Eppur si commuove: Melodrama, the expression of feeling, and postwar Italian cinema
4:00pm - 5:00pm /
Wednesday 17th February 2016
/ Venue: Lecture Theatre 3, Ground Floor Rendall Building
- 0151 794 2780
- Tom Whittaker
- Admission: Admission is free.
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The lecture will be given by Dr Louis Bayman (Southampton) who talks about his work below:
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy and feeling itself.
This seminar will discuss the melodramatisation of post-war Italian cinema as a cultural response to a society undergoing thorough transformation. It will pose questions regarding how we understand film history, and consider the relationship that melodrama institutes between popular culture and both neorealism and arthouse modernism. It will argue that melodrama places emotional expressivity at the centre of the dramatic universe, and by so doing, presents a reality into contact with both the Sacred and the everyday.
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy and feeling itself.
This seminar will discuss the melodramatisation of post-war Italian cinema as a cultural response to a society undergoing thorough transformation. It will pose questions regarding how we understand film history, and consider the relationship that melodrama institutes between popular culture and both neorealism and arthouse modernism. It will argue that melodrama places emotional expressivity at the centre of the dramatic universe, and by so doing, presents a reality into contact with both the Sacred and the everyday.