Emotion Pictures: Yearning and Repressed Desire in Melodrama

Writer Nadia M Oliva tracks the development of the melodrama genre and how it plays out across film, TV and online.

The heightened, visually-colourful worlds of melodrama were traditionally sold as romantic tearjerkers, designed to stoke the overly emotional sensibilities of housewives. In fact, the genre was responsible for bringing the social, economic and political conflicts of the wider cultural sphere into the emotionally primal sphere of relationships.

Characterised by film-makers such as Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls and later adopted by directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Céline Sciamma and Ang Lee, melodrama allows room for longing, heartbreak and full-throated emotion in ways that few other types of cinema can. In this video essay, writer Nadia M Oliva tracks the development of the genre, explaining how it has developed from what scholar Linda Williams called "one-, two- or three-handkerchief movies" into an emotional mode that plays out across film, TV and online.