Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Linda Williams at Bryn Mawr

Linda Williams
Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

“Megamelodrama: Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the 'Classical'”

Monday March 21, 2011
4:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)
Carpenter 21
Bryn Mawr College

Since the late eighties, American audiences have been witnessing a quite literal expansion of the very dimensions of movie and television melodrama. The movie screen has expanded spatially. Where it once grew wider in competition with television, it now grows deeper--as 3D becomes more popular but also through a new dynamization of the vertical. In contrast, the television has expanded "horizontally" in time as serial melodramas go on and on. Both of these expansions suggest that we need to rethink the very nature of the melodramatic space and time of the moving image in contrast to assumed norms of the "classical."

Sponsored by Class of 1902 Lecture Fund, Department of English, Program in Film Studies, Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Center for Social Sciences

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