Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts

MELODRAMA AND MODERNITY: EARLY SENSATIONAL CINEMA AND ITS CONTEXTS Ben Singer Film and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 363 pp. One of the most decisive developments in film studies of the early 1990s was the historiographical turn, led by scholars of early cinema. Much of this scholarship was informed by a new, or rather revived, set of theoretical claims drawn from contemporary observers-Simmel, Benjamin, and Kracauer-of the and cultural changes accompanying late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity. Ben Singer's excellent monograph Melodrama and Modernity operates firmly within this historiographic field, bringing some much-needed perspective on its past equivocations and directly addressing some of its shortcomings. Singer's book treats the intersection of melodrama with from the 1880s through the 1920s, with a particular focus on the transition from stage melodrama (10-20-30 cents, i.e. popularly priced) to sensational serial films in the teens. The shift was a quick and decisive one, with cinema supplanting the theater as the medium in which blood and thunder stories would circulate and thrive. Singer offers a set of persuasive reasons for this change in medium, including aesthetic, industrial, and economic factors, against past explanations that have emphasized the aesthetics of cinema's photographic realism that allowed for a more convincing depiction of spectacular stunts. Singer concludes his book with three chapters on serial melodrama films, including titles such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Exploits of Elaine (1915), and The House of Hate (1918). Across these chapters, Singer outlines serial melodramas' historical emergence, the role they played in the film industry, and their narrative and stylistic attributes; the ideological significance of the serial queen (that is, the central heroine's paradoxical power and imperilment) in the context of discourses surrounding modernity's New Woman; and their innovative publicity tie-ins, which supported the films in the usual promotional sense, and also supplemented (and often clarified) narrative developments that are largely illegible in the films alone. Yet Singer's book is not restricted in relevance to specialists of early film history. In fact, one of the greatest strengths of Melodrama and Modernity is its much broader definitional and theoretical precision in grappling with terms and concepts that are often invoked rather carelessly, or at least ambiguously, in many areas of film studies. For example, Singer devotes his first chapter to untangling the different possible meanings and modes of experience that the term modernity has conveyed. He differentiates among six facets: as an explosion of socioeconomic and technological development (what is generally labeled modernization); as the reign of instrumental rationality; as a condition of perennial cultural discontinuity and ideological reflexivity; as the heightened mobility and circulation of all social things; as a milieu of atomization and competitive individualism; and as a perceptual environment of unprecedented sensory complexity and intensity. This last notion, which Singer elsewhere terms a neurological conception of modernity, has dominated recent film historiography; and while Singer deals with this facet in most detail, he nonetheless remains cognizant of the other intersecting dimensions of in the remainder of his study. Singer also usefully tackles the historical and theoretical meanings of melodrama. Against film studies' notoriously malleable and at times rather vague use of the term, Singer proposes a nexus of five features that traditionally characterize this genre: pathos, emotionalism, moral polarization, nonclassical narrative form, and graphic sensationalism. He further points out that moral polarization, along with sensational action and spectacle, are the two truly defining features of his corpus of 10-20-30 and serial film melodrama, in contrast to the rather different leftist and feminist critical emphases that have, for example, been applied to Douglas Sirk's films. …

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