World Cinema: Modernity and Melodrama

World Cinema: Modernity and Melodrama is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Sheetal Majithia.

Course Description
Film history and cultural criticism once approached melodrama as a failed and lowbrow form characterized by excessive rhetoric, one-dimensional characterizations, and schematized moral polarizations. In this course, however, we will survey scholarship of the last few decades, which exhibits a newfound interest in mode, particularly within postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist, frameworks. If as Peter Brooks argues, melodrama is a mode for the modern age, how does a sense of the postcolonial modern come to be visualized and articulated in cinematic melodrama? In this course, we will focus on how melodrama?s focus on gendered body figures comparative models of modernity with a focus on films drawn from national cinemas around the world. Films might include: All That Heaven Allows (USA), Ali Fear Eats the Soul (Germany), Cloud-capped star (India), No Regrets for Our Youth (Japan), The Goddess (China), Noony the Loony (Egypt), and Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Brazil) among others.