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  • Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment
  • Michelle Leigh Farrell
Sadlier, Darlene J., ed. Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Pp. 183. ISBN 978-0-252-07655-8.

This is a collection of essays on melodrama's role in Latin American film, nation-building discourse, telenovelas, and even in the antimelodrama works of New Latin American Cinema [End Page 373] throughout the twentieth-and twenty-first centuries. The authors in this collection challenge the idea of melodrama used only to foster national pride connecting personal lives and national realities. Instead, they demonstrate how melodrama was used also to question and criticize that same national discourse.

The book is divided into an introduction and nine essays on melodramatic works from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. Each reflects on an aspect of melodrama's importance in Latin America, such as in establishing film industries, celebrating national identities, as well as influencing vanguard film, contemporary documentary, and telenovelas. In the introduction, Sadlier explains the changing definitions of the term as melodramas grew further from musical works towards a display of deep passions where in the end good conquers evil and the heroic story often is a metaphor for the nation. She further explains that Cinema Novo and social action films attempted to reflect the changing realities in Latin America by pushing to make antimelodramatic films. Sadlier challenges the reading of the New Latin American Cinema as antimelodramatic since the filmmakers often used the same language of melodrama to communicate their socially responsible themes. While the cinema vanguard rejected melodrama's clean reorganization of the world into good and evil where good always triumphs over evil, melodrama's success is impossible to ignore, and, as Sadlier writes, "[its study] helps us understand why it has been the most durable form of popular art in the Latin American Cinema" (15).

The articles vary in their focuses. Some, such as Gilberto Perez's "Melodrama of the Spirited Woman Aventurera", concentrate on the spirited woman as a common pivotal character in melodrama. Others look at the history and origins of a national industry. Luisa Alvaray's "Melodrama and the Emergence of Venezuelan Cinema" shows how the melodrama genre coming from Mexico ironically initiated a national film industry in Venezuela. In others, such as "The Building of a Nation: La guerra gaucha as Historical Melodrama" by Paula Félix-Didier and Andrés Levinson, "The Humiliation of the Father: Melodrama and Cinema Novo's Critique of the Conservative Modernization" by Ismael Xavier, "Women as Civilizers in 1940s Brazilian Cinema: Between Passion and the Nation" by Cid Vasconcelos, and "Luis Alcoriza; or, A Certain Antimelodramatic Tendency in Mexican Cinema" by Marvin D'Lugo, we see the uses of melodrama that broke with a traditional past by celebrating local identity, exceptional female characters, irony, or even parody of the genre itself.

Sadlier contributes to the work with an article entitled "Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Cinema de lágrimas" in which she tells of the British Film Institute's attempt to celebrate twentieth century film by commissioning over twenty filmmakers worldwide to make movies on the history of film in their countries. Brazilian Nelson Pereira dos Santos was chosen to represent all of Latin American Cinema with a single documentary. Instead, he created a fictional film entitled Cinema de lágrimas. This romance combines both melodrama and Cinema Novo in an unrequited love story about Rodrigo, who travels from Rio de Janeiro to Mexico to find the films his mother forbade him to see. Like Rodrigo, Pereira dos Santos returns to find the "mother" of all Latin American film genres: the melodrama.

Beyond fictional films, in "Weeping Reality: Melodramatic Imagination in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary", Baltar takes a close look at the 1994 documentary Peões (Peons) by Eduardo Coutinho to show the contemporary use of melodrama in an intimate form of documentary film by using the personal to represent society. The use of melodrama is also vital to present-day telenovelas. In the final essay, "Televisual Melodrama in an Era of Transnational Migration: Exporting the Folkloric Nation, Harvesting the Melancholic-Sublime", Benamou explains how melodrama continues to shape the present with...

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