Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Paperback)

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Product Description

Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema -- academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media -- create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal's selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.

About the Author

BARBARA KLINGER, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies and director of the Cultural Studies program at Indiana University, has published essays on film theory, criticism, and history in Screen, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (August 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253208750
• ISBN-13: 978-0253208750
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,050,268 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ideas aplenty but little organisation, December 28, 2006

By	Kevin Brianton (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

Meaning and melodrama is an investigation of the diverse ways, people have viewed the films of Douglas Sirk. It is an ambitious work that covers a huge amount of terain. She makes some interesting observations about the way perceptions change ovr time. It is simply not possible for a critic to look at the films of Rock Hudson - one of the definitive masculine heroes of the 1950s - and not take account of his homosexuality which was only publicly revealed when he died of AIDS many years later. Similarly, it is the off screen love life and political actions of DeMille, that may change a modern audience's perception of his films.

Professor Klinger asks what determines a film's meaning and ideological significance. She considers the internal features of film: its viewers, and its environment. For Klinger placing films in their historical context has larger implications for understanding the impact of cultural forces. It gives us an insight into the complex relationship between films and their contexts. She examines how institutions such as academia, the film industry and the media create an identity for films. She aims to "reconsider criticism as a specific kind of textual appropriation."

Klinger's basic idea is interesting; however, it seems to lead to self reinforcing statements. When the auterists were at their height as critical tradition such as the Sarris review of Sirk's body of work in the 1960s, it is not surprising that they regarded him as a fine director with a formal style. Similarly, it is not surprising that Marxists find issues of class in his films or that feminists find issues about gender. It would be astonishing if they didn't find them. As critical theories or frameworks rise and fall, it is not surprising that writers of that period follow the theories popular at that time. The ideological position of the critic is always going to be reflected in their criticism.

The book is interesting, but poorly organised and the whole work does not hang together and appears to be a series of seperate essays written with little relationship to each other. Aspects are fascinating, but the whole is unsatisfactory.