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Melodrama is a popular mode of address that privileges affect at the expense of reflection and critique. Generally held in disrepute, melodrama's simplicity and sensationalism are widely read as a sign of social and psychological alienation. Melodrama responds to its critics, however, with ever-renewed and self-assured appeals to affect itself. Melodrama's irreducible privilege of affect in mind, therefore, the thesis proposes that affect admits description in Levinasian terms as a "radical passivity." The Levinasian proposal on affect, moreover, is extended to a theory of cinema, which, it is shown, is particularly well suited to melodramatic expression. / Affect or "embodied passivity," Levinas explains, is irreducible to phenomenological notions of intentionality, psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic investment or cognitive appraisals of psychic processing. To be a body is to be exposed to wounding but it is also a naIve agreement to the conditions of its sustentation. To be a body, in short, is to be capable of being affected. For Levinas this passive relation to what is other is the condition of an ethical responsibility that is absolute. Levinas's notion of embodied passivity, however, has aesthetic implications about which he was deeply ambiguous. Hence it is in the context of an aesthetics of embodied passivity, largely unexplored by Levinas, that the thesis examines melodrama's focus on affect and the specifically cinematic expressions of embodied passivity. / Melodrama's accessible address, however, reduces the Other, as Levinas would say, to caricatures, mobilizes affect in the direction of a "monopathic" response and disavows, in the process, the encounter with alterity to which it appeals. Nonetheless melodrama "fleshes out the cliche" or exploits the stereotype in the service of having, precisely, some affect. Such is the melodramatic privilege of enlivenment over the circumstances of its orchestration. Hence it is possible to appraise melodrama's heightened orchestrations of style, its recourse to emphasis and its enduring appeals to suffering and happiness, as prevailing testimony to the (unspeakable) nature of the body's irreducible vulnerability. Melodrama's elemental if simplistic vision is that affect matters absolutely.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-117). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

The subject matter of mental illness has fascinated artists and writers for centuries. Filmmakers have responded in diverse and innovative ways to the artistic challenge of portraying mental illness. In this thesis, I focus on the representations of mental illness in six recent films from Australia and New Zealand: Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989), An Angel at My Table (Campion, 1990), Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer, 1993), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), Angel Baby (Michael Rymer, 1995) and Shine (Scott Hicks, 1996). In each film, the protagonist is diagnosed, or treated by others, as mentally ill. Mental illness is portrayed as an affliction which the protagonist struggles to overcome. I argue that these films cultivate a relationship of empathy between the mentally ill character and the spectator. Whereas the related emotion of sympathy involves feeling sorry for someone, empathy involves feeling with that person; in other words, rather than feel for these mentally ill characters, we are invited to feel like they do. (For complete abstract open document)

Loi, Ho Man. / "August 2011." / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Abstract (English and Chinese) --- p.iv / Note on Transcription --- p.vi / Table of Contents --- p.vii / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One: --- National Allegory of Aesthetics? Narrative Cinema as a Standstill Image in Hong Kong Film Scholarship --- p.11-54 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Hong Kong Narrative Cinema as Allegory and Aesthetics --- p.15 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Ringo Lam and Crisis Cinema Revisited --- p.44 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- "Mobilization of Narrative and Spectacle in Hong Kong Cinema: The Image of the ""Depressive Hero"" in the Work of Ringo Lam" --- p.55-99 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Narrative and Spectacle in Hong Kong Film Studies --- p.56 / Chapter ´ؤ --- "Ringo Lam and the Screening of ""Depressive Heroes"" in Cinema" --- p.68 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- "Jerking Tear, Shedding Blood: The Genre of ""Heroic Bloodshed"" as Melodrama in Hong Kong Cinema" --- p.100-133 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Melodrama and Its Vicissitudes in Film Studies --- p.102 / Chapter ´ؤ --- "The Mystery of Yi: The Melodramatic Nature of the Genre of ""Heroic Bloodshed""" --- p.116 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbour as Thy Son: Prison on Fire (1987) below the Lion Rock --- p.134-163 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Let There be Friendship as Light in Prison --- p.135 / Chapter ´ؤ --- "Visualities as Biopolitics in the Genre of ""Heroic Bloodshed""" --- p.148 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- No Bloodshed after Tiananmen: Full Alert (1997) and the Postmodern Dialectic of Stability and Prosperity --- p.164-198 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Melodramatic Pathos and Action Revisited in Full Alert --- p.166 / Chapter ´ؤ --- Full Alert as False Alarm: The Stable Prosperity of Postmodern Hong Kong --- p.180 / Chapter ´ؤ --- "Excursus/Excursion: Hong Kong Cinema after ""Heroic Bloodshed""" --- p.191 / Conclusion --- p.199 / Bibliography --- p.229 / Filmography --- p.247

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished