Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema

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This book presents 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 central male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. Case studies by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, Franois Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino demonstrate how the art-house male melodrama offers a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, rather than the heroic stereotypes commonly found in popular genre cinema.

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 Foxs 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 Foxs sensitive use of Charles Maurons 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 CarolinaGreensboro.

"This book is a tour de force, a new classic of gendered screen analysis. Foxs canvas is broad and international, but these superbly subtle readingsfrom Ray to Bergman, Truffaut to Guadagninotake 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 Bio

Alistair Fox is professor emeritus in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago