Examples Of Romantic Melodrama

1792 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Difference between modernism and post modernism in literature

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. …show more content…

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

Show More
Related

  • Empathy and (Film) Fiction, by Alex Neill

    1015 Words  | 3 Pages

    Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever way. Tracing the origins of this issue, he distinguishes between two types of emotional responses, sympathy and empathy, as separate concepts in order to understand the influence of both types of emotional responses to fiction. However, relying mostly on this unsupported discrepancy between two concepts and the influence of the “identification” concept, Neill finds himself unable to trace sympathy as a valuable response to fiction. This difficulty makes Neill argue throughout the better part of the text that empathy is the key emotional factor in the reaction to (film) fiction and that it is a more valuable type of emotional response for the audience.

    Read More

  • Lady Audleys Secret

    2374 Words  | 5 Pages

    The term melodrama has come to be applied to any play with romantic plot in which an author manipulates events to act on the emotions of the audience without regard for character development or logic (Microsoft Encarta). In order to classify as a Victorian melodrama, several key techniques must be used, including proximity and familiarity to the audience, deceit rather than vindictive malice, lack of character development and especially the role of social status.

    Read More

  • Art vs. Classical Film in the Cinema

    831 Words  | 2 Pages

    The many debates about art cinema versus classical cinema have been going around for a while. The mainstream Hollywood classical film and the art cinema are frequently presented as opposites. In one, the style of the film is bland, while the other seeks to center its focus on the visual becoming central as narrative unity. Throughout the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick called 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see that this film can be classified as an art film. On the other hand, it can also be seen as classical film. Even though these two are the complete opposite and they contradict themselves, they are both apparent in the film.

    Read More

  • Music Composers: Hans Zimmer

    1994 Words  | 4 Pages

    For this essay I will be looking at the work of Hans Zimmer to discuss how music in film engages the viewer and evokes emotion and pulls the viewer toward the film. Hans Zimmer is a German born music composer. Hans Zimmer’s love of music stems from his childhood when he learned how to play various instruments. Before Zimmer began composing music for films he was in a well-known band. The band was called The Buggles whom were famous for their song Video Killed the Radio Star. After the Buggles Zimmer played in other bands but never had another hit. As Zimmer has progressed as a film composer so has his list of nominations and awards. Zimmer has won 4 Grammy Awards and 2 Golden Globes and many more for his outstanding film scores. The reason I chose to write this essay on Zimmer was that his genres and music score are extremely versatile ranging from animations to comedy to dark thrillers. This is important to highlight as it shows Zimmer can create almost any atmosphere with his music whether it be sad or creating tension that all cause us to engage with the film. Zimmer's use of themes and introduction of different instruments allowed him to create these wonderful engaging film score. In this essay I will look at three films by Hans Zimmer these are The Holiday Rush and Rain Man.

    Read More

  • Classical and Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema

    2472 Words  | 5 Pages

    During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.

    Read More

  • War Film Analysis: Apocalypse Now Directed by Ford Coppola

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    In conclusion, I have demonstrated how Coppola exploits a wide array of sound and editing to create suspense, intensity, and anxiety in the sequence to affect the audience’s emotions, using diegetic ambient sound effects, non-diegetic music, voice over and four editing types. With this sequence, Coppola has shown the savagery of war and our complicity in this violence as an audience.

    Read More

  • Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess

    2633 Words  | 6 Pages

    Williams juxtaposes the three genres together, to reveal similarities and differences, and, in turn, their similar and different desire effects on the audiences. Specifically, she points out the physical reaction of characters in the films, and how the audience members mimic them. Firstly, in regards to the physical body, Williams discusses the similar uncontrollable “convulsion or spasm,” that comes with the different genres; a body on the screen is “’beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness.” (729) Next, she dissects the sound of these bodily reactions – the overpowering moan, scream, or sob that the chara...

    Read More

  • The Lives of Others

    1482 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...successful collaboration of sound, colour, camera positioning and lighting are instrumental in portraying these themes. The techniques used heighten the suspense, drama and mood of each scene and enhance the film in order to convey to the spectator the intended messages.

    Read More

  • Theory of Montage in Pudovkin’s, Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s movie.

    1016 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the presented essay I will compare the style of work of selected artists in the montage of the film. I will try to point out some general regularities and features of Soviet cinema. At the same time I will try to capture especially what is common in their systems and similar or conversely what differ. For my analysis, I will draw on the feature films of the Soviet avantgarde, namely these are the movies - The Battleship Potemkin (S. Eisenstein, 1925), Mother (V. Pudovkin, 1926) and The Man with a movie camera (D. Vertov, 1929).

    Read More

  • Genre As A Genre

    862 Words  | 2 Pages

    The genre of romantic comedies sets up a framework of generic conventions for each film. Although they usually have the construction, each film is developed in their own unique way. The amusing, comical, and dramatic movies follow the basic structure of the unfulfilled desire of love in the lives of the main characters, a situation that they are put in that provides a chance for potential romance, and then though several obstacles, a realization that they are a perfect match and live “happily ever after”.

    Read More

  • The Romantic Comedies

    720 Words  | 2 Pages

    Since the time of Aristotle, romantic comedies have sought to tell a story about two people, and questions whether or not they would end up together as Billy Mernit (author of Writing the Romantic Comedy)informs. They also make us question what it means to be in a relationship and tell us a little about ourselves. The romantic comedies were extremely popular with moviegoers during its Golden Age of the 1930’s as Daniel M. Kimmel (author of I’ll Have What She’s Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies) informs us. The good romantic comedies of this time were referred to as “weepies” or “three hanky pictures (Kimmel). Over time, though, the romantic comedies dwindled to the point where nowadays the romantic comedies seem to be dead (Mernit). Today, the romantic comedy is alive and well, but it goes unrecognized due to it adapting. The appearance of the romantic comedy may have changed, but the key elements have not changed. The key elements of any romantic comedy include two characters who will meet and fall in love with each other, a conflict that will tear the two of them apart, and an ending where love has changed the main characters and they will either accept or deny love such as the events of Philadelphia Story.

    Read More

  • Fascism Italian Cinema

    1349 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...ito Mussolini had many effects upon the neorealist movement such as the Institute LUCE and the “Cinema” journal. Telefoni Bianchi, which was prominent during Fascism, was too unrealistic for many of the Italian neorealist directors. Therefore, in a reaction to Telefoni Bianchi, these directors wanted to show more of the gritty and simple side of Italian life after the war. Just like Fascism had an impact on neorealist cinema, neorealism also impacted new movements such as new wave films as well as modern cinema. Pier Paolo Pasolini summed up neorealism when he said “…Passions were so strong right after the War that they really pushed us, they forced us towards this kind of film truth. And this truth was transfigured by poetry, and lyricism. It was because of if its lyricism that Neo-Realism so captured the world because there was poetry in our reality” (Gallagher).

    Read More

  • The Use of Sound in Coppola’s The Conversation

    2672 Words  | 6 Pages

    As an audience we are manipulated from the moment a film begins. In this essay I wish to explore how The Conversation’s use of sound design has directly controlled our perceptions and emotional responses as well as how it can change the meaning of the image. I would also like to discover how the soundtrack guides the audience’s attention with the use of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds.

    Read More

  • Modernism - Rebellion and Sexuality

    2048 Words  | 5 Pages

    Michael Levenson said in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism that Modernism fiction was “involved in the radical modern departure, across all of the arts, from representational verisimilitudei”. It was stylistically and thematically focused on rebellion against the way art was presented in the past and what its main focus was.

    Read More

  • Music In The Film, Phantom Of The Opera

    1453 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sound is what brings movies to life, but, not many viewers really notice. A film can be shot with mediocre quality, but, can be intriguing if it has the most effective foley, sound effects, underscore, etc. Sound in movies band together and unfold the meaning of the scenes. When actors are speaking, the dialogue can bring emotion to the audience, or, it can be used as the ambient sound. Music is one of the main things to have when filmmaking. The use of Claudia Gorbman’s Seven Principles of Composition, Mixing and Editing in Classical Film gives audiences a perspective of sound, and, how it can have an impact on them.

    Read More

More about Examples Of Romantic Melodrama

Open Document