Melodrama, Class and the Cinema (SCRN40005)

This subject involves a study of the role that melodrama has played in the representation of class and ideological conflict in the cinema. Students are asked to examine melodramas from periods such as the silent period, the 1930s, the 1950s and contemporary cinema, from Hollywood and art cinema traditions. They will encounter theoretical writings on class and ideology in the subject's interrogation of the melodrama's tendency to expose ideological contradictions at a domestic and political level. This subject enables students to understand issues of film form, gender, the family, sexuality and psychoanalysis in relation to the melodrama's complex representation of class in the cinema.