Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema

MELODRAMA, MASCULINITY AND INTERNATIONAL ART CINEMA

MELODRAMA, MASCULINITY AND INTERNATIONAL ART CINEMA

Alistair Fox

Anthem Press

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Copyright © Alistair Fox 2022

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932347

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-183998-407-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-407-4 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Franco Citti in Accattone (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961), courtesy of Photofest.

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Frédéric Dichtel

[I] believe myself capable of understanding men, their feelings, their troubles, their dramas. This conviction is based on my long, hard experience. […] It’s an unforgettable experience that follows us our entire lives, and that perpetrated itself in the peremptory and mysterious need to look around oneself with comprehensive and generous eyes to bring forward, from behind their appearances and inventions, the secret drama of each man.

Vittorio De Sica

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Italian Neorealism and the Emergence of the Male Melodrama: Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952)

2. The Migration of Male Melodrama into Non-Western Cultures: Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955–59) and Fourth Cinema

3. Hollywood Melodrama as a Vehicle for Self-Projection: Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Home from the Hill (1960)

4. The Political Turns Personal: Neo-Neorealism and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961)

5. Personal Cinema as Psychodrama: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Winter Light (1963) and Hour of the Wolf (1968)

6. François Truffaut and the Tyranny of Romantic Obsession: The Soft Skin (1964), Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and The Woman Next Door (1981)

7. Figuring an Authorial Fantasmatic: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), A Room In Town (1982) and Parking (1985)

8. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the Emergence of Queer Cinema: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975) and In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)

9. Visual Aestheticism and the Queer Prestige Melodrama: Call Me by Your Name (2017) and Luca Guadagnino’s Desire Trilogy

Conclusion

List of Films Cited

Select Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

Preface

This book is the culmination of a long itinerary. It began several decades ago with my study of Thomas More’s Utopia—an attempt on my part to locate the origins of the social idealism that has inflected the evolution of my country.¹ During the course of this investigation, I realized that More’s ambiguous, paradoxical work could not be separated from its author (who appears as a fictionalized character in the account of his imagined ideal society), and neither could the real-life More be separated from the circumstances that were prompting him to write the book in 1515. Intrigued by this connection between an author and his work, I extended the scope of my investigations to cover the whole of the sixteenth century in England, looking first at the way fiction was used to address political issues in the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs,² and then the social and psychological purposes of the extensive imitation of Renaissance Italian literary sources that took place in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.³

In the course of these investigations, I discovered that various strategies of imaginative displacement were regularly being deployed in this literature, which led me to conduct further enquiries into what was motivating such a process, and what its functions were. The answers began to suggest themselves to me as a result of daily interchanges I had while a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, during 1987–88, with scholars like the anthropologist Rodney Needham and the psychoanalyst, translator and musicologist Alan Tyson, who pointed me in the direction of Sigmund Freud’s speculations on dreams and dreaming. Upon reading Freud’s crucial work, I quickly recognized that the process Freud ascribed to dreams involved mechanisms of displaced fictive invention that were similar to those I had been encountering in my studies of Tudor literature.

After a spell as a senior administrator in my home university, which deepened my insights into what Thomas More called politic worldly drifts, I decided to see whether the same mechanisms were operating in contemporary forms of fictive representation, and whether fiction was being used for the same purposes, particularly with reference to the literature and cinema of my own country, New Zealand. This decision to update the enquiry to the contemporary period and expand its scope to include a different culture and a new medium as a basis for comparison resulted in new studies of the way masculinity has been portrayed in New Zealand prose fiction;⁴ of the personal dimension in the films of the New Zealand director Jane Campion;⁵ and of the succession of coming-of-age films regularly produced in this country.⁶

Armed with insights furnished by these studies, together with further perceptions gained from excursions into French cinema for yet another point of comparison, I felt ready to develop a theoretical model to explain the creative processes I had come to recognize, taking into consideration the advances in knowledge of the human brain by neuroscientists that have been steadily accumulating since the 1990s. This model, based on a synthesis of affective neuroscience with psychoanalysis, is presented in my book Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), which forms the basis of this study.

Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema (originally titled The Secret Dramas of Men) applies the theory outlined in Speaking Pictures to an analysis of key films in a neglected body of cinematic fictions with the aim of identifying the nature and functions of the creative process itself. The approach I take might most accurately be described as psychocritical, a term coined by the psychoanalyst and literary theorist Charles Mauron.⁷ It is also genetico-biographical, a term proposed by the psychoanalyst and film scholar Francis Vanoye,⁸ and nosographic, in accordance with the approach Christian Metz outlined in The Imaginary Signifer, but was unable to pursue at that time owing to the lack of a fully developed example.⁹ With the exception of Metz, these theorists are not yet widely known outside of France, as their most important writings are not available in English, which is unfortunate;¹⁰ I owe an enormous intellectual debt to all three of them.

Apart from film scholars interested in genre and gender, and those who may be interested in an important category of films that has received less attention than it merits, this book has been written to draw attention to the fact that for many decades auteur filmmakers have been giving expression to aspects of masculine interiority that have been largely underestimated, derogated or delegitimized by dominant cultural norms. Feminism has paved the way for the kind of perspective this book offers, and it has been written in the expectation that men will take up the invitation to follow in a similar path of self-discovery, as appears to be the case, judging not only by the current proliferation of films exploring men’s emotional experience, but also by the appearance of new theories in the field of critical masculinity studies.

Finally, I hope that this book will open a window on to aspects of human experience that are pertinent to both men and women, given that, in many respects, the emotional experiences represented in the films I discuss are, in the end, restricted neither to one sex nor the other, but, rather, common to both.

Notes

1 Published as Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

2 Published as Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

3 Published as The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997).

4The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2008).

5Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011).

6Coming-of-Age in New Zealand: Genre, Gender, and Adaptation in a National Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

7 Charles Mauron, Des Métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel: Introduction à la psychocritique (Paris: J. Corti, 1963).

8 Francis Vanoye, Scénarios modèles, modèles de scénarios (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005).

9 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Palgrave, 1982), 25, 84 n. 10.

10 For an extended appraisal of Mauron, see Linda Hutcheon, Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; 2006). Unfortunately, at the time this book was written, Hutcheon did not have access to subsequent findings of affective neuroscience regarding mental processes, many of which support Mauron’s intuitions to a greater extent than Hutcheon foresaw.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted, as always, to my wife and intellectual partner Hilary Radner who initially encouraged me to undertake this enterprise as a complement to feminist explorations and concerns about women’s issues. She has offered expert advice at every step along the way, and it is true to say that without her this book would never have been written.

Another formidable helper has been my friend and colleague at the University of Otago, Frédéric Dichtel, an ardent cinephile, whose love of this medium exemplifies why cinema matters—why viewers seek something beyond entertainment when they watch a film. He drew my attention to many male melodramas I might otherwise have overlooked, freely sharing his own response to the films in terms of the issues I was exploring during weekly conversations. It is to him that this book is affectionately dedicated, in recognition of his enthusiasm for the project, his formidable sensitivity as a spectator, and his friendly companionship.

I would also like to thank Jean-Pierre Bertin Maghit and Raphaëlle Moine of the Université de Paris 3 for inviting me to deliver three seminars at La Sorbonne Nouvelle under the auspices of La Chaire Roger Odin. This occasion gave me an opportunity to present some of the material in this book before an expert audience, and I am grateful for the invaluable feedback I received.

Thanks are owing, too, to the members of the Visual Studies Seminar at the Dunedin School of Art who provided me with a forum for outlining the theoretical principles that inform this study and offered valuable feedback from an art-critical perspective.

Finally, my thanks go to the team at Anthem Press, Megan Greiving and Courtney Young in particular, for the outstanding care, attention and courtesy they have displayed during the production of the book, making it a pleasurable and satisfying process.

INTRODUCTION

In cinema studies, masculinity has tended, with a few exceptions,¹ to be presented as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book will argue that the evolution of the art film, notably in the form of personal cinema, through its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, offering a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis—a masculinity that is undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstances. Hollywood, in the form of male weepies, offered preliminary insights into this destabilized masculinity, but it is with the flowering of post–World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the Indie waves of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the male melodrama, the correlative of the woman’s film.

The present volume offers a series of case studies that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively developed into a major form in contemporary cinema. Although these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Satyajit Ray and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, have frequently been discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date they have not been examined, with a few isolated exceptions, in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.

Even though masculine experience generally has been one of the major preoccupations of filmmakers, a cursory glance at popular cinema genres will show that for the most part screened masculinities have depicted men as heroic actors in roles traditionally assigned to them by normative codes of masculinity. Hence, in action films, westerns, crime thrillers and war films there has been an emphasis on ritualized conflicts (such as gunfights, gangland shootouts, gladiatorial combats and so forth),² on the male body as a vehicle for display (of musculature, beauty, physical feats and toughness),³ and often on homosocial bonding between males, as in the buddy film. In most cases, therefore, masculinity in popular cinema has been presented largely in terms of its external manifestations, rather than the interior emotional or psychological conditions that men experience.

From time to time, some of the earlier filmmakers turned to melodrama as a vehicle for representing masculine emotional experience. In Broken Blossoms (1919), D. W. Griffiths depicted the story of a sensitive, somewhat fragile young Chinese man who, an outsider in the American society, falls in love with a white girl who is brutalized by her alcoholic father, a macho brute who is his antithesis.⁴ Early American filmed melodramas of this sort were so called because they imitated the conventions of the nineteenth-century stage melodramas. As such, they displayed an acting style that was exaggeratedly histrionic and an overt emotionalism that is nowadays regarded as excessive. Later, they evolved into the romantic melodramas and family melodramas made by the Hollywood studios, which, significantly, were seen as films that serve primarily to address a female audience, leading to a tendency to regard melodrama as a feminized genre associated with the woman’s film.⁵

Irrespective of this association, with its latently pejorative overtones, Thomas Schatz notes that the male roles in films like The Long Hot Summer (Martin Ritt, 1958), and Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) with its depiction of an alcoholic playboy, were actually as much male ‘weepies’ as they are female ones.⁶ One can also point to Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), which shows a family man succumbing to mental illness and addiction, or Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955), which depicts the descent into tormented delinquency of a teenager as a result of dysfunction within the family. Then again, in films like A Star Is Born (William A. Wellman, 1937), released during the heyday of classical Hollywood, the suffering of a fading male movie actor is foregrounded almost as much as the joy of an aspiring actress at her meteoric rise. Significantly, the successive remakes of this film—by Frank Pierson with Kris Kristofferson (1976), and by Bradley Cooper (2018), with Cooper himself playing Jack—show an increasing emphasis on the hero’s failing interior life.

The conventions of Hollywood melodrama that shaped these films, however, tended to generate a distance between the spectator and the male ­characters in these family melodramas, either because of their predictability, or the effect created by their classical shooting style. As a result, these ­characters are viewed from the outside and judged in terms of their behaviors, rather than from the inside through a revelation of their subjective feelings. Conventions used include stock situations presenting obstacles to happiness; characteristic narrative structures (flash-backs, schemas of repetition, circular plots and happy endings); stock images and actions (the slap, throwing oneself on a couch and placing one’s body in front of a killer to save an innocent victim); and the use of visual stereotypes (the woman at a window, the man outside looking in, the stairway, the car ride, the mink coat indicating wealth or corruption, the checkered shirt indicating natural simplicity and so forth).⁷ The shooting style used in Hollywood melodramas consisted of continuity editing that included heavy use of shot/reverse shots, reverse tracking shots, elaborate décors and a tightly structured plot. The combined effect of these formulaic conventions was to limit the extent to which the spectator could identify empathically with the male characters in these films owing to the distancing effects of the clichéd content and stylistic predictability.

Neorealism and the Advent of the Art-Cinema Male Melodrama

In the aftermath of World War II, however, a new form of film emerged that lent itself to a more nuanced representation of the subjective dimensions of masculinity than had been previously achieved through earlier styles and modes. I am referring to what might be called the auteur male melodrama of art cinema, a form that has received very little attention from film scholars to date. Indeed, its existence has been largely overlooked, even though it has been a progressively expanding sub-genre of art cinema since its invention in the late 1940s.

This new form of male melodrama was made possible by the invention of a new approach to film style on the part of the Italian neorealist filmmakers. In part, this style eventuated because filmmakers needed to make a virtue of necessity. As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson point out, by 1945, most of Cinecittà, the large Roman studio complex, had been destroyed by the fighting to liberate Italy. Consequently, the shortage of sets and equipment forced filmmakers to rely on actual locales, make use of non-actors, work with smaller crews and utilize lighter equipment that could allow the camera to move more freely while shooting on location.⁸

As it turned out, the discovery of this new approach to filmmaking coincided with a massive crisis of confidence faced by men in the context of post-War Europe. The economic, social and psychological damage wrought by the War had a severe impact on the self-sense of many men. Economic deprivation and socio–political instability weakened their confidence in their customary gendered roles and identity, especially given the catastrophic demonstration of the failure of the previous world order to which two global conflicts of unprecedented magnitude attested.⁹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the convergence of these circumstances should have given rise to a renewed interest in the making of films that addressed the psychic condition of men in the post-War situation by revealing actual feelings that were often suppressed or hidden from view. The result was the creation of a more nuanced kind of male melodrama that laid the foundations for a whole new genre, one that has continued to grow, until today it has become a staple of independent cinema.

Genesis and Evolution of the Genre

The evolution of the art-house male melodrama is marked by the rapid spread of the neorealist approach into other cinemas, both in Europe and elsewhere, and then by a marriage of the stylistic techniques of neorealism with aspects of various art movements, such as French Impressionism and German Expressionism. As the decades rolled on, filmmakers then began to hybridize this potent blend of stylistic devices with the attributes of other, more conventional genres. Indeed, as this study will show, genre filmmaking and auteur filmmaking are always in dialogue with each other in a process of mutual enrichment. It is rare that a genre film does not bear the marks of a subterranean auteurist vision (such as that evident, for example, in the Hollywood films of Alfred Hitchcock). Conversely, a personal film that draws explicitly on the autobiographical experience of a director also inevitably draws on the generic conventions of cinema as a means of giving form and expression to that experience (as in the New Wave films of François Truffaut). For this reason, melodrama needs to be defined in a way that allows for considerable variability in its manifestations, with generic and personal elements dominating to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the circumstances of the particular case.

In Italy, Vittorio De Sica was the first to adopt a neorealistic approach for the sake of revealing the damaging impact of poverty on masculine self-sense: the shame of a proud man deprived of the means of supporting his family in Bicycle Thieves (1948), and the despair of an aged retiree whose pension is insufficient to pay his rent, in Umberto D. (1952). The effects of poverty were powerfully confronted again by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Accattone (1961), the story of a pimp from the sub-proletarian slums of Rome who struggles with his guilt at immoral actions he takes in an attempt to avoid starvation. Soon afterwards, Vittorio De Seta extended the male melodrama in a psychological direction with his Un uomo a metà (1966), depicting a man who is trying to process fragments of memory in order to try and understand the forces that led him to suffer a mental breakdown.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman, who had worked with Rossellini and adopted certain of his techniques, created a series of films that shifted the focus of attention away from the political and economic context to the domain of the family and intimate relationships. In films like Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957), Winter Light, (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963) and Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), he dramatized both the causes and the consequences of psychological damage he recognized in himself, having been emotionally deprived as a child on account of his parents’ lack of affection, puritanical belief system, and the brutal regime of discipline and punishment it supported.

By the end of the 1950s, the influence of the Italian neorealists had become ubiquitous. On the other side of the world, the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, in his Apu Trilogy—Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), inspired by De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves—dramatized the struggle of a young man seeking to escape from the confines of traditional Indian culture, with its inhibiting expectations regarding filial obligations, in order to enter into the new world of post-colonial India.

In France, the young Turks of the French New Wave began to present their own versions of disaffected, restless and unsatisfied male protagonists. One of the most prominent among them was François Truffaut, who, like Bergman, had worked as an assistant with Roberto Rossellini. Beginning with The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), Truffaut would depict a whole series of male characters—such as Charlie Kohler in Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960), Pierre Lachenay in The Soft Skin (La Peau douce, 1964) and Louis Mahé in Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi, 1969)—who are searching for a kind of love, and degree of satisfaction, they can never find. Another of Truffaut’s New Wave contemporaries, Jacques Demy, startled and delighted the cinematic world with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964), which showed how the artifice of the musical could be enlisted to express personal investments—in his case, the emotional complexity kindled by Demy’s latent homosexuality, which he dared not publicly admit.

During the next two decades, male-centered art-film melodramas began to appear with increasing frequency as new waves and second waves took root in other countries. Stylistically, these subsequent filmmakers often extended the genre in different directions by hybridizing it with other forms. In Italy, for example, Bernardo Bertolucci demonstrated in The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970) how the aestheticism of a baroque sensibility—displayed earlier by Luchino Visconti in films like Senso (1954) and The Leopard (Il gattopardo, 1963)—could be deployed to express the psychic condition of a guiltily conflicted man. Later in the decade, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a prominent member of the New German Cinema, revealed how the heightened style of Sirkian melodrama, particularly the use of saturated colors, could be appropriated to serve as a vehicle for conveying masculine emotional suffering in films like The Merchant of Four Seasons (Händler der vier Jahreszeiten, 1972), Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit, 1975) and In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1978). In Iran, Abbas Kiarostami portrayed the ennui and despair of a civil servant entrapped in professional and domestic circumstances that offer him no possibility of happiness in The Report (Gozaresh, 1979), while in New Zealand, Roger Donaldson kick-started the New Zealand New Wave with his portrayal of disaffected outsiders who seek to escape disintegrating marriages by fleeing into the bush, in Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981). Male melodramas, in fact, can be found in most of the newly energized national cinemas of this period, for example, the Cinema Novo of Brazil, with films like The Brave Warrior (O Bravo Guerreiro, Gustavo Dahl, 1968) and Hunger for Love (Fome de Amor, Nelson Pereira Dos Santos, 1968).

American cinema itself participated in this trend. With the advent of the American New Wave, which stretched from the late 1960s into the 1980s, a generation of younger American directors, inspired by their European and other international counterparts, seized the opportunity to create a more adventurous type of film.¹⁰ Such films included The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafaelson, 1970), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Kramer vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), all of which reflect the influence of the international auteurs. Scorsese, for example, has acknowledged that Satyajit Ray had a major influence on his