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Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema
By Alistair Fox
This book offers a detailed study of how some of the most illustrious auteurs in the history of art cinema have made use of melodrama to represent masculine subjectivity on the screen.
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About This Book
To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies,” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama,” the correlative of the woman’s film.
The present volume offers a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.
Reviews
“Exploring the rich field of modern auteur cinema, Alistair Fox offers an incisive and unique study of ‘masculine interiority’ within movie melodrama, shedding new light on some of the most canonical films of the last eighty years" — Timothy Corrigan, Professor Emeritus of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art, Fisher-Bennett Hall University of Pennsylvania.
"The breadth and depth of Alistair Fox’s work is nothing short of astonishing. Recruiting scholarship that is equally extensive, he ranges across multiple nations, eras and cinematic movements. With forceful and elegant writing, Fox provides a rich understanding of how filmmakers represent the male of the species"— KrinGabbard, author of Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus
"Original, comprehensive, and insightful, this book complements superbly the rich corpus of feminist publications on women in cinema. Alistair Fox casts a brilliant light on a series of post WWII melodramas that reject the male stereotypes engineered by Hollywood and suggest a gender fluidity leading to an authentic expression of the gay experience. An important book on a long-neglected material" — Anne Gillain, Professor Emerita, Wellesley College.
"Alistair Fox’s sensitive use of Charles Mauron’s psychocritical approach illuminates the films of a range of directors whose films explore a fluid male sexuality. Paying close attention to form and music, as well as the directors’ personal histories, he makes a convincing case for male melodrama as a key genre" — Phil Powrie, Professor of Cinema Studies, University of Surrey, UK.
“Alistair Fox argues persuasively for a new understanding of the generic dimensions of melodrama in the context of the international art film through richly detailed analyses of the work of nine important directors. Theoretically sophisticated and extensively researched from primary sources, it provides us with a history of the post-war “male melodrama” as a distinct but largely unrecognized cinematic form" — David A. Cook, Professor of Media Studies, University of North Carolina—Greensboro.
"This book is a tour de force, a new classic of gendered screen analysis. Fox’s canvas is broad and international, but these superbly subtle readings—from Ray to Bergman, Truffaut to Guadagnino—take us intimately close to some of world cinema's most iconic male filmmakers and their alter egos. Under Fox's illuminating critical eye, filmic masculinity is revealed in all its nuanced, complex, melodramatic fascinations"—Tim Palmer, Professor of Film Studies, UNC Wilmington, author of Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and Irreversible.
Author Information
Alistair Fox is professor emeritus in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago
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Table of Contents
List of Figures; Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Italian Neorealism and the Emergence of the Male Melodrama: Vittorio De Sica’sBicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952); 2. The Migration of Male Melodrama into Non-Western Cultures: Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955–59) and “Fourth Cinema” ; 3. Hollywood Melodrama as a Vehicle for Self-Projection: Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Home from the Hill (1960); 4. The Political Turns Personal: Neo-Neorealism and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone(1961); 5. Personal Cinema as Psychodrama: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Winter Light (1963) and Hour of the Wolf (1968); 6. François Truffaut and the Tyranny of Romantic Obsession: The Soft Skin (1964), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and The Woman Next Door (1981); 7. Figuring an Authorial Fantasmatic: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), A Room In Town (1982) and Parking (1985); 8. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the Emergence of Queer Cinema: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978); 9. Visual Aestheticism and the Queer Prestige Melodrama: Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Luca Guadagnino’s Desire Trilogy; Conclusion; List of Films Cited; Select Bibliography; Index
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