Eve’s Bayou (US 1997)

Southern (and Sirkian?) Melodrama

Watching Eve’s Bayou is to experience something that is strangely familiar whilst it is set in such an exotic landscape. A tale set in the bayou country of Louisiana, it is soaked in the idea of history and memory. The setting for Lemmons film evokes an emotional response in us – a place we feel we know even if we have not visited it. And as, for example, the mountains and coastline for Ireland carries with it universal stories and a particular connection with myths and legends that constantly interject into the present, so this landscape, as it is so unchanging, carries its past into its present. What Kasi Lemmons has achieved is to evoke the mythological and the ethereal so vividly within the setting of the film, but used it as a context for a family melodrama that is both modern and ancient because it is a story that can and is told time and again. And, therefore, we respond to the characters and are engaged in their story from a very human point of view. In addition, whilst we might not share that exact-same history of those characters, we can empathise with that feeling of being part of a family and a place and a set of cultural superstitions that form our home.

The film is narrated by the older Eve as she looks back at a particular devastating event in her childhood. Eve is a classic character – a young girl aged 10 – sitting on threshold between childhood and adulthood. As such, she instinctively responds to and takes part in those traditions of her world whilst being on the cusp of moving against them. She is her Aunt Mozelle’s tender and faithful acolyte as she receives suffering people to give them the gift of seeing where their loved ones have got to. No-one in the story doubts Mozelle’s second sight and vision, but the children rebel against their beleaguered mother’s reaction to these warnings. What performs so dramatically in this film is the juxtaposition of the ancient culture and (relatively) modern family existing there – with the incendiary tensions of an unhappy marriage and teenage children who are beginning to see what is really happening. The events of the film are pure melodrama in both senses – the extremes of violent action and the claustrophobic (and so easily dysfunctional) life of the family. We could equate it (narratively) to some of Douglas Sirk’s dramas of the 1950s, with the internal struggles of the family and the absolutely, immovably central figure of the woman within that family. Lynn Whitfield’s matriarch (Roz) is a Sirkian concoction of breathtaking beauty, rustling silk (the credits note that her costumes were ‘built’ by Patty Spinale) and sculptured eyebrows. Samuel L. Jackson perfectly encapsulates the persuasive charm of the patriarch, Louis, who is, ultimately, more callow and confused than impressive. Unlike Sirk, it is not Roz’s story throughout the film and it is only by the end that we truly appreciate her strength and her power. When Roz (mother) embraces her youngest (male) child, Poe, so intensely at the beginning of the film, she seems a little mean to her second daughter, Eve. The moment is quickly passed into a light-hearted chase – but later we can reflect that that embrace was for the only child that was hers entirely – Louis has stolen the two elder daughters entirely for himself. By the end, she has become a powerful centre who has truly learned how to ‘look to her children’ as Diahann Carroll’s soothsayer has warned her to do.

The frustrations of the marriage are the central focus of this film, with a representation of an African-American family who are affluent and well-regarded in their community – occupying the space that is generally reserved for WASPish families in American cinema. The ‘issue’ for these characters is (unusually) not race and its struggles – but their internal desires. Just as in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (the Sirkian-influenced exploration of repression in marriage) we are focussed on the women’s response. In Eve’s Bayou, however, it’s not the mother but the child who is our centre of consciousness as we watch. Eve also actively drives the narrative. Eve hates with the passion of a ten-year-old towards someone who has harmed the person she most loves and believes in and, as a result, she is the instigator of particular events in the action. The story constantly juxtaposes the feeling of events that are fated (Mozelle’s foreseeing of a child’s accident) and events that are effected by the deliberate (if unknowing) action of people. Eve is responsible for these events if not to blame for them – and the narrative manages to walk this incredibly tight balance without losing sympathy or empathy for any of the characters involved.

It’s interesting that Louis is the doctor – when the film is dense with references to others forms of superstitious healing. These are so often related to the female rather than the male sensibility – the man being related to science (knowing). The film clearly sides with the power of superstition and female ‘knowing’ – the person that can look into your eyes or hold your hands – and just know what you are thinking, is the powerful force within this film.

Which brings me back to Mozelle. Whilst Roz is the desperate housewife, Mozelle is the repository of power in the family. Her voodoo heals where Louis’ medicine is ineffective. Lemmons has written some tour-de-force female protagonists and has decided to shoot them in the style of a costume drama to ensure that, visually on screen, they have maximum impact. Their vibrant costumes are not modern but belong to a different world which enhances our impression that this film is from a different place. Both women are completely desirable and like ‘candy’ on the screen – vivid, strong and ultra-feminine. However, this is not a costume drama staged rigidly in one era of American life – the 50s or 60s, that we can recognise and immediately to give us a context for behaviour and morals. Instead, Lemmons appears to be seeking after a much more ambiguous feeling – a time outside of any era and linking to the ancient landscape it sits in. It has been termed Southern Gothic and to draw on a comment for a very different film (Sling Blade): “As in most Southern gothic fiction, the past weights heavily on the present and it gives Sling Blade an ominous feel.” (Greg Meritt: Celluloid Mavericks). The same is true of Eve’s Bayou which is steeped in a feeling of a world living in both past and present, and evoking the mythical resonance of something like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (a graduate of the same film school as Charles Burnett) is resonant here – about the families of the Gullah community – reiterating ancient customs through their poetic language. In Daughters they are reiterating them just at the point they know they are about to lose them – as the community moves from the islands onto the mainstream. In Eve’s Bayou there is no sense of a threat of change impinging on the lives of those – the final shot shows the sisters watching a sunset with every possibility of life remaining the same, the ebb of loss and tragedy an accepted part of that experience.

Winning an Independent Spirit Award for this film in 1998, Kasi Lemmons has continued to act and direct. She is currently in pre-production with a gospel musical version of the nativity story (co-written) called Black Nativity. Roy tells me the (very good) print of Eve’s Bayou arrived recently at Bradford covered in dust – what a shame it’s seemingly become a hidden visual and thematic jewel.

Coco avant Chanel (France 2009)

Coco (Audrey Tautou) demonstrates her understanding of the erotic charge offered by the 'orphanage dress' she creates as fancy dress for her friend, the Parisian actress Emilienne (Emmanuelle Devos).

Gill Branston described this film as a ‘chick flick’ given the majority of the audience in Cardiff were women. I’m not sure there was the same majority in Hebden Bridge, but then Hebden doesn’t follow conventional demographics. I was pleasantly surprised by the film and I enjoyed it throughout. I can see why some audiences, expecting a straight biopic about Chanel were disappointed, but Anne Fontaine, director of a script she co-wrote does exactly what the film’s title suggests and offers us a young Coco before she became the iconic haute couture designer  – although there is a strange coda to the film which shows the more mature Chanel at some indeterminate time in the future when she clearly is famous.

The film is interesting in terms of its take on that French take on the ‘heritage drama’ that developed across the Channel at much the same time as its British counterpart. The houses and costumes look very good and all the performances are fine. The narrative worked well for me (some find it slow) and though I can see that Coco might be an unappealing character for some, I found her interesting and intriguing. It isn’t really a biopic as such as it offers only part of a life – and that the life before the subject had gained the height of her fame. I guess that the principal generic repertoire is really the romance. But it is also in a way a history lesson. I know little about fashion and care less, but the film certainly showed me why Chanel could be considered as innovative in costume design in France before 1914.

The major impact for me was the star performance of Audrey Tautou. I think she is one of the few contemporary stars who bears comparison with the great stars of classical cinema. Tautou has a distinctive face and the kind of slim body that shows off the clothes to perfection. Unlike most youngish Hollywood female stars, Tautou has her own star image – the modern gamine with a sense of determination. It seems to be working here as the film is doing reasonable business in markets across Europe. It has taken over $3 million in the UK , $2 million in Germany, $2.2 million in Spain and $1.6million in Italy to go with the $6 million plus in France. With the smaller markets chipping in and the US to come, the final total will be near the Warner Bros investment in production costs. With a reasonable afterlife on DVD and TV this might make up for some of the losses on A Very Long Engagement from the same star and studio.

El orfanato Part 2

 

The UK poster for the film

Nick posted his reaction to El orfanato a couple of months back and now that I’m teaching the film, I’d like to expand on his comments about one of the best films of the year in UK distribution. The DVD of the film offers a rich mixture of extras and commentaries which help to explain the director’s approach – and why it was so enthusiastically ‘presented’ by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro’s name on the credits helps to sell the film in the US and UK, but it is a little misleading in terms of audience expectations. El orfanato is much more closely connected to Spanish cinema history/influences than El laberinto del fauno, even though the latter refers more directly to Spanish history. The different box office careers of the films are interesting – in Spain, El orfanato was the much bigger success, grossing over €24 million and taking top box office position for the year (by comparison, Pan’s Labyrinth took under €8 million). In the US, the fortunes of the films were reversed with Pan’s Labyrinth taking five times more at the box office ($37million to $7million). In the UK, Pan’s Labyrinth took slightly more. Overall, the figures show a very successful pair of films, which are both Spanish-language productions with a focus on children in various genre mixes that involve horror and fairy tales. The difference between the other genre repertoires involved in the mix is the means of separating them.

Perhaps the most interesting essay on El orfanato that I have read was published in Sight and Sound, April 2008. Maria Delgado situates El orfanato in terms of the lost children and families from the Spanish Civil War, making the observation that it is only within the last year that the Spanish government has finally passed legislation that allows families to finally come to terms with their losses:

Spain’s Law of Historical Memory was finally passed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government late last year, with the result that the bodies of between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians who opposed the right-wing Nationalists during the Civil War and its aftermath can be exhumed from the mass graves in which they are believed to lie. The Orphanage adeptly explores the legacy of a buried past.

Delgado references a wide range of films in her persuasive account of how El orfanato is so deeply embedded within Spanish film culture. I haven’t seen all the films she mentions, but certain links – to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and to both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) are ones that struck me straight away. The last two titles both feature Ana Torrent, then aged 6 and 8 respectively. She made her name with these two films, becoming a child star right at the end of Franco’s domination of Spanish culture – when children were venerated in cinema and society at large. Both films were critiques of fascism presented in highly ambiguous metaphors. In Cría cuervos, Ana is a little girl who believes she has murdered her father – motivated by her mother’s death for which she thinks her father was responsible. (The father was an Army Officer and Ana’s family offers a kind of microcosm of Spain under Franco.) Ana’s mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (director Carlos Saura’s wife) and she also plays the older Ana who is later revealed to be telling the story in flashback. In El orfanato, Geraldine Chaplin plays the ’spirit medium’ who Simón’s mother hires when he goes missing.

None of these references will mean much outside Spain, but they clearly had resonances for sections of the Spanish audience. Some other aspects of the plot offer more universal symbols associated with 20th century wars – e.g. human remains hidden in ovens.

The extracts I have been using during an event analysing El orfanato are:

The Innocents (UK 1961)

The Others (Spain/US 2001) 

Dark Water (Japan 2002)

Kilómetro 31 (Mexico 2006)

What has struck me most is the repetition of quite specific elements across several films. For instance, drawings of ghosts by children occur in The Ring (US 2002), The Others, Dark Water and El orfanato. Children’s games such as hide and seek or ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ appear in The Innocents, Dark Water and El orfanato etc.

I’ll try to add to this over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here’s a useful fansite reference:

http://www.horrorphile.net/el-orfanato/

Black History Month Daughters of the Dust (US/UK 1991)

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was an idea when Dash was studying at the American Film Institute in 1975, to be finally released in 1991.  It’s a feminist project in a number of ways – its focus on the stories of the women of the family, of a sense of a matriarchy within that family and, not least, in Dash’s blending a story that resonates both the personal and the political.

The film is set on the Sea Islands (sometimes called the Golden Islands) that lie off the coast off South Carolina. These islands were, originally, a staging post for slaves brought from West Africa before they were turned over to their masters on the plantations. Therefore, the descendants living on these islands have a very specific culture that descends from their West African roots, brought and surviving in a contained area within the new world.

Dash’s family is descended from Sea Island Gullahs, and her film is drenched in the very particular cultural knowledge – of the way the language is spoken, the food, and even (for Dash) the way the characters move. It is a celebration of her own family history, but it is an exploration of a history of African-American history. Tellingly, Dash comments herself that this was a beginning into a new life, but that the people arriving brought with them the knowledge of a whole culture. It is interesting to reflect that, arguably, the history for African-Americans has become that history of oppression and release, thereby ignoring the depth and wealth of history that came from the original home. The search for roots has become a dialectical engagement with that oppression, searching through that for the mythical home that was denied several generations. In Dash’s film, there is a representation of people who live in both, live in a place of repression but which is occupied by their family still living, fully living, their cultural traditions everyday.  Nothing is lost – it is a celebration of that longevity and living connectedness to worlds that are worlds away. This is symbolised immediately in the presence of several generations – from the dead spirits, to the unborn child who narrates the film.

In honouring these traditions, Dash’s film has immense attention to visual detail. Its vivid cinematography represents, for example, a banquet, in all its colours and textures. It is held by the families on the sands before several of them leave to travel north, a move from the islands to find better opportunities on the mainland. The cinematographic focus on the food is, itself, a rendering of the how sharing food is a sharing of traditions and feelings that unite and create a community, even for those who never shared the original experience. Whilst Dash identifies that experience as very specific to her community and to that film, it is very universal; across cultures and religious traditions we can (hopefully) all recognise how grandparents, together with parents, drip-feed our cultural history through food. (Mine’s London working class high tea. In Dash’s hands, it might have filmic possibilities. What’s yours?)

Dash’s attention to this kind of detail makes for a different kind of narrative structure for the film – one which, consciously, rejects a Western male narrative drive (her words). Instead, the story unravels and unfolds – taking place over the day and a half before some of the family leave, but moving back and forwards in time, incorporating black and white footage of the era and including fantasy sequences. Set in 1902, Dash aims to catch the turn of one century as we were moving to the turn of the next. It moves around the small area of the island, identifying areas of cultural history. The visit to the graves, where sea shells are piled up on each grave, is an example of where we move through all these different landscapes in her film as one of the members of the family group. The languid exposition, so that we attend different scenes and events, does challenge any ideas you might have about narrative drive in a film. Instead, it unfolds with a sense of existing within this world, within this culture and this particular group of people.

It does capture a moment in time- when the younger generation designs to move on, to find ’something better’ and the old world and order have to be left behind. Dash’s film makes real the cost of that through the character of Nana Peasant (a mesmeric Cora Lee-Day) – who lets go her family with that kind of understanding that old age (when will that be valued, now, in Western media forms?) allows. This culture is represented as a matriarchy. And Dash’s style of narrative represents that matriarchal strength as a spinal cord through the old and new. Women dispute with each other, with their men, tell stories to their children, cook, comfort each other – they look forward and backward within their own culture. Women, I think, recognise this form of storytelling very easily – it has moments of high melodrama that punctuate moments of relative normality or banality. Dash describes it as unfolding in vignettes, and it’s challenging to watch because it lacks the drive of plot and conflict we might be used to in mainstream cinema.

Dash’s film had a long gestation due to the inevitable need to convince potential backers about its marketability – a film about family, with a focus on women. It found an audience (released, initially, on one screen in USA) and grossed $1.6 million. An audience (or audiences) were ready for a representations of a different culture, using a different narrative form. Of course, it did not result in institutional change or breakthrough, but Dash continues to work. The vision of Daughters of the Dust came out of years of work in American Independent cinema – Dash used actors she had worked with before, including Tommy Hicks (who appeared in She’s Gotta Have It). She regards her opportunity as theirs – a characteristic of the independent sector, which rejects the hierarchical order of mainstream cinema and its auteurist approach.  This film exists in how it speaks to a particular audience – the user reviews on www.imdb.com are stimulating and detailed responses that prove this.

Official website

What is melodrama?

In response to our regular contributor, Srikanth, who asked us to explain what we mean by melodrama on this blog, I’ve dug out some old notes and dusted them down (See Srikanth’s comment on the posting for The Lady of Musashino). I hope they go some way to explaining why film scholars adopt a rather different view on melodrama compared to film reviewers. The notes were first written in 1998 for a project focusing on three melodramas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (West Germany 1974) Jane Campion’s The Piano (France/Australia/NZ 1994) and Udayan Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic (UK/France 1997). The opening sections of these notes follow a brief intro below:

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‘Melodrama’ is used on this blog to refer to an ‘open’ category of films that might include a large number of what reviewers refer to as ‘dramas’, ‘romances’, ‘thrillers’ etc. (In the left-hand sidebar on this blog, ‘Melodrama’ is one of the largest categories.) The genre repertoire we envisage is both porous and fluid – accepting elements from other repertoires and itself overflowing into them. This open quality is problematic for reviewers and most audiences. It is also a problem that definitions of melodrama within the film industry have changed over time so that in some ways, melodrama now means the opposite to what it once meant. In the Hollywood of the 1930s, melodrama could be used to describe action films, but now it usually refers to ‘relationship films’.

Why is film studies interested in melodrama?

Besides its fluidity, melodrama has been an important subject for film and media Studies for three main reasons.

1. Melodrama has always been primarily concerned with ‘popular culture’. Although the subject matter may sometimes be the lives of the rich and sophisticated, the appeal has always been to the widest possible audience. The modern offspring of melodrama includes both the disaster film like Titanic and television soap operas like EastEnders and Coronation Street or, in global terms, telenovelas such as Betty la fea (Ugly Betty). This concentration on the popular suited the polemical nature of film and media studies when it was establishing itself against more traditional academic views of ‘high culture’.

2. Partly because of its popular appeal, melodrama has often been despised by critics – ‘melodramatic’ is seen as a term of abuse, whether it describes a dramatic scene in a film or our behaviour in real life. Definitely linked to this is the association of melodrama with feminine rather than masculine concerns.

Twentieth century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority. (Jane Tompkins (1985), Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, quoted by Christine Gledhill (1987))

Melodramas are often mainly about women, very often written by women, and at certain times have been enjoyed by women to a much greater extent than by men. It is not surprising then that much of the 1970s work on film melodramas was undertaken by feminist writers, interested in reclaiming what they saw to be important works which had been neglected because of the assumption that ‘women’s films’ were less important. Fear Eats the Soul and The Piano are both films which have benefited from greater audience and critical attention because of the work of feminist critics like Laura Mulvey.

2. Melodramas deal in emotional conflict, much of it centred around family and sexual relationships. There are ‘male melodramas’ with men in central roles and, crucially, there are themes of racial and class conflict in a wide range of melodramas. All of the three main films addressed in this project have been chosen because of their potent mixture of race, class and gender conflicts. Because of this emotional powder keg at the centre of so many melodramas, it isn’t surprising that many critics have seized upon specific melodramas as providing examples of ‘sites of ideological struggle’ with the despised melodrama genre enabling filmmakers and audiences to pursue critiques of contemporary society via popular entertainment. This will be explored through work on the famous melodrama director Douglas Sirk in 1950s Hollywood and in some of the quite heated discussion over The Piano.

Melodrama and the modern audience

We will trace the roots of melodrama as a genre and look at examples of ‘pure’ melodramas from earlier periods of cinema. The films we have selected are not necessarily designed for a mass, popular audience –in fact, they have all tended to be screened in ‘art’ cinemas. How then, does this fit with our assertion that melodrama is about the popular? The most popular forms of ‘moving image culture’ in the 1990s, television soap operas and drama series, are certainly derived from melodramas, but they tend to promote narrative content ą the issues and human stories – over and above the performance and presentation of the stories –the formal or stylistic aspects. This is where television differs from cinema. Modern popular cinema on the other hand might be argued to be more about performance and presentation than about story – a return to the sense of spectacle which has always been an important aspect of cinema. Studying film melodrama might help us to make sense of this set of differences. Do we read and enjoy Titanic and EastEnders in the same way?

The Origins of Melodrama

The word ‘melodrama’ comes from the Greek melos = music and drama = action, presented as a performance. So, a melodrama is a drama with music – a definition which would cover most entertainment films that use music to invoke moods and to signal emotional themes or to heighten sensations such as fear or suspense. We clearly need to be much more precise. Let’s consider some of the roots of melodrama in theatre and literature.

Christine Gledhill, in her influential book Home is Where the Heart Is (1987), stresses the importance of the the links between melodrama and the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century. In Britain and France, two or three theatres received royal patents granting them a monopoly over the performance of ‘official’ plays, which largely drew on a classical repertoire. These theatres, in which plays were defined by spoken dialogue, maintained the ‘standards’ and the ideas and values of the aristocratic elite. The growing urban audience, largely outside London and composed of the newly emerging ‘middle classes’ and the industrial working-class, demanded entertainment which was forced to draw on established ‘folk’ art and other popular entertainment traditions: ‘dumb show, pantomime, harlequinade, ballets, spectacles, acrobatics, clowning, busking, the exhibition of animals and freaks, and, above all, musical accompaniment and song’ (Gledhill 1987).

These popular forms fused into a new form of ‘illegitimate theatre’. The three main features of this new form, which will be relevant for our study of film melodramas, were spectacle, performance and music. You might wish to consider the extent to which these three features of popular entertainment are still capable of dividing audiences along class lines or between groups who argue about ‘serious meanings’ as against ‘pleasure’. How often are films criticised for presenting ‘only spectacle without substance’? Similarly, the rise of the star has provided a focus on performance away from ‘content’ or ‘message’. As we will note later, these same arguments can be applied outside Europe, especially where communities have been suppressed and have sought to express themselves through popular entertainment. What is carnival in Brazil and the Caribbean about if it isn’t spectacle, performance and music?

By the end of the eighteenth century, the illegitimate theatre had developed a sophisticated mise en scène – literally meaning the methods used to ‘put things into a scene’, to combine spectacle, performance and music to produce meaning. Later, we will see that the idea of a filmic mise en scène has been central to an understanding of film melodramas. In the nineteenth century, popular entertainment developed rapidly with the spread of the industrial revolution and the growth of urban centres. The illegitimate theatre gradually began to become accepted by the authorities and in the extraordinary turbulent period of change which constituted the nineteenth century, melodrama developed in relation to a range of different influences:

• gothic fiction appeared in the mid eighteenth century and produced sensational stories about ‘good and evil’ which exaggerated the traditional conflicts of popular entertainments. The evil aristocrat who seduced the young servant girl was now in league with the devil. This genre which was revived towards the end of the nineteenth century with novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, can be seen as contributing to the climate of sensation and dramatic conflict which suited melodrama.
• economic and social change were major features of life in the nineteenth century. Families moved from the country into towns. Women ‘went out’ to work in factories (work had nearly always been at home or on the farm before). Time, according to the clock, was a new factor in lives which had been governed by daylight and farm tasks. Most important, people travelled and met a much wider range of potential marriage partners. Travel broadened minds and broke down traditions. The establishment of colonies abroad and the prospect of emigration promised further escape routes and the chance of new experiences.
• new ideas about the family. While working-class women were going to the factory, the married women of the emerging middle-classes were gaining freedom from work and seeking new roles in society. The Victorian period is remembered for its ideas about ‘respectability’ and ‘double standards’ with a consequent public morality which recognised the ‘fall’ from respectability to destitution and degeneracy. Victorian narratives can contain both dramatic rises and falls in social standing. Check out the novels of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins for stories of fortunes won and lost and of bequests and inheritances which could change people’s lives – ‘proving’ family status was important in these circumstances. (Recent UK adaptations of Dickens’ Bleak House and Little Dorrit have translated the novels into a serial melodrama format.)
• the rise of the picture story. Gledhill points out that during the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was an enormous interest in all forms of ‘pictorialising’, not just through the new forms of photography and lantern slides, but also through painting, displayed in new public art galleries, and illustrated books, stained glass etc. Many of the images so created drew on the mise en scène of the previously ‘illegitimate theatre’, so that in a simple tableau of family members, the decor and the gestures of the individual characters could be easily read in such scenes as the the family getting ready to sail to a new land or awaiting the news of a father’s disgrace etc.

Melodrama and early cinema

All of these factors meant that when the cinema began to develop as a narrative form early in the new century, it was able to draw upon a wide range of long-standing popular entertainment forms (e.g. in the fairground, where some early cinema shows were presented), classical theatre and the well-established melodramas of the new urban theatres. The theatrical companies which staged increasingly sophisticated melodramas bequeathed several important features for a cinema of popular genres. They had developed:

• complex systems of lifts and rolling scenery props, allowing spectacular scenes on stage (a locomotive crash, runaway horses etc!) with highly-skilled teams of technicians. 
• ‘stock companies’ of actors who appeared in each show, playing a particular ‘type’ of character, who would be recognised by the audience. This idea would be taken up by film producers and directors. You might even see this in contemporary cinema with the use of character actors like Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi etc. Certainly it was true of directors like John Ford or Orson Welles (the Mercury Theatre Group) in the 1940s.

‘Silent Cinema’ drew heavily on the conventions of the theatrical melodrama. It was not of course ‘silent’ – piano or even full orchestral accompaniment allowed music to play a great part in telling the story and emphasising the emotion. Acting in the cinema was developed from similar techniques in theatrical melodramas, adapted only when filmmakers realised the possibilities of the close-up and the power of editing. Melodrama was an important genre in national cinemas across the world from around 1910 onwards and by 1927 had become highly developed in terms of mise en scène and camerawork.
The coming of sound was in some ways a step back for melodrama – Hollywood, in particular began to concentrate on dialogue and the early sound cameras were in any case difficult to move. Hollywood had attracted many European directors, skilled in sophisticated melodrama techniques, during the 1920s and in the 1930s many more made the trip, escaping from Hitler. They were frustrated during the early sound period, but later, especially in the 1950s with the introduction of CinemaScope and the greater use of Technicolor, they were able to draw on their experience of European art and theatre traditions in devising extravagant mise en scène and camera movements. Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder were all Germans or Austrians with this experience.

Europe and America

Melodrama is a universal form – it is found in virtually every national cinema. Yet the form it takes does vary. You may wish to discuss how familiar melodrama emotional conflicts might be represented in different societies. One major criterion of melodrama is often argued to be ‘the happy ending’ (in order to distinguish melodrama from tragedy). This is certainly the case with most American melodramas, which perhaps for Europeans run the risk of being ‘over sentimental’. By contrast, melodramas in societies with strict codes of honour can often be concerned with the inevitability of defeat and destruction (as in Japanese or Chinese melodramas) or, at best the ‘bittersweet’ taste of the Austrian stories told by Ophuls or Wilder.
In an ‘open’ society where passionate behaviour is unremarkable, a melodrama will be very different from a similar story in Britain where ‘repressed emotion’ can lead to sudden outbursts from characters who are normally restrained. By importing directors, writers and stars with ‘European sensibilities’, Hollywood was able to have the best of both worlds. As we have noted in the introduction, melodramas were often despised by critics of the period, despite (or perhaps, because of?) their popularity with audiences. They were dismissed as trivial, trashy etc. – implying that they were made without skill or care. This was far from the case. Melodramas were arguably the most difficult films to make, requiring extraordinary control by the director over the sets, the camera operations and the performances of the actors. When the French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma began to promote film directors of ‘popular cinema’ as worthy of study, they chose in many cases the directors of melodramas.

Defining and classifying melodramas

There are relatively few ‘pure’ film melodramas, which fit a particular set of criteria, and even then there are several different types of relatively pure melodrama. Our task is to define melodrama in much more general terms. We might begin by taking all films and dividing them into two very broad categories – action and melodrama.

Action films tend to be ‘goal-orientated’ – they progress to a particular resolution such as the war is won, the killer is captured etc. Action narratives have conflicts which are tackled through action – characters go out and do something. It follows from this that the editing of sequences to represent movement by characters is of central importance. By contrast, melodramas are about relationships between characters and the resolution of a melodrama narrative concerns the restoration of one or more relationships, or their replacement by others. In a sense, melodramas are more ‘circular’ than ‘linear’. The conflicts in melodramas can often not be resolved by ‘action’, it is the failure of characters to act or even to speak about ‘the problem’ which creates the conflict. The emotional struggle in a melodrama must be expressed or ‘displaced’ in some way. Instead of the editing of action sequences, melodramas deal in mise en scène, performance and music.

“Almost throughout the picture, I used deep-focus lenses which have the effect of giving a harshness to the objects and a kind of enamelled, hard surface to the colours. I wanted this to bring out the inner violence, the energy of the characters which is all inside them and can’t break through.”

This explanation by Douglas Sirk about the colour in Written on the Wind (US 1956) is quoted by Thomas Elsaesser (1972) as the best possible description of what 1950s melodramas were about. In the film, a wealthy Texas oilman marries a designer, while his sister sets her sights on the oilman’s best friend. The oilman turns to the bottle when it seems there will be no son and heir. When his wife does get pregnant, suspicion falls on the best friend . . . On the face of it, a familiar melodrama narrative, which only gains distinction from the way it is presented. Later, of course, a television series called Dallas picked up on the fascination most audiences find with sex and wealth in a society like that of the Texas oil country and created one of the most popular television programmes worldwide (as critics pointed out, families in Africa and Asia could recognise the tensions within the family circle).

So, although many films will have ‘melodrama moments’ (even action pictures will have moments where emotions are expressed through mise en scène, performance and music – think of the ‘standoff’ before a gunfight in a western), the ‘pure melodrama’ will concentrate solely on relationships, and audiences will seek clues to the emotional state of the characters through expressive use of props, gesture etc. These relationships will often come into conflict because of the disruptive effect of some external agency – social or cultural change or ‘difference’. Whether these effects invoke a discussion of ‘issues’ amongst the audience or are simply accepted as part of the mechanics of the plot is what makes melodrama interesting. Certainly, critics have latched on to the potentially subversive nature of melodrama. What is more certain is that the issues in melodrama relate directly to personal relationships rather than threats to the community or nation which characterise action films. At the most basic level, film melodramas must display these two features:

• expressive style
• concern with personal relationships

This is the fluidity of melodramas, which can be set almost anywhere and cross with many other more tightly defined genres (including ostensibly action genres). One of our problems in defining particular types of melodrama is that the term itself was used very loosely by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s and 1940s to describe most forms of drama, including action films and thrillers (see Maltby 1995). It was almost as if the term applied to genre pictures generally. In contrast, despite the impression given by some current writers, the studios themselves placed high value on the idea of the ‘woman’s picture’ (it was the male critical establishment which despised the genre). The studios recognised the spending power of the female audience. We can define a number of possible melodrama genre types:

crime melodrama – a drama in which crime is the cause of the problems faced by characters, rather than the basis for an action narrative (i.e. the gangster film). Many crime melodramas are better known as films noirs.

film noir – some films in the period 1940-58 are now often categorised under the banner of film noir, because of their stylistic features or general reference to the ‘underside’ of contemporary post-war American society. Classic examples of the genre, such as In A Lonely Place (1950) or Mildred Pierce (1945) are very much more interested in relationships than in crimes. It is also notable that many of the European emigrés who developed mise en scène and camera techniques, were also involved in film noir.

costume melodrama – historical films can focus on action (the epic or swashbuckler) or relationships. The costumes and the different social mores of earlier periods allow for an ‘excessive’ mise en scène. French and British costume films often look back to the eighteenth century (e.g. the Gainsborough Studio films in Britain in the 1940s). Are the current round of Victorian literary adaptations classifiable as melodramas? Some certainly make strong claims.

gothic melodrama – ‘gothic’ implies horror and certain Victorian costume films may have an added element of danger or ‘evil’.

woman’s picture – like youth pictures, these films are defined by their audience address rather than by specific themes or styles. The central characters will be women and the narratives will centre on issues important to women. Some films may be ‘romances’ or comedies. Many of the 1940s melodramas were targeted directly at the disproportionately large female domestic audience during the war years. They were often disparagingly termed ‘weepies’ or ‘tearjerkers’. A more modern variant is the idea of the ‘chick flick’.

family melodrama – maternal melodrama or male melodrama. This is the typically American form of melodrama, focusing on families and often on specific mother/daughter or father/son relationships. The 1950s melodramas were specifically associated with the middle-class American family, but earlier films, such as Stella Dallas (1937) also addressed the issue of working-class origins and ‘marrying out’ into the middle-class.

colonial melodrama – the ‘exotic’ orient provided the location for melodramas which were based on the possibility of corruption of the ‘civilised white settler’ by the native culture in Asia and Africa. These are a feature of British and French cinemas, as well as Hollywood. Much more problematic for contemporary filmmakers, there are still examples of this type in the 1990s. A subset of this type comprises American melodramas dealing with the experience of African-Americans under slavery and its aftermath in the South.
There are other melodramas which are perhaps best described by their relationship to more familiar genres – melodramas set in the American west for example, both during the classic period of the late nineteenth century and more recently. There are also hybrids with horror.

Narrative analysis

As we have indicated above, the interest in melodrama centres on the relationships between characters, rather than the achievement of specific goals. The story as such in many melodramas is at once both very simple and sometimes highly contrived. After you have seen Fear Eats the Soul, you will probably be able to recall the main points of the story quite easily. We tend not to study melodrama to understand how a complex cinematic narrative is constructed in terms of dealing with ‘time and space’ – it is possibly more productive to choose a thriller with plenty of ‘cause and effect’ chains of action.

Some of the common narrative analysis theories, such as those derived from Propp’s analysis of fairy tales, are not easily applied to melodrama. These theories look at the conflicts set up by the opposition of a hero and villain, with the hero embarking on a quest. Although early theatrical melodramas certainly dealt with crudely drawn ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’, film melodramas about relationships do not set up characters in the same way. Certainly audiences will identify with particular characters and will be concerned about how they behave in the circumstances set up by the film, but will they expect them to ‘win out’ – and what will ‘winning’ mean?

More useful, perhaps, is the observation about narrative structure, set out by Tzvetan Todorov. He suggested that most narratives are structured around a ‘disruption’ to the prevailing status quo. This leads in turn to a set of conflicts in which the characters struggle to solve the problems created. Eventually some form of resolution is achieved and a new ‘equilibrium’ is established, which may be the same or different to the previous status quo. This seemingly simple observation provides a good description of what happens in the film which is effectively our starting point – Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (US 1955). In this story the disruption occurs when a respectable middle-class widow meets and falls in love with a younger man. The conflicts arise with her son and daughter and friends at the country club, all of whom disapprove, both of the unstated sexual liaison and the fact that the man is decidedly ‘bohemian’. The pressure from her family and friends nearly makes her end the affair and only after a dramatic accident does she rebuild the relationship. In this case it is a ‘happy ending’ which produces a new equilibrium, although there is a ‘price’ of pain to pay for the promised future.

A similar structure applies to Fear Eats the Soul and My Son the Fanatic, although the extra dimension of racial and religious difference introduces another layer of conflict. You will have to decide whether the resolutions of these films are ‘happy’ or not and what kinds of price has to be paid. The Piano is slightly different in that the disruption is a journey which takes a mother and child away from one family situation and forcibly places them in another. We learn so little about the previous period of ‘stability’ that it is hard to judge what changes are taking place – although audiences can read into the story a great deal about the characters. The conflicts are about how the woman can achieve her desires, although again these are not obvious or clear-cut. The resolution of the film is not convincing in the sense that we can’t be sure if she has achieved what she wants or how she feels about it. This pushes us to reconsider the struggles earlier. Although The Piano is in effect a costume melodrama, set in the nineteenth century, this lack of resolution and our subsequent return to the struggle means that the film has great resonance for contemporary audiences, who have little difficulty thinking through the issues in a more modern context.

The colonial dimension of The Piano (it is set on a ‘plantation’ in New Zealand), points us neatly towards a further set of theoretical ideas suggested by the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Genre theorists borrowed Strauss’ idea of a conflict structure based on binary oppositions to explain how many genre films were constructed. The oppositions which we can find in colonial melodramas are striking and provide us with useful insights into how a colonial narrative produces meaning. These narratives are based on ideas and values that the characters are likely to have had at the time. Consider the following oppositions:

White Settler                ‘Native’

Civilised                       Savage
Educated                      Ignorant
Controlled                    Wild
Sexually restrained      Sexually promiscuous
Moral                           Amoral
Rational                       Superstitious

You can probably come up with further oppositions which explain how the Victorian settlers viewed ‘native’ peoples. These are not necessarily presented as straight opposites. Rather, they map out a terrain. The European melodrama is rarely interested in the ‘colonised’ peoples, so the main work of the melodrama narrative is to look at the struggle of white male and female settlers to develop a healthy emotional state in the midst of the overpowering ‘otherness’ of the colonial environment. Usually it is the white woman who ‘succumbs’ – this always been thought more shocking than the white male with the ‘native girl’. In terms of mise en scène, it is worth thinking about the colonial environment, in which the heat, the scents of spices and exotic flowers, the strange animals and spectacular landscapes all appeal to the senses (‘arouse’ emotions) more than the familiar ‘home’ environment.

Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin in The Piano

In The Piano the woman is drawn, not directly to a native (Maori) figure, but instead to a white man who has ‘gone native’ – in some ways an even more despicable figure for respectable society than the native male (who can sometimes be stereotyped as the ‘good native’ or the ‘noble savage’). The white man who adopts native habits has not only betrayed his own culture, but has also degraded what is worthwhile in native culture. When you see The Piano you should find little difficulty identifying sequences in which these binary oppositions are emphasised and which clearly propel the narrative forward. What makes The Piano particularly interesting (and perhaps led to some of the controversy over reactions to the film) is that the central woman character is also trapped in another set of oppositions – as a woman in the strictly patriarchal Victorian society. She has been sent/brought to New Zealand essentially as a piece of male property. Her transgression – the affair with Baines – is doubly marked, she has both broken out of her marital relationship, her enslavement as property, and sullied herself with a ‘degenerate’ man.

It is this double marking or ‘over determination’ which makes The Piano so much a melodrama. We have emphasised so far that melodrama mise en scène is expressive and excessive – everything seems to be exaggerated, almost to the point of hysteria. In this context, over determination can apply to both the events – piled on top of each other – and particular aspects of the mise en scène. To take just one example, much comment has been made about the costumes in The Piano. The woman wears a crinoline – a voluminous skirt supported by a rigid cage. This is both supportive (the woman and her daughter use the crinoline as a tent when they are landed on the beach) and restrictive (as she tries to cross the uneven and boggy ground – the endless rain is also a potential sign of sexual release). This supportive/restrictive clothing also provides great erotic excitement for the man in terms of what it hides and obstructs him from accessing.

The double marking of the woman in The Piano means that the colonial ‘discourse’ or argument is to a certain extent obscured by the feminist discourse – does our positive response to what the woman achieves by breaking out of her unhappy marriage prevent us reading the colonial discourse?

Exercise
As a preliminary to watching The Piano, try to map out the oppositions you think might be relevant for middle-class men and women in Victorian society. Which qualities would be expected from men rather than women etc.?

References

Hanif Kureshi (1998) My Son the Fanatic, London: Faber & Faber
Jackie Byars (1991) All That Hollywood Allows, Routledge, London
Thomas Elsaesser (1972) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury – Observations on the Family Melodrama’ in Gledhill (ed) op cit.
Christine Gledhill (ed) (1987) Home Is Where The Heart Is, British Film Institute, London
Richard Maltby (1995) Hollywood Cinema, Blackwell, London
Laura Mulvey (1977) ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’ in Gledhill (ed) op cit

 

 

Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei) (China 1964)

The two women at the end of the film.

Stage Sisters is a well made and enjoyable film that also has great significance in the history of Chinese Cinema. Director Xie Jin was one of the few figures to have continued working in China since the 1950s, making his first feature in 1957 at the age of 34 and his sixteenth in 1997 (The Opium War).

Plot outline:  Chunhua and Yuehong are the ’stage sisters’ of the title. They meet in the late 1930s when Yuehong’s father’s popular opera troupe visits a town where Chunhua is all too willing to join the troupe. Eventually, they land up in Shanghai under Japanese occupation with Chunhua now a skilled performer. But the two young women gradually move apart before the plot brings them together again and the film ends with the triumph of the of the People’s Liberation Army.  

The timing of the film’s production is one reason for its importance. Although it was completed well before the usually accepted date for the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Kwok and Quiquemelle (1987) have argued that the beginnings of the clampdown were in 1963 and that Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong and a former Shanghai actress, was instrumental in the ban received by Stage Sisters. She saw both cinema and theatre in the early 1960s as failing to adhere to policies designed to promote the conception of the People’s Republic of China as a revolutionary society. (There is also the suggestion that she was settling old scores in Shanghai.) In the first instance pressure was put on Xie Jin during production to change the latter part of his film. Then before its release in 1965 a campaign was mounted against the film – because it did not paint a sufficiently negative view of the ‘bad’ characters. During the Cultural Revolution, filmmaking was first suspended altogether and then allowed only in the form of austere revolutionary model operas. With the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, films like Stage Sisters emerged from their cocoons to charm and please audiences.

What is surprising about the ban for audiences in the West is that the vision of a Marxist future appears so palatable in the film. Two young women are shown taking different decisions about their future and it is clear which is the ‘correct’ decision. This comes across in a satisfying story that has plenty of human interest and moral ambiguity.

Traditions and metaphors
For a film like Stage Sisters to work with a mass Chinese audience, it must draw upon traditional storytelling with familiar characters and settings. This the film does by basing its story on the meeting of two young women from different backgrounds who then work together in a Shaoxing folk opera troupe.
The best known form of Chinese opera in the West is Beijing opera – the metropolitan opera with elegant choreography and movement. But there are regional ‘typical’ opera forms across the country. Shaoxing is a rural district south of Shanghai. It is famous for producing opera singers – singers in a more populist mode than in Beijing opera – and for an opera style with more dialogue and audience engagement. Touring troupes from Shaoxing would perform in the market place of towns and villages. Eventually these performances moved into the larger towns and cities, occupying permanent theatres. The tradition includes women playing men’s parts in traditional stories. Although the elaborate costumes, complex plots and sophisticated performance styles might seem to suggest an elite activity, Shaoxing opera was largely performed by actors of peasant stock for audiences of mainly poor people. Xie Jin was also from the Shaoxing region and he draws on his own background in the film.

The story begins in the mid 1930s when the Nationalists (KMT) were attempting to subdue local warlords and to suppress the growth of the Communists. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, a temporary truce between Nationalists and Communists lasted only a few years before a three-cornered struggle ensued. After 1945 the Communists began to win the war against the Nationalists and the film ends in 1949 when the victorious Communists enter Shanghai and the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is established. In between, the struggles of the opera troupe to find ways to struggle through the war act as a metaphor for Chinese society as a whole.

The personal dramas of the stage sisters parallel the fictional worlds of the plays they perform, which in turn, parallel the political changes occurring in Chinese society. (Marchetti 1989: 100)

Gina Marchetti suggests that Chunhua is a modern recreation of a female warrior character from traditional opera – aggressive, physically powerful, morally upright and inevitably victorious. This use of traditional types is common to many of the films of the PRC and works for both the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters, so that ‘counter-revolutionary’ figures may embody characteristics of wicked demons or monks or rogue generals.

But there are also parallels with more contemporary figures. Marchetti points to the character of Jiang Bo in Stage Sisters. She is the representative of the progressive forces in Shanghai and she acts as a major influence on Chunhua. In particular, she takes her to an exhibition in 1946 commemorating the death of Lu Xun, a literary and theatrical figure associated with the ‘May the Fourth’ Movement (the May protests of 1919 against the Versailles settlement), also known as the ‘New Cultural Movement’.

Lu Xun was another Shaoxing native who championed the rights of women, especially those of the poor and Chunhua goes on to perform in an opera based on Lu Xun’s novella, The New Year’s Sacrifice. Here the narrative of Stage Sisters points to the struggle for a socially committed theatre. It is significant that it is the Shanghai theatre world in which these events unfold. Shanghai was the Chinese city most open to the West and outside influences – both the revolutionary politics which informed the Communists and the entrepreneurial drive of capitalism.

In the final part of the Stage Sisters narrative, Chunhua is back on tour, this time performing in an opera version of The White-Haired Girl, a revolutionary play written in Yenan in 1943 at the time of Mao’s lectures on Art and Literature in which he laid out the importance of a ‘cultural army’ to fight the Chinese people’s enemies at home and abroad. Stage Sisters cleverly combines the references to traditional, ‘socially committed’ and ‘revolutionary’ operas in the performances of Chunhua. But this also requires a very careful approach to cinema aesthetics.

Combining cinema aesthetics
Xie Jin constructs the film’s narrative using three different, but interconnected approaches. First he draws on traditional Chinese literary sources (and to a certain extent, earlier forms of Chinese cinema such as the Shanghai melodramas of the 1930s). He was himself strongly influenced by Hollywood films from the 1940s studio period, especially what he termed the ‘literary’ or ‘lyric’ films such as Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940), Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy 1940), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942) or the 1930s Warner Brothers’ bio-pics of figures such as Emile Zola or Marie Curie.

These two sources are referenced alongside Soviet Cinema, which was perhaps the dominant cinematic mode in China in the 1950s and early 1960s. Soviet Cinema since the early 1930s had been forced by Stalin to develop what became known as ‘socialist realism‘.

Not to be confused with ‘social realism’ (a term used generally to describe films that attempt to create an authentic environment of social reality and to engage with ‘real social issues’), the Soviet variant dates from Stalin’s attempts in the early 1930s to purge Soviet cinema of its experimental and authorial features, especially those of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. Stalin decreed that cinema must be ‘accessible’ to the masses. Accessibility did not allow for ‘art’. The socialist realist model drew on Hollywood methods to present the worker as hero in romanticised scenarios with simple linear narratives. The heroic figures were privileged in the frame through the use of lighting, camera angles and composition.

In many ways ‘Hollywood realism’ and ‘socialist realism’ used a similar aesthetic and offered audiences an easily digestible form of entertainment with the ideological work of the film disguised by ‘invisible editing’ and clear identification with characters and narrative coherence. They differed of course in terms of the individualist v. collectivist ethos of American and Soviet culture.

As well as Chinese, American and Soviet aesthetics, Xie Jin in the early 1960s was influenced by a further realist aesthetic, this time from European and World Cinema. Xie Jin himself has referred to Italian neorealism and it is likely that he was also familiar with the work of other filmmakers who were influenced by neorealism, including Satyajit Ray in Bengal (e.g. in The Apu Trilogy 1955-9). The dominant form of World Cinema in the 1950s was referred to as a ‘humanist cinema’ (a term applied to both Ray and Kurosawa Akira  at the time). The reference to humanism is generally taken to mean a text which deals with human interests rather than religious themes or the supernatural. In such films, the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in ‘ordinary situations’ are the focus. The neorealist influence meant that such stories would be filmed with less stylisation than the manufactured realism of what Jean-Luc Godard would later describe as ‘Hollywood-Mosfilm’.

Stage Sisters has many influences and it is held together by Xie Jin’s feeling for the human characters.

. . . the delicacy and skill with which Xie Jin has so often juxtaposed official messages approved by the political hierarchy of the time, with other more subversive scenes and comments. His films are often laced with scenes of sheer human pleasure in everyday social banalities, delight in which quietly melts the edges of hard Party truths and relentless social critiques. Not that Xie Jin is a ‘schizophrenic’ director: rather he has an overwhelming sense for the full texture of social interaction. (John Downing, responding to Timothy Tung, 1987: 207)

(The film is in Technicolor despite the still above.)

References
Kwok and M. C. Quiquemelle (1982 and 1987) ‘Chinese Cinema and Realism’ in John Downing (ed.) Film and Politics in the Third World, New York: Autonomedia
Gina Marchetti (1989) ‘Two Stage Sisters: The blossoming of a revolutionary aesthetic’ in Jump Cut No 34.
Timothy Tung (1987) ‘The Work of Xie Jin: A Personal Letter to the Editor’ in Downing (ed.) op cit.

(Many of Xie Jin’s films were seen in America in the mid-1980s and Jump Cut 34 has a major section on Xie Jin and Chinese Cinema. Gina Marchetti’s article has formed the basis for these notes.
In 1988, following the successful release of Yellow Earth, a new Xie Jin film, Hibiscus Town was released in the UK. Xie Jin was a prolific filmmaker throughout his career (except for the period of the Cultural Revolution) but only two of his films have been widely seen in the UK.

Questions for discussion

1. Do we think that Stage Sisters manages to deliver a coherent story in a consistent style, given the many influences and pressures on its director?

2. What reading do we make of the resolution of the film’s narrative and in particular what happened to the ‘stage sisters’?

3. If the film’s narrative is indeed a metaphor for the social and political history of China in the period 1935-50, what do we understand about that history and what might we expect to see in later films?

Roy Stafford (based on notes compiled in 2003/4 for evening classes on Chinese Cinema)

El Orfanato (The Orphanage, Spain, 2007)

Boy or ghost?

WARNING: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. This movie pinned me back in my seat in the cinema but, as it’s an example of the ‘fantastic’ – where everything might simply be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination – I wondered whether it would work on a second viewing: it does. The opening half hour, certainly, is less successful if you know the ending, but after that the sheer craft of the film is more than engaging.

The film uses many of the tropes of the ghost story (though, as my son noted, ‘thank god someone in a horror movie has turned the light on’) and so, although there’s nothing supernatural about the ‘ghosts’, it is a truly horrific story as we find at the denouement when the mother understands what’s happened to her son; the moment of realisation is one the most chilling moments in cinema.

Fremde haut (Unveiled, Germany/Austria 2005)

Jasmin Tabatabai and Anneke Kim Sarnau amongst the cabbages.

‘Fremde haut‘ translated via Google tools produces ‘foreign skin’ in English (in the interview referenced below, the director suggests ‘a stranger’s skin’ which she sees as an eroticised concept). I think this refers to the sense of living inside someone else’s skin. If so, it’s possibly a better title for this film than Unveiled. The central character does certainly literally ‘unveil’ herself when her plane leaves Iranian airspace. We then follow her attempts to enter Germany and, more importantly, to stay there. Her first big mistake is to lie to the German authorities when she attempts to seek asylum. The truth is that she has had to flee Iran after an affair with a married woman. The only way she is able to avoid being sent back to Iran is to take on the identity of a young male Iranian student and then try to avoid contact with the authorities. Although physical veiling and unveiling occur in the film – in both the literal and metaphorical sense, there is also the sense of ‘living as somebody else’, again, both physically and metaphorically as asylume-seekers/migrants must seek to do.

The narrative ploy of a woman ‘passing’ as a boy/young man is of course a very traditional device. Many of the reviews of the film refer to Hilary Swank’s performance in Boys Don’t Cry (1999), but I was reminded of Suzy Amis in The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). I’m not sure why I made this connection, but it’s possibly because Fariba (played by German Iranian actor Jasmin Tabatabai) is an older and more confident /better educated (she is a translator) woman than the Hilary Swank character. Also, the sexual politics of the film do not come to the fore until later in the film.

The film received only a limited theatrical release in the UK and I rented the DVD, distributed by the lesbian and gay specialist distributor Millivres now owned by Peccadillo pictures. It says something about UK distribution that a film like this is distributed in this way. I don’t mean this as a slight on LBGT businesses, but there is an inference that the film doesn’t stand up for a wider audience, which I don’t think is the case at all. As a ‘lesbian drama’ the film offers a long build-up to a relationship and then has relatively little time to explore it. Reviewers tend to think that the resolution is unsatisfactory. I don’t agree, but I do think the film could have run longer. On the whole, I preferred the earlier scenes (which audiences seem to find less believable) than the later ones which seem much more like familiar genre scenes – Thelma and Louise again?

Director Angelina Maccarone appears to have a significant profile in Germany and the film is co-written by Maccarone and her cinematographer Judith Kaufmann. On this basis, it is a strong contender for screening on a course about women filmmakers.

The film is low budget and filmed in a recognisable social realist style that is very familiar to UK audiences. Overall it doesn’t have quite the same elements of humour and melodrama as a Ken Loach film. There are, however, some amusing moments such as the arrival of immigration officers at the food processing plant where Fariba is working. Fariba is forced to hide in a tank and be buried under piles of chopped cabbage by the woman who will later be her partner. I expected that the film would be more like the work of Pawel Pawlikowski, who despite living in the UK for many years, has for me an ‘East European eye’ which makes English landscapes look strange – as in his tale of a Russian asylum-seeker and her son in Last Resort (UK 2000). Fremde haut was filmed mainly in the farming areas around Stuttgart. I don’t know this region, but for UK audiences, it is suggestive of the flatlands of the Fens and other areas of arable farming where migrant labour is often employed for picking, sorting, processing food crops.

On a personal note, I enjoyed the central performance by Jasmin Tabatabai and I kept thinking that she looked like one of my favourite singers, Rosanne Cash. I then discovered that she is also a musician and that she once started a women’s country band named after the book/film Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (see her website for lots of other interesting connections to film and music projects). Director Maccarone also has musical talent and she writes and sings on the soundtrack. There is an interesting interview on AfterEllen. The more I find out about this film and its creative team and ‘talent’, the more interesting it becomes.