Melodrama As Provocateur

Linda Williams (1946–2025) was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She authored and edited several books, including Screening Sex and Playing the Race Card. She received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds.Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University.Elisabeth R. Anker is Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at The George Washington University.

“Williams”s Melodrama as Provocateur is a comparative history of melodrama in two societies on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection changes the way we look at contemporary fictional production and challenges the dichotomy between elite and mass culture. It argues against this academic tradition and defends the idea that melodrama is the central form of American fiction, and more broadly of democratic cultures, found in most fictional cinemas around the world.”—Geneviève Sellier, coauthor of The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956“Williams has been one of the outstanding American scholars of cinema, who has written about a whole series of important topics—race, documentary, pornography, melodrama—with a remarkable timeliness as well as insight. Melodrama as a topic continues to be of vital and expanding interest in the film and media studies field, and this team of melodrama scholars is of the highest order.”—Charles Musser, Yale University

• Introduction / Christine Gledhill, Laura Horak, and Elisabeth R. Ander 1Part I. Provocations1. The Fortunes of Melodrama in France and America; or, Why Melodrama Is Still Important / Linda Williams 15Part II. Refiguring Melodrama’s Histories as Transnational/Transmedial Form2. On Shifting Ground: Melodrama’s Transcultural, Transmedial, and Transhistorical Genesis / Matthew Buckley 653. Hollywood’s Export to the World: Melodramas of Colonial Conquest / Jane M. Gaines 814. Feeling Our Way: Melodrama and Emotional Engagement / E. Deidre Pribram 1015. Strip Thinking: Forms of Intermittent Pictorialization / Carolyn Williams 1196. “And We Wept, Precious”: Motion Capture and Melodrama / Carla Marcantonio 137Part III. Melodrama’s Fortunes in France and America: Eighteenth to Twenty-First Century7. Seeking Sisterhood: French Melodrama, American Cinema, and the Case of Les deux orphelines / Victoria Duckett 1518. Searching for Melodrama in French Versus American Cinema, 1908–1912 / Richard Abel 1689. The Lost World: Le Silence est d’or; or, French (Mis)Recognition of a MÉlodrame That Dares Not Speak Its Name / Charles-Antoine Courcoux 18210. “Grab ’Em by the Pussy”: Donald Trump and the MAGA Melodrama / Elisabeth R. Anker 20111. Trans Melodramas / Laura Horak 219Part IV. Aesthetics and Politics of Emotion12. Falling in Love and in Art: The Diva Documentary / Dolores McElroy 24313. Melodrama as Default Mode of Popular Culture: P!nk’s Album Trustfall (2023) / Martin Shingler 26014. Emotional Legibility: Modernity, Melodrama, and Ambivalent Gender Justice in Bombay Cinema, 1930s–1950s / Ira Bhaskar 27215. From My Sister’s Bedside: Life and Death in the Shadow of Blossoms Shanghai / Zhang Zhen 293Acknowledgments 311Contributors 313Index 317