Melodrama as History and Nostalgia: Reading Hong Kong Director Yonfan’s Prince of Tears

Abstract

Melodrama, like all filmic genres, has morphed and evolved throughout cinematic history to meet audience expectations of the times. Paralleling this evolution is the shifting critical and scholarly reception and understanding of the genre’s form and ideological status, as witnessed in contemporary film genre studies. Christine Gledhill’s work in Home Is Where the Heart Is, in particular, has radically transformed the field, as she argues that ‘[m]elodrama exists as a cross-cultural form with a complex, international, two-hundred-year history,’ and that it is also ‘a specific cinematic genre’ and ‘a pervasive mode across popular culture’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 1; emphasis mine). Not only has this ‘pervasive’ modality in cinematic presence enabled scholars to reclaim the melodramatic form as a site for serious critical inquiry, but Gledhill’s focus on women’s films, including familial and romantic melodramas, has necessarily raised the stakes for feminist film criticism. As Linda Williams points out:

The two major strikes against melodrama were thus the related ‘excesses’ of emotional manipulativeness and association with femininity. These qualities only began to be taken seriously when excess could be deemed ironic and thus subversive of the coherence of mainstream cinema. Thus, as Gledhill notes, melodrama was ‘redeemed’ as a genre in film studies in the early seventies through a reading of the ironic melodramatic excesses located especially in the work of Douglas Sirk. (Williams, 1998, pp. 43–4)