better known as Michael Curtiz - visited Denmark to study their filmmaking systems and techniques.3 Nordisk ceased to make films in 1917, and when production recommenced after World War One, its global position was lost. Its German market was undermined by the establishment of Ufa, Germany's state-owned studio, and Nordisk's increasing focus on literary adaptations proved a less-successful export strategy than Germany's development of expressionism into a cinematic mode.In 1910, actor August Blom joined Nordisk's 1700 staff as a director.4 He soon became the studio's leading director, shooting more than a hundred films by 1924. While Olsen preferred single reel films (up to sixteen minutes long), which had to sell about twenty prints before turning a profit, Blom wished to make longer films. After his racy three-reel melodrama Val Foengslets Port (The Temptations of a Great City; Denmark 1911) became an international hit, selling nearly 250 copies, he increasingly got his way. Although largely forgotten nowadays, Blom was a major figure in the development of what we now think of as feature-length films, both in Denmark and internationally. He was best known for literary adaptations, including versions of Robinson Crusoe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a Hamlet shot at Elsinore, and for social melodramas, which depicted temporary mobility between social classes before conservatively reasserting the natural order of social hierarchies (Mottram 135-6). In 1913, he adapted German Nobel Prize-winner Gerhart Hauptmann's novel Atlantis, following its narrative very closely. It was a prestige production over which Hauptman retained considerable control; but despite the novel's rather modern perspective, its story of the self-exiled, proto-existentialist Dr Friedrich von Kammacher (Olaf Fonss) resonated strongly with the melodramatic form Blom favoured. At eight reels (nearly two hours), it was the longest Danish film - and one of the longest films anywhere - to that date. It was another international hit, with prints prepared specifically for Danish, German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian language markets (there were two Russian versions, one with a much more tragic conclusion which is included as an extra on this DVD). For its US release, it was cut down to six-reels. According to Mottram, the excised scenes almost certainly included von Kammacher's side trip to Paris and his brief shipboard affair with a Russian Jewess from steerage, and probably the two-shot sequence which gives the film its title and its few moments of more-or-less direct interest to readers of this journal: von Kammacher's dream/ vision of Atlantis.Nearly halfway through the film, the overwrought von Kammacher retreats to his cabin on a liner crossing the Atlantic to the US. In his sleep, he meets a dead friend with whom he walks through the streets of Atlantis. While Blom succeeds in giving this sequence an oneiric quality, the lost continent is rather obviously just a Danish town. This tension makes it appear oddly prescient of Ingmar Bergman's symbolic use of Scandinavian settings in a film such as Smultronstallet (Wild Strawberries; Sweden 1957), but it is profoundly at odds with the rest of the film's realist aesthetics. …

Affective Historiography: Schindler's List, Melodrama and Historical Representation

With Hayden White's notion of the "content of the form" of narrative as a starting point, this article argues that the melodramatic form of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) constitutes a distinct mode of historical representation that must be critically accounted for alongside the manifest content of the film. This argument is made by linking Linda Williams' discussion of melodrama as an operative mode concerned more with the emotional retrieval of innocence than with rational psychological causality to Peter Brooks's invocation of Freudian case studies to understand how narratives can work towards the revelation of an original "truth" whose ontological status is unclear. Through this integration of Williams and Brooks, the melodramatic quality at play in Schindler's List , which is often read as a liability against the film's representation of history as it affords access to registers of emotional excess that cannot be explained through narrative logic, can be understood as an essential feature of the film's historiography. Moreover, given this tendency towards emotional excess rather than rational causality, this article suggests that the melodramatic historical form can productively address (although not necessarily resolve) the epistemological challenges posed by the Holocaust to representational rendering.

Surviving the after-shocks of Racism: Reading Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks after Katrina

Fall 2008 47 Jenny Spencer is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches political theatre, feminist theatre, performance studies, and modern drama. Her publications include Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond (Cambridge U P, 1992) and the anthology Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, which she co-edited with Jeanne Colleran (U Michigan, 1998). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Modern Drama and Theatre Journal, and she has served as editor for Theatre Topics. Surviving the After-shocks of Racism: Reading Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks after Katrina Jenny Spencer In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina, complicated by governmental dysfunction at all levels, produced an American refugee crisis within U.S. borders that resulted in weeks of compelling television drama especially aimed at audiences who did not experience the disaster firsthand. During initial coverage, the impact of the event was intensified by the theatrical presence of eyewitnesses who helped newscasters frame the event in melodramatic terms: after hurricane force winds, rising floodwaters, and devastating property loss came heroic rooftop rescues, angry mobs, tearful reunions, riveting survivor testimony, and images of villainous neglect. The melodramatic form of narration brought heroes and villains to the fore in a way that pre-empted a more nuanced conversation that would place the event in conversation with other refugee producing international disasters.1 The uniquely American dimensions of the crisis were further highlighted by Reverend Al Sharpton’s complaint that the term “refugee” was “un-American,”which pushed the media to shift its vocabulary to “survivors,” “evacuees,” and “the internally displaced.”2 Sharpton’s intervention regarding the politically correct designation of hurricane victims was double-edged: by implying that the victims were primarily black and poor (although the suffering was experienced by many who were neither), he also reminded the nation of a long history in which minority populations have routinely been excluded from the rights, privileges, and guarantees associated with U.S. citizenship. Unlike other racially divisive, and heavily televised, events such as the Rodney King riots, the Anita Hill hearings, and O.J. Simpson’s trial (and more like early coverage of the war in Iraq and the events of September 11), the Katrina broadcasts made self-consciously emotional and humanitarian appeals to their audiences based on shared American values and ideals. Yet America’s racial history became increasingly difficult to avoid as the disaster played itself out: those stranded by the flood and waving from rooftops, like those looting the local Kmart, may have felt themselves to be invisible, but the cameras delivered their predominantly black 48 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism bodies to the nation. Repeated film footage of looting, usually by black males, alongside interviews with unconvincing, inept, or overwhelmed public officials, suggested a causal relationship between ineffectual government and the ensuing lawlessness. Once armed servicemen entered downtown New Orleans, observers could also witness how racial violence, as Rey Chow has put it, is not an exception to the rule of law, but rather a systemic function internal to the workings of the social body—the way things usually get “put in their place.”3 Despite demographic differences among the audience, expressions of shock and anger in the face of blatant racial inequality emerged as an emotional through-line of Katrina coverage, though the overwhelmingly racialized nature of poverty in New Orleans should have come as no surprise. The power of the televised spectacle to draw such emotionally charged responses seemed due, in part, to the way in which the visual images were ghosted by past and recent historical events—from the destruction and management of the war in Iraq, to the tsunami victims of 2004, to student protests of the 1950s and 1960s, to the looting of the Los Angeles race riots, the deliberate destruction of the levees in 1924, and even the separation of families on the slave auction block. As Marvin Carlson reminds us in The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine, such ghosting is always a part of theatrical representation, but such ghosting is not limited to the stage.4 The psychic, cultural, and economic losses caused by Katrina, and highlighted...