Williams on Melodrama

“Narrative cinema as a whole has been theorized as a realist, inherently masculine medium whose “classical” features were supposedly anathema to its melodramatic infancy and childhood. Thus, while narrative silent cinema has always been recognized as melodrama at some level, the “essential” art and language of cinema has not. Melodrama has been viewed either as that which the “classical” cinema has grown up out of, or that to which it sometimes regresses. However, as Gledhill notes, well into the sound era, industrial exhibition categories continued to assert the melodramatic base of most genres. The names of these categories are themselves revealing: western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, backwoods melodrama, romantic melodrama, and so on (Gledhill 1987, 35). What is striking in the above examples is the way the noun “melodrama” functions to denote a certain form of exciting, sensational, and, above all, moving story that could then be further differentiated by more specifications of setting or milieu and/or genre. It is this basic sense of melodrama as a modality of narrative with a high quotient of pathos and action to which we need to attend if we are to confront its most fundamental appeal” (Williams 17).


In this passage, Williams is describing the transition and binary of classical cinema and melodramatic cinema. She evokes examples from earlier in the chapter when she cites Henry James’ reaction to a production of Uncle Tom, noting that it evoked his childhood sentimentality of what is right and what is wrong. It is this reaction to which Williams refers through the phrase “melodramatic infancy and childhood.” She notes the progression of film history as the “rising up” from the melodrama, because silent movies in a sense, had to be melodramatic in order to evoke the meaning and purpose of the film through over-exaggerated acting. She notes that “classical” cinema is considered to be the more mature offspring of the melodramatic “movie”- the film that emotionally “moves” the reader. However, throughout the chapter, she argues that this is not necessarily the case. Rather, the melodramatic film in a sense has been reborn, so that we as a nation might “talk to [ourselves]” about the dilemma and moral binary of negrophilia versus negrophobia in American culture (11). The “high quotient of pathos” to which Williams refers is a manipulation of the heartstrings that allows for the viewer to contemplate a sufferer within a social setting of which they are already previously aware. Williams argues that this emotionality leads the viewer to a “state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness” for African Americans in race films (13). It is this ability to “establish a moral good” through melodramas that “fundamentally appeals” to the viewer (13, 17).

In evaluating the claim and overall project of Williams’ Chapter 1, I thinking about the movies we have seen in class and obviously was able to notice the melodramatic elements concerning the establishment of a “moral good” to which Williams refers. For example, the jail scene in “Lying Lips” when the damsel in distress is wrongfully imprisoned, and we the viewers are able to feel and sympathise with the injustice of her imprisonment. However, I could not help but think about Williams’ assertion that there has been a type of “regression” in popular media towards that of the melodramatic. I felt that her example concerning the 1996 Olympics was particularly inventive, as it did not have to do necessarily with race, but still untangled the emotionality of the reader. Interesting that in her article, when she is referring to the melodramatic nature of the 1996 Olympic Summer Games, she refers to the melodramatic nature as a type of “feminization”—implying a certain emotionality associated with women—that such melodrama has a “moralizing function” (16). This led me to consider (what is now potentially turning into my seminar paper) the recent Oscar-nominated film “The Help.” Generally, I am wary of such racialized narrative bestsellers for reasons of historical innacurracy (aka Bill O’Reily’s new book “Killing Lincoln”), yet I had heard so many positive reviews about the novel and movie that over my Christmas break I read and watched both. While the history of racism in America is hardly a new problem, it is an old problem that seems to be popularly resurfacing since the election of President Obama.

My first question, as inquiry for a burgeoning seminar paper, what are we to make of this melodramatic nature in films today that, because of its sentimentality, it is nominated for the most prestigious film award? Do we fall into this trap of melodrama ourselves? Or do we agree with Williams’ project, that aside from noticing films’ melodramatic tendencies, such sentimentality can potentially result in social good? How do we make sense of this if melodrama is often said to try to reassemble a lost past? (36)

Second Question: In her essay, Williams evokes the argument of film critic Peter Brooks, who argues that the melodrama must begin with a moment of virtue, a safe and “idyllic space” that will be unjustly invaded. He notes that even if it is not “literally represented” that it will be remembered or implied some way through the nostalgia of the characters and potentially their memories. In the films that we have watched for class so far, how is this “idyllic space” embodied in the different films even if it is not literally represented?

Third Question: In her second chapter, Williams notes how the former nineteenth-century stereotype of villain and hero/heroine in the melodrama is reversed through the concept of the Uncle Tom, as someone who is victimized by the white master. Does this reversal occur in the films we have watched so far? And if so, does it do so to the detriment of the filmmakers’ social intentions?

The Blood of Jesus Sound Critique

In the chapter “Sound in the Cinema” from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art, they write: “The creation of the sound track resembles the editing of the image track. Just as the filmmaker may pick the best image from several shots, he or she may choose what exact bit of sound will best serve the purpose… also sound that was not recorded during filming may be added freely” (320). This use of sound in film is particularly exemplified in Micheaux’s The Blood of Jesus in which the moral dilemmas and temptations with which the young female protagonist, Martha, is faced throughout the film. Generally, the moments in which she is seemingly “walking the path of righteousness” gospel choir music or church organ music will be playing in the background. This employs Bordwell and Thompson’s term “internal diegetic sound” in which the audience seemingly enters the characters mind as Martha’s face is shot simultaneously with gospel music and the shots pan back and forth from her face (or mind) to the picture of Jesus hanging on her wall.

Similarly, when “internal non-diegetic sound” which does not indicating the mind of a person, but also has no physical presence in the shot, it sets the mood and the pace for the scene. This is exemplified particularly twice in the film The Blood of Jesus. The first time occurs at the beginning of the film during which a baptism is taking place and a man, claiming he sees a snake in the water, comically and pathetically runs away from the congregation and his baptism, tripping and stumbling his way down the road. While this is occurring a ridiculous upbeat hymn begins to play with a faster tempo titled “Run child run, The Devil’s Behind You,” which adds to the comicality of the scene. Later on in the film, following Martha’s “sinning” and debauchery in the city where she is continually tempted by the devil, she escapes yet is chased by a handful of men who believe that she ahs stolen from them. During this chase scene, in which the camera shots pan back and forth between Martha and the gang of men behind her, the same song “Run child run, the Devil’s Behind You” is replayed from earlier in the movie. The effect of this is that the danger that Martha is in is, to some extent, taken out of the scene, as the audience relates the comic effect from the earlier scene of baptism to the chase scene.

Furthermore, “external diegetic sound” is employed in the film through Satan’s laugh—it comes across in the film as maniacal to the extreme. It is an attempt to be so “scary” that it is comical or ridiculous. In this instance, the filmmakers, who continually show Satan running away from the “voice of God” or the angel who repeatedly appears, may be attempting to demonstrate how, despite his supposedly maniacal laugh, it is ridiculous when God comes into the picture. Therefore, though Satan’s laugh is maniacal and held for over a good 10 seconds on camera, it can be considered ridiculous, as long as Martha resists temptation.

Something that I was wondering about was the use of silence in a film that employs so much sound to indicate the emotional and mental states of the characters. During the first scene, when the entire congregation is walking along the road and singing hymns before the baptism—Martha, though she is going to be baptized as well, is strangely silent. I could be reading too much into this, but does her silence indicate that, despite the fact that she is going to be baptized, she hasn’t yet been tempted and therefore is not truly a Christian?

2nd question

I have a second question that I would like to add and was considering that stemmed from the question that Nick posted on his blog.

Considering the Hollywood's historical tendency to portray America as it wishes rather than as it is (aka Birth of a Nation), does a similar blindness and rewriting of history and race in America occur contemporarily in the film industry through the production of "black and white friend films" which consequently promote the idea that "racism no longer exists in the United States?"

Taylor on Micheaux

In his chapter on "Black Silence and the Politics of Representation" Clyde Taylor argues that no longer should the original aspect of racism in Classic Hollywood Cinema history be ignored. Rather, cinema studies should inquire into why such racism became so prevalent in the early stages of US cinema as it would illuminate racial history in the United States.To analyze this, Taylor draws from political theorists Samir Amin and Walter Rodney to exemplify the "underdevelopment" of black cinema in the United States. Namely, he articulates the variables of the market of film and the monopoly that film studios and producers such as those from Universal Studios held over the film industry and minor film companies such as the Lincoln Studios, which was a primarily African American studio dedicated to the creation of "race films." Such checks as corporate laws and censorship oftentimes allowed such large film companies to easily outsell and "buy" actors such as Noble Johnson, who could have helped African American cinema to really take off.

Another aspect of his argument circles around how African American cinema was used to portray African American women as a part of the early century's "Cult of Domesticity," which popularly subscribes to the idea that women are fragile and delicate and central to the conception of the family and home. Yet in popular cinema, that role was systematically withheld from the African American female actor. As such, studios such as Lincoln's studio cast African American women in fragile damsel-like roles, which allowed the African community to address their womens' absence from this female role and promote the concept of African American men able to protect African American women from racial violence. It is interesting to note however that the majority of African American women cast in these particular roles are described by taylor as "lighter" in skin color.

How can we reconcile that while the country and consequently the Hollywood film industry banned the representation of "miscegenation" in films and yet they preferred to employ, work with and cast African Americans who had lighter skin, despite the fact that that lightness itself exemplifies the history of amalgamation in the United States?