"Based on a True Story:" American Melodrama and Cultural Analysis
This project asks: can the affective and emotional strategies that define the American filmic melodrama be regarded as useful tools for a future feminist politics, or is the melodramatic mode detrimental to such a politics?
In her essay "Melodrama Revisited" Linda Williams notes that melodrama "should be viewed [...] not as an excess or an aberration but in many ways as the typical form of American popular narrative in literature, stage, film, and television." According to Williams, it is "in ever modernizing forms of melodrama, not epic, not 'classical realism,' that American democratic culture has most powerfully articulated the moral structure of feeling that animates its goals of justice". Somewhat counter-intuitively, social conditions and conflicts might be far more effectively staged in the emotionally charged and affective atmospheres of melodrama than in realism.
Situated at the interface of affect theory, social and cultural criticism and film studies, this project takes up the dramatization of questions of gender positioning and production in both classic and contemporary filmic melodrama as an entry into a wider analysis of the relentless and seemingly inevitable melodramatism(s) of American popular art and culture.
Have filmic melodramas newly taken up female experiences and empowerments that have not hitherto been expressed? Can and should the melodramatizations and emotional intensifications inherent in American culture, especially their assumption of a shared, ultimately humanist agenda and approach to gender constructions and organizations, be aligned with a feminist politics? Are a politics of affect a useful platform for bringing about social change? In the light of these questions, an analysis of American melodramatizations, both artistic and cultural, is a necessary step towards the development of a melodramatic, or perhaps a 'post-melodramatic', feminist politics.
Vita
Feminist film scholar Sandy Flitterman-Lewis wrote the first intensive analysis of Agnès Varda’s work to appear in English: To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (1990). The book also treats Germaine Dulac and Marie Epstein in an effort to define a female cinematic voice. Her work has foregrounded pioneering filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who is the subject of four important essays in major collections. She co-founded Camera Obscura, the first journal entirely devoted to feminist film theory. Her current work studies families in Occupied France during World War II. Her writings on topics from melodrama to memory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals and have been translated into nearly a dozen languages. She teaches in the Department of English and in the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University.
Research Areas
Feminist Film Theory
Cultural Studies
Holocaust Memory
Gender Studies
Comparative Literature
Publications (Selection)
To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (coauthor) (London: Routledge, 1992).
“A Tree in the Wind: Chantal Akerman’s Later Self-Portraits in Installation and Film” in Chantal Akerman: Afterlives, edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), pp. 13–25.
“Memory, Friendship and History in Au Revoir les Enfants: in The Cinema of Louis Malle: Transatlantic Auteur edited by Philippe Met (London: Wallflower, 2018) pp. 200–209.
“Sites of Infamy: Les Guichets du Louvre, Monsieur Klein, La Rafle” in Ginette Vincendeau and Alastair Phillips, Paris in the Cinema: Beyond the Flaneur, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) pp. 196–206.
“Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog”in Documenting the Documentary, edited by Barry Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Second Edition (Wayne State University Press, 2013).
“Varda, Glaneuse d’Histoire(s): Les Justes au Panthéon” in Agnès Varda, le cinéma et au-delà ed. By Anthony Fiant and Roxane Hamery (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 219–228.
“Nevers, Mon Souvenir: Marguerite Duras, History, and the Secret Heart of Hiroshima Mon Amour” in In the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and the Cinema, ed. By Rosanna Maule and Julie Beaulieu (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 259–283.
“Imitation(s) of Life: The Black Woman’s Double Determination as Troubling ‘Other’” in Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, edited by Lucy Fischer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 325–335.
“The Blossom and the Bole: Narrative and Visual Spectacle in Early Film Melodrama,” in Cinema Journal 33:3, Spring 1994, pp.3–15.
