Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama”
1. What is the genealogy of melodrama, according to Elsaesser?
2. Several times Cavell remarks that Hollywood film is similar to opera. How
would Elsaesser respond to this?
3. Elsaesser writes, “[melodrama] served as the literary equivalent of a particular
historically and socially conditioned mode of experience. Even if the situations
and sentiments defied all categories of verisimilitude and were totally unlike
anything in real life, the structure had a truth and a life of its own, which artists
could make part of their material.” What does he mean by this?
4. How does Elsaesser define melodrama?
5. According to Elsaesser, family melodrama is characterized by “a sublimation of dramatic conflict into décor, color, gesture, and composition of frame, which in the best melodramas is perfectly thematized in terms of the characters’ emotional and psychological predicaments.” What does he mean by this?
6. Can you identify instances in Now Voyager in which dramatic conflict is displaced into the mise-en-scéne?
7. In “Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly,” Stanley Cavell argues that Now Voyager employs a “grueling obviousness and repetition of symbology in everything from décor and objects and shadows to names and weather.” How would Elsaesser respond to this description?
8. “Letting the emotions rise and then bringing them suddenly down with a thump is an extreme example of dramatic discontinuity, and a similar vertiginous drop in the emotional temperature punctuates a good many melodramas—almost invariably played out against the vertical axis of a staircase.” What does Elsaesser mean by this? Is this true of Now Voyager?
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