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[no dialogue].
(Dr. Julia Lesage). This is, this is pretty
high-tech here so I hope you'll bare with me.
We're making a movie, showing movies, and all kinds of things.
So I hope we can do all that at the same time.
It's interesting to consider melodrama in "The Ice Storm"
and "Pleasantville" because they seemingly are very different
films, but melodrama is a form which has been popular
in theatre since the 19th Century at least
and, in cinema, is popular in films all over the world.
We don't usually use the term melodrama,
we usually use the term drama.
So if you go in the video store, you'll see a section of DVDs
called drama, but it really is a genre that has a form and has
a certain kind of thematic unity or concern.
What makes melodrama a perennial favorite as a genre
is that it deals with moral issues, but it brings them
down to the level of everyday life.
And sometimes the moral issues could be treated on a grand
scale with the presentation of good and evil,
but more often it's about emotional situations.
Now it's a little unfashionable to say I really enjoyed a film
and it was about good and evil.
I mean it might not be something you could get people to watch,
but we do talk about films as being about justice
between people or mistreatment of people,
or we talk about psychological good health.
In the history of melodrama they talked about it
as dealing with right feeling.
A major authority on melodrama Peter Brooks, said that one of
the things that melodrama does is it creates drama inside the
audience that builds on what's already there.
And we already have a drama or a conflict in our life
between official authority and the codes by which
we run our every day lives.
And we actually all have these codes.
It's very interesting if people will talk to each other about
it, but usually you don't talk to other
people about it but you really do have them.
I mean, in my case, there are things I learned from my mother
or things I learned from my father,
or things I discovered on my own but I really stick to them,
and I really believe they're true.
So personal codes, perhaps private, are what we use
to live by, but they're also what we use to
interpret melodramatic characters and situations.
Now these two films have a wonderful contrast.
In "The Ice Storm", there are many *** encounters,
but they're frustrating and unsatisfying,
both for us as viewers and for the characters.
The theme of the film is about the moral limits of
the upper-middle class.
The unsatisfying personal and family lives that rich people
lived in the 1970's.
Now we like to look at movies that show us the rich
and how their lives are in shambles.
I think the current one is Celebrity Drug Rehab, you know.
[audience laughter].
(Dr. Lesage). You love to see that
and it's a favorite theme since the 19th Century.
In contrast, two teens from contemporary times are thrust
into a 1950's television show "Pleasantville"
which has a colorless world.
Well, it's actually in black and white,
but it's also a static world without change.
So what happens in the course of "Pleasantville" is that the
teenagers, and then the young man's mother played by
Joan Allen, have *** awakenings and experiences
that indicate they're coming to knowledge.
That the, some of the people of Pleasantville enter the stream
of life and find a path to identity and human warmth
that is indicated by a fascinating shift to color.
Now I'd like to step back and look at the structures of
melodrama, because there are actual structures that you can
look for in melodramatic films.
First of all, as I mentioned, it questions authority,
but it does so with a heavily emotional structure.
Sometimes there are real emotional excesses,
and these give vent to tensions that the characters don't
usually discuss and that we also might not discuss.
The narrative pace itself is episodic since it focuses on
these distinct emotionally expressive moments.
And so there's not much emphasis on cause and effect,
but instead a reliance on coincidence.
For example, two teens just happen to enter the past in
"Pleasantville", or the parents just happen to frequently
discover their kids in moments of sex play in "The Ice Storm".
Furthermore, in melodrama scripted emotional moments
are accompanied by tremendous use of spectacle,
both visual and audio spectacle.
So in plays in the 19th century, you might have sets of houses
on fire or ships sinking, and this dramatic stage craft
would enhance the audience's experience
of heightened emotion.
In film we use mis en scene and music to heighten the emotion.
And both these two particular films are famous for their
mis en scene in the innovative way they used it
to create both emotional impact and a moral message.
The ice storm of the first film is a recapitulation of the
of a historical 1973 New England ice storm.
Ang Lee tells us that, and his scene designers tell us that
some of this ice was created through the use of lots of
hair gel, since they didn't always have cold weather,
but it certainly is a spectacular ice storm
and here it represents an ice storm of the heart.
"Pleasantville" has an ironic title.
It was originally a black and white,
and somehow lifeless world, a world that meets
knowledge, sex, emotion, identity, and embracing change.
So the film, to recognize that,
uses a gradual transition to color.
In both films the visual spectacle is tied to
emotional and moral commentary.
Now, when we think of the scenes of melodrama
and how they get worked out,
melodrama usually has a moral world with villains
and victims, catastrophes and confrontations.
In its narrative structure it has discrete, emotionally
intense situations not necessarily directly tied
to each other, so that creates an episodic structure.
Because spectacle is crucial in film, visual framing often
creates a single memorable moment to sum up the scene.
So, that could be an image which stays in your mind
like a tableau.
These visuals sum up the moral theme,
they have symbolic meaning,
and they add an emotionally emphatic resonance.
Now the first clip I'm going to show is a party at the
upper-middle class family's home of the Carvers.
It's mid-century, modernist architecture,
and it's seen during an ice storm.
The *** harshness is reflected both in the ice storm
of the heart but also in the harshness of the architecture.
The hard surfaces, the reflections,
the windows which are both barriers and like a fishbowl.
This particular scene, the people talk about a key party,
that is where the men throw their house keys in a bowl
and the women pick them out,
and the couples go home with different people.