Overview

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. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well-established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re-thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post-war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form.

Full Product Details

9780748656424

Table of Contents

Reviews

Finally, an excellent example of a cultural history of film! Louis Bayman very convincingly connects the tears of cinematographic melodrama and its body and lifeblood to the neorealist corpus. He reveals roots, bonds and kinships that have never before been so well illuminated between the great 19th-century tradition of opera, popular literature and theatre and with the contemporary popular cultural forms of the foto- and cineromanzo.' -- Gian Piero Brunetta, University of Padova

Author Information

Louis Bayman is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He holds a PhD from King’s College, London and has published various articles on popular genres especially in relation to Italian cinema, serial killer cinema, film aesthetics and retro and nostalgia. He is author of the monograph The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama (2014) and co-editor of the collection Popular Italian Cinema.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available