Examples Of Romantic Melodrama

Romantic Melodrama in Post-Classical and Modernist Period

In this essay, I will mainly cover the history of melodrama and the derivative category of romantic melodrama. By specifically explaining the two films Hiroshima Mon Amour and Doctor Zhivago, the similarity and difference of the romantic melodrama in both Post-Classical and Modernist time period will be clarified.

Marked by a plot to attract the highlighted emotions of the audience, melodramatic films are derived from drama films. As we can see, “Melodrama” consists of “drama” and “melos” (music), literally meaning “plays combined with music.” The themes of dramas were exaggerated within melodramas, and the liberal use of music enhances their emotional conspiracies to a large extent.

The term “melodrama” is often implied deprecatorily by film studies critics as an impractical, pathos-filled, mincing tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characteristics (including a chief female character) that would straightforwardly appeal to feminine audiences.
Melodramatic films with heart-wrenching, sentimental plots usually accentuate stimulating situations or crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship, strained familial status, tragedy, illness, neurosis, or emotional and physical hardship within everyday life. Victims, unfortunates, sublime and heroic characters or miserable protagonists in melodramas are denoted with tremendous social stress, threats, repression, apprehensions, implausible events or predicaments with friends, lovers, work, family, or society. The melodramatic format allows the characters to work through their struggles or prevail over the problems with unwavering fortitude, sacrificial actions, and steadfast bravery.
During the 19th century, melodramas dominated theatrical stages because the stories were easy to understand, neither challenging the mind nor criticizing society. Instead, they provided entertainment and escape from daily life.
As the genre grew, audiences came to associate melodramas with other characteristics. Moreover, they became hugely successful throughout the 19th century in part because they were so accessible. Melodramas take very complicated concepts and themes -- like love or war -- and reduce them to binary opposition, which means something is on either side of a system, but never in between. Examples of binary opposition are things like men and women, love and hate, or good and evil; each side defines the other by virtue of its existence. These decisive properties made them extraordinarily befitting for the conversion from the stage to the screen in the early 20th century.
Melodramas took very complicated concepts and made them easily digestible through the use of familiar characters, story arcs, and well-established expectations. Unlike reality, in which, for example, love and war conflict was very complicated and nuanced, melodrama reduced it to a matter of pure and adorable romantic love and violent and cruel warfare, never asking the audience to consider anything else but these most basic binary terms.
Throughout the first ten years of the 20th century, an immediately approved method for audiences to appreciate melodramas without the confine of formality of stage production was through silent films, though at that time the technology to include sound in the film did not exist. The lack of spoken dialog in silent films was compensated by the film industry using music to emphasize particular emotions.
Melodramas continued to flourish on the screen as soon as the technology improved to incorporate sound into film. Originally, the ways in which melodramas use music as supplementary were categorized as following. The scenes engaging conflicts and fights, for instance, might be accompanied by intense orchestral arrangements, while scenes dealing with romantic affairs and fantasies could come up with something softer. All the efforts above were to heighten the emotional impact of different scenes.
If we go back to Hiroshima Mon Amour and Doctor Zhivago, both of them are excellent examples for the perfect combination of film narration and music. The development of the plots is both hinted and enhanced by the background music in the films, reducing the incredibly complicated issues of warfare down to binary oppositions while generally ignoring the nuances of the story. It will not be exaggerated to portray the film Doctor Zhivago’s score as “Opera.” Composed by Maurice Jarre, the score of Doctor Zhivago will linger in people’s minds even days after watching it, especially Lara’s Theme.
A wide variety of romantic melodramas in gaudy, lush, super-saturated Technicolor – classic, histrionic-laden, exaggerated, glossy, tear-jerking soaps, appeared since 1950s. Since these wrought up films appeared during a time of Hollywood censorship, all of the sexual transgressions, ungratified desires, illegitimacies, psycho-sexual disorders (impotence, frigidity, nymphomania, Oedipal problems, etc.) rapes, adulteries, domestically-oppressed women, abuses, abortions, and affairs were not made entirely explicit. These potentially-subversive topics, nonetheless, were brought to the screen. (filmsite.org)
Generally, romance melodramas are romantic love stories that focus on fervor, consciousness, and the affectionate loving involvement of the main characters and the journey that their forthrightly resolute, veracious and pristine romantic love takes them through dating, courtship or marriage. They share the myth of love affairs and confusions, in which the protagonists strive to figure a way out in the social pressure and difficulty.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is a post-classical black-and-white film of love, war, suffering and forgetfulness, which was sweated out of an affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) in the titular bomb-ravaged city. The French actress in Hiroshima to shoot “a film about peace” has a one-night stand with the Japanese architect. Her explorations of the reconstructed city, especially the ultramodern theme park-like memorials, reawakens painful memories of a wartime affair with a German soldier (Bernard Fresson) that culminated in public humiliation at the hands of her zealously patriotic parents. Arranged like a piece of modernist music, Hiroshima Mon Amour eschews linear development, advancing instead as a contrapuntal duet filled with repetitions and subtle variations on a theme: the necessary persistence of memory, as well as its obverse, the horror of inevitably forgetting.
Resnais presents time in a circular fashion – past, present and future looping into each other. He achieves this through repeated dialogue and a wholly innovative film aesthetic. (Mavor, Carol, 2012.) Using multiple flashbacks, ellipses and voiceover narration, Resnais presented a challenge to classical narrative cinema forms. Here, as in much of the New Wave that he was both a part of and apart from (he was more closely aligned with the “Left Bank” group early in his career), was a cinema of images and ideas, evolving with little reverence for the conventions of plot and story development that cinema audiences had grown comfortable with. In Hiroshima mon amour linear construction is abandoned; storytelling is circular and unresolved.
Different from Hiroshima Mon Amour, set against the fall of Tsarist Russia and the rise of the Soviet state, Doctor Zhivago follows Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago (Omar Sharif) a young doctor who falls in love with a seamstress’ daughter, Lara Antipova (Julie Christie). Like all Russians, Yuri and Lara are caught up in the tumult of the First World War and subsequent Russian revolution. This causes Yuri and Lara to be constantly reunited and separated over a period of many years, despite their efforts to avoid the political turmoil and bloodshed.
Although the bulk of the film is a romance, the backdrop of the revolution and war is a strong thematic element. The depiction and description of the First World War the Russian Revolution reflect that a whole social system is torn down and another of a harsh, dynamic nature is constructed to take its place. Yet these things are only indicated in a few fine and fiercely acted scenes that are thrust suddenly through a fabric of personal drama and then are as quickly withdrawn. (Murf. 1965) Such scenes as a devastating slaughter of socialist demonstrators in the streets of Moscow around 1910 or a clash of Czarist troops and Communist deserters on a frozen road toward the end of the war or a longer, more agonizing sequence of exiles being transported in a train to the distant regions of the Urals do suggest the boiling surge of violent change. And they are sharply illustrated on the large screen under the skillful direction of David Lean.
Director Lean’s touch is palpable in every scene, from the amazing wide shots of Eastern European and Russian landscapes to the fascinating long takes of actors’ faces. One of the most famous of these latter shots is when Lean holds the camera on Omar Sharif as Yuri watches the Cossack guards cut down a group of protesters in the streets of Moscow. Sharif’s expression, coupled with Lean’s confidence in allowing the audience to imagine what Yuri is seeing, makes for a powerful piece of cinema.
In the two films above we can see a lot of differences due to the different time period of the film genre.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is showed in 1959 which is the period of Post-Classical. It’s not hard to figure out it in the late transition of from the Classical to the Modernism. For example, the shooting method of Hiroshima Mon Amour is more dynamic, using technologies such as the juxtaposition of the scenes. Also, after WWII, culture changed drastically that everything established and clung to was questioned and Americans were re-examining culture. As a result, Direct relationship between culture and the way artists in that culture are represented to people. And the formulas that had crystallized in the classical period were not not working well, which means that the conventions, stories and iconography no longer applied to the current culture. Hiroshima Mon Amour brings the social problem of the morality of the war in terms of the narrations of the love affair between two characters and uses the struggles in the inner world of the female protagonist Riva to reveal the truth of the reality.

While in Doctor Zhivago, which is filmed in 1965, the sign of the Modernism is obvious. First of all, it elevates film to a high art form, as has been mentioned before, director Lean uses the camera to show a much wider visual world than that of Hiroshima Mon Amour. What’s more, from Doctor Zhivago, the emphasis of self-consciousness can be found through the depictions of the questioning of the individual personality of Doctor Zhivago, Lara, Tonya and a lot of other

characters.
Romantic Melodrama's existence in today's entertainment is one of debate. While many argue that the romantic melodrama has died out in Western culture, others argue that it is alive and well, albeit in new forms, in movies like Twilight and Titanic, where the protagonists don't quite follow society's laws, but is willing to stand for brave love in the face of what the society may see as morally wrong. Even the small screen still boasts modern melodramas in today's soap operas. With their over-inflated emotional scenes, beautiful heroes and heroines, evildoers and quest for justice, daytime soaps are simply the offspring of the one-hundred-year-old romantic melodrama.