film retrospective curated by
Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and La Farfalla sul Mirino
 

promoted by
Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

 
acknowledgments
Park Circus (London)
 

media partner
Quinlan.it
 

One of the ironies of melodrama as a genre is that it is more difficult for cinemagoers to offer a precise definition of it than it is for them to instinctively recognise it. The lacerating clash between individual aspirations and strict social ground rules, the exaltation of love and primeval passion, a strongly expressive style: all these are features that converge towards an idea of “excess” as the linchpin of the entire genre – excess in sentiment and excess in the depiction of that sentiment, even at the cost of realism. The retrospective entitled Magnificent Obsessions focuses on Hollywood in the ‘fifties, which was the golden age of the melodrama not only on account of the superb quality of the films produced in that era, but also because melodrama became the vehicle for a new way of questioning the stiflingly conformist and regimented American society that had emerged from World War II. From the clash between generations to women’s status, psychological issues, racism and even a critique of the consumer society, numerous themes surprising for the period began to emerge in these films thanks to the genius of such directors as Sirk, Ray, Minnelli and Kazan, but also thanks to the anti-realistic “over the top” approach that was part and parcel of the genre. These issues would only explode in all their forcefulness in the cinema of the ‘sixties, but the spirit of the melodrama was to live on, primarily in television series and, of course, thanks to a group of filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Almodóvar who were to prove capable of revisiting the genre in masterly fashion.