Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk - Softcover

Klinger, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253208750 ISBN 13: 9780253208750

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema―academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media―create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal’s selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.

About this title

About the Author:

BARBARA KLINGER, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies and director of the Cultural Studies program at Indiana University, has published essays on film theory, criticism, and history in Screen, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0253208750
• ISBN 13: 9780253208750
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224