Papers by Rachel Schaff
Screen , 2022
This article examines Logan (James Mangold, 2017), the tenth installment of 20th Century Fox’s X-... more This article examines Logan (James Mangold, 2017), the tenth installment of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film franchise, as a ‘paternal melodrama’. Drawing on film melodrama theory, we argue that melodrama’s absentee father finally finds his way back in the current cycle of superhero films, as exemplified by Logan, and continuing into Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What we call the paternal melodrama reconfigures the relation between gender and genre, merging feminine sentiment and masculine action in one spectacular odyssey. The paternal melodrama, like the maternal melodrama and the family melodrama, stresses parental sacrifice and deals with intergenerational conflict, but it does so in epic proportions. Sharing its iconography and themes with traditionally masculine action genres, the paternal melodrama seeks to reconcile the father’s fight for home with his knowledge of its impossibility. Even as it works within the conventions of the superhero film, in the paternal melodrama, paternal feeling, not world-ending action, ultimately dominates.
Spectator, 2013
Position Paper, Visible Evidence XVIII Conference
New York, August 2011
Cinéma & Cie International Film Studies Journal Vol. XVI, No. 26/27, Spring 2017
Studies in Eastern European Cinema , 2020
In 1998, the Czech National Film Archive (Národní filmový archive/NFA) classified sixty-seven fea... more In 1998, the Czech National Film Archive (Národní filmový archive/NFA) classified sixty-seven feature-length fiction films produced between 1930 and 1945 as generic melodramas in their volumes of Czech Feature Film (Český hraný film). This essay considers how this retrospective genre classification offers entry into understanding melodrama’s aesthetic and cultural operations in Czech cinema. The focus is less on how the NFA defined the genre, than how these volumes, in bringing melodrama into critical view, reveal important assumptions about its cultural and historical affiliations with foreign co-productions. Starting by outlining some of the problems presented by the volumes of Czech Feature Film, this essay highlights some key questions that emerge in studying the complicated relationship between Czech and German popular film genres. In particular, it focuses on melodrama’s relationship to films made during the Nazi occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, when films were necessarily co-produced with the Nazified film industry. Through a close reading and reception study of Saturday (Sobota, Václav Wasserman, 1945) this essay considers how the perception of melodrama films as light entertainment during the Nazi occupation provided yet another opportunity for these films on Czechoslovak state television during the post-1968 period of normalization.
Book Reviews by Rachel Schaff
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 2019
Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Champaign, IL: ... more Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 328 pp., $29.95 (Paperback).
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Papers by Rachel Schaff
Book Reviews by Rachel Schaff