Home is where the heart is: Studies in melodrama and the woman's film

by Christine Gledhill

Since the early 70s, film theory has focused on melodrama as a particularly challenging genre. Feminism, in particular, has claimed a stake in re-examination of the form, raising many critical questions about the relation between gender and culture. This collection contains the most exciting contributions from nearly two decades of critical endeavor to come to terms with these questions. Christine Gledhill's overview precedes essays that range from classics by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Mulvey, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith to newly commissioned perspectives covering Hollywood's output from the early 20s to the 60s. Home is Where the Heart Is constitutes invaluable reading for anyone interested in the role of melodrama in the history of cinema, feminist film criticism, and analyses of popular culture.

Genres: Film, Essays, Nonfiction

364 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been developing an essay on Douglas Sirk's "There's Always Tomorrow" (1955), so when I saw this in a used book store I had to grab it. It's a handy anthology of many of the top essays on film melodrama, heavily weighted towards the ideological-psychoanalytic interpretations that were dominate in the 1970s.