This autumn at Broadway, we’re indulging in the dramatic with a season of melodrama on screen that charts the history of the much-maligned genre, from the classics of the 1940s and ‘50s to the more recent homages – reverent, tacky or both – that came in the decades that followed.
Melodrama is about an excess of emotion: bold feelings echoed by bold visuals. Women are always at the centre of the narrative and the story often plays out in a domestic setting: mothers are plagued by ungrateful children, wives embark on risqué affairs, spinsters reinvent themselves. For this reason, and for their theatrical tone, ‘women's pictures’ were often dismissed as soapy, sensationalist and in bad taste.
Though melodrama largely fell out of fashion in mainstream cinema in the 1960s, arthouse staples like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters and Todd Haynes have all –in their own style– paid tribute to the genre. From the 1970s through to the noughties, these directors used the framework of the genre to explore issues contemporary to the period they were working in themselves. The results are exactly as decadent and overblown as you’d imagine – don’t forget your tissues.
– Kate Wood, season programmer
