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The Operatic and the Everyday in Post-war Italian Film Melodrama
by Louis Bayman
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Book Presentation:
Melodrama - the key cinematic form of post-war Italy, central to popular life and the dramatic arts
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.
Key Features
• Connects less established areas of research such as popular neorealism to more well-known subjects such as domestic melodrama
• Provides an analysis of cineopera or opera film
• Helps to pioneer the area of popular Italian cinema
• Contributes to both Italian Studies and Film Studies
About the Author:
Louis Bayman specialises in film and in Italian studies and has published a range of articles on melodrama, Italian cinema, and popular culture. He co-edited the volume Popular Italian Cinema, and World Cinema Directory: Brazil. He is an Early Career Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.
Press 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
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
Directory of World Cinema / Brazil (2014)
Dir. Natália Pinazza and Louis Bayman
World Film Locations / São Paulo (2013)
Dir. Natália Pinazza and Louis Bayman
> On a related topic:
Transatlantic Television Drama (2019)
Industries, Programs, and Fans
by Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills and Roberta Pearson
Melodrama Unbound (2018)
Across History, Media, and National Cultures
Dir. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
Melodrama After the Tears (2016)
New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood
Dir. Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann
Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames (2016)
The Future in the Instant
Mourning Films (2012)
A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema
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