As one of the most influential contemporary film scholars, Linda Williams brought her critical feminist lens to some of society’s most maligned and underappreciated film genres. Melodrama as Provocateur showcases what was to be Williams's last project in which, insisting on melodrama as a cross-generic, cross-media mode, she investigates the divergence between French and American attitudes to film melodrama. A diverse group of scholars respond to her provocations, rethinking melodrama’s transnational, transmedia histories and potential futures. Their contributions examine how melodrama became, as Williams argues, the default mode of contemporary media, and demonstrate how it plays an increasingly powerful role in public discourse and political rhetoric today.
Melodrama as Provocateur showcases the final project of influential film scholar Linda Williams, along with responses to her work by a diverse collection of scholars. Together, these writings dig into the past, present, and future of melodrama’s prominence in contemporary media and politics.
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Williamss 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, 19301956
Williams has been one of the outstanding American scholars of cinema, who has written about a whole series of important topicsrace, documentary, pornography, melodramawith 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
1
Part I. Provocations
1. The Fortunes of Melodrama in France and America; or, Why Melodrama Is
Still Important / Linda Williams 15
Part II. Refiguring Melodramas Histories as Transnational/Transmedial Form
2. On Shifting Ground: Melodramas Transcultural, Transmedial, and
Transhistorical Genesis / Matthew Buckley 65
3. Hollywoods Export to the World: Melodramas of Colonial Conquest / Jane
M. Gaines 81
4. Feeling Our Way: Melodrama and Emotional Engagement / E. Deidre Pribram
101
5. Strip Thinking: Forms of Intermittent Pictorialization / Carolyn Williams
119
6. And We Wept, Precious: Motion Capture and Melodrama / Carla Marcantonio
137
Part III. Melodramas Fortunes in France and America: Eighteenth to
Twenty-First Century
7. Seeking Sisterhood: French Melodrama, American Cinema, and the Case of
Les deux orphelines / Victoria Duckett 151
8. Searching for Melodrama in French Versus American Cinema, 19081912 /
Richard Abel 168
9. The Lost World: Le Silence est dor; or, French (Mis)Recognition of a
MÉlodrame That Dares Not Speak Its Name / Charles-Antoine Courcoux 182
10. Grab Em by the Pussy: Donald Trump and the MAGA Melodrama / Elisabeth
R. Anker 201
11. Trans Melodramas / Laura Horak 219
Part IV. Aesthetics and Politics of Emotion
12. Falling in Love and in Art: The Diva Documentary / Dolores McElroy 243
13. Melodrama as Default Mode of Popular Culture: P!nks Album Trustfall
(2023) / Martin Shingler 260
14. Emotional Legibility: Modernity, Melodrama, and Ambivalent Gender
Justice in Bombay Cinema, 1930s1950s / Ira Bhaskar 272
15. From My Sisters Bedside: Life and Death in the Shadow of Blossoms
Shanghai / Zhang Zhen 293
Acknowledgments 311
Contributors 313
Index 317
Linda Williams (19462025) 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.
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