Melodrama Key Features

Sources
Victorian novels, stage melodramas, Greek tragedy, Italian opera, French stage musical drama, etc.

Definitions
‘Melodrama’ stems from the French, meaning ‘drama with music’. Like Action/Adventure it might be considered a mega-genre, as it encompasses many different styles and can be interpreted very broadly. A narrower definition of melodrama has been applied by Thomas Elsaesser and others to describe films made by director Douglas Sirk in the 1940s and 50s. These ‘family melodramas’ focus on central female characters and their struggles in a socially repressive society.

Key Characters
The key protagonist of melodrama is female and it is through her perspective that the story is structured. Conflict typically arises through some form of social repression involving the family, relationships with other women or repression or romance by/with men. Male roles are often marginalised and their drives and motives apparently less complex and more simply delineated.

Textual Features
The melodramas of the 1950’s tended to be characterised by a heightened use of mise-en-scene where the emotive value of objects may be emphasised within careful framing and composition. Certain films are marked with a subtle expressionism and symbolic use of colour. Music tends to be used expansively, resulting in noticeable clichés.

Melodrama Audiences
The audience for melodramas was frequently conceived of as predominantly female. Melodrama, and the ‘Romantic Drama’ have been referred to as ‘women’s pictures’ and ‘chick flicks’. The ‘woman’s picture’ flourished in the 1930’s and 40’s as audiences were more balanced across age and gender demographics than today. Audience studies identify women as regularly making the key decisions about which films they or their families saw, and indeed family viewing was far more common in the days when cinema was a more dominant leisure pursuit.



I have based my chick flick on the melodrama key features.