Melodrama and Meaning History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk [Paperback]

Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinemaacademia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass mediacreate meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universals selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary institutionalized camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.

BARBARA KLINGER, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies and director of the Cultural Studies program at Indiana University, has published essays on film theory, criticism, and history in Screen, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Many Faces of Melodrama

1. The Progressive Auteur, Melodrama, and Canonicity

2. Selling Melodrama: Sex, Affluence, and Written on the Wind

3. Tastemaking: Reviews, Popular Canons, and Soap Operas

4. Star Gossip: Rock Hudson and the Burdens of Masculinity

5. Mass Camp and the Old Hollywood Melodrama Today

Conclusion: Cinema, Ideology, History

Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index