To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies, ” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama, ” the correlative of the woman’s film.
The present volume offers 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 male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.
Mục lục
List of Figures; Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Italian Neorealism and the Emergence of the Male Melodrama: Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952); 2. The Migration of Male Melodrama into Non-Western Cultures: Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955–59) and “Fourth Cinema” ; 3. Hollywood Melodrama as a Vehicle for Self-Projection: Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Home from the Hill (1960); 4. The Political Turns Personal: Neo-Neorealism and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone(1961); 5. Personal Cinema as Psychodrama: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Winter Light (1963) and Hour of the Wolf (1968); 6. François Truffaut and the Tyranny of Romantic Obsession: The Soft Skin (1964), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and The Woman Next Door (1981); 7. Figuring an Authorial Fantasmatic: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), A Room In Town (1982) and Parking (1985); 8. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the Emergence of Queer Cinema: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978); 9. Visual Aestheticism and the Queer Prestige Melodrama: Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Luca Guadagnino’s Desire Trilogy; Conclusion; List of Films Cited; Select Bibliography; Index
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Alistair Fox is professor emeritus in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago
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