Operatic Melodramas

Operatic Melodramas | Abele Elizabeth Abele University of Pennsylvania [Eabele@astro.ocis.temple.edu] Operatic Melodramas Marcia Landy. Cinematic Uses ofthe Past. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. (264 pages, cloth, $49.95. $19.95, paper) Many critics have commented on the recent rise and valorization ofperiod films and have theorized about why their popularity is increasing. Approaching the millennium, are we becoming stuck in nostalgia or moving toward an end to history as we have known it? In Cinematic Uses ofthe Past, Professor Marcia Landy examines this interest in historical films for directors and audiences—not just during the "fin"but throughout the century. Landy examines the "past" and "history " in the broadest sense, seeing films set in the present or future as likewise evoking and reshaping the past, adding to the culture's popular understanding ofits history. Landy, followingher previous book Film, Politics, and Gramsci, solidly positions her critical approach to history and memory in the work ofGramsci, Nietzsche, Jameson, and Deleuze, intersecting their discussions to ground her view ofhistorical films as operatic melodramas that attempt to shape the folklore ofa culture's self-perceptions. The past seems especially valuable in exploring identity constructions based on nation, gender , sexuality, and race. She is generallyless interested in comparing the official historical record with its filmic representations, focusing instead on illuminating how melodrama (featuring star "divas" and operatic effects) reflects and redefines a period's "folklore" ofthe past, the "common sensical" and "shared" memory ofthe past that"explains" the shared present. In each chapter Landy examines several films—that share a common period, national cinema, and/or historic focus—for the particular way that diey shape me past's folkloric images, Deleuze's "crystals oftime." Using examples from Senegalese, Italian, American, British, and German cinema, she consistendy portrays melodrama as the common denominator: "Melodrama and history feed on familiarity, ritualization, repetition and overvaluation ofthe past to produce a déjàvu sense of'Yes, that is the way it was and is.'" Melodrama therefore builds the consensus necessary for the representation ofhistory—whether in official records or film—to pass into the culture's folklore. "Operatic" becomes another key element for Landy, not referring to opera per se, rather to cinematic representations that stress opulent music, visuals, and gestures—as excessive as Jameson's "excesses ofhistory"—over the spoken word and narrative content. In Chapter 3, "The Operatic as History: Two Risorgimento Narratives," she does not discuss adaptations, but how the Italian movies, Blassetti's 1860 and Viscounti's The Leopard, use operatic effects and techniques to heighten the melodrama ofnationalism and reveal the patterned rituals that move unfailingly toward the preordained end. Star personas—like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Diana Dors—become for Landy the ultimate melodramatic divas, as their excessive screen personas and personal histories enhance their films' melodrama, while complicating the historic narratives . Divas augment the sense of die always present and always past that Landy finds in cinematic appropriation ofhistory. Chapter 5, "'You Remember Diana Dors, Don't You?': History, Femininity, and the Law in 1950's and 1980's British Cinema," presents an interesting integration of a star persona , Diana Dors, into folklore. This important chapter provides the closest reading ofa specific historical event—the life of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged Diana Dors' Yield to the Night (1956) was received by reviewers and audiences as a retelling ofRuth Ellis' 1955 execution , but the film had actually been written two years earlier, specifically for Diana Dors. Landy explores the parallels between Dors' and Ellis' lives, and how their personal situations were shared by many British women ofthe 1950's. In the popular consciousness, the stories of Ellis, Dors, and her character in Yield to the Nightmerge. Miranda Richardson's portrayal of Ruth Ellis in Dance with a Stranger (1985) Landy suggests is based as much on Dors as Ellis. This retelling ofEllis' story during the Thatcher era reflects the lack ofchange for many British women from the 1950's to 1980's, still facing the constrictions ofgender and class—even ifMargaret Thatcher moved into the male position of"executioner." Though Landy's definition of"history" maybe at its most tenuous in...