Love Is at the Bottom of Everything: Existential Melodrama
Abstract
The article is an attempt to define a specific variety of melodrama which was founded in the modernist cinema at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The analysis of its distinctive features and naming conventions derived from them (existential melodrama, modern intellectual melodrama, anti-melodrama) points to the differences between this genre and a classic melodrama. Artists such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Jerzy Kawalerowicz, by negating its emotional expressiveness, storyline closure or faith in the strength and value of emotions, created a quasi-genre formulae that proved to be one of the most capacious narrative schemes serving modernist artists in the 1960s and 1970s. A large number of films that exemplify this subtype of melodrama are Polish, which shows strong links of Polish cinema with the trends of the world cinema at the time.
Keywords:
melodrama, modernism, genre, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jerzy KawalerowiczReferences
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Authors
Miłosz Stelmachkwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
Absolwent filmoznawstwa na Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim; doktorant w Instytucie Sztuk Audiowizualnych tamże. Redaktor czasopisma o tematyce audiowizualnej „Ekrany” oraz czasopisma kulturalnego „Fragile”.
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Copyright (c) 2015 Miłosz Stelmach
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