Description
Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to the narrative of Dreyer’s essentially bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work--pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on--find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating not only our understanding of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.
Book Information
ISBN 9780299347505
Author Amanda Doxtater
Format Hardback
Page Count 254
Imprint University of Wisconsin Press
Publisher University of Wisconsin Press
Weight(grams) 513g