Publication
I AM LOVE: Reinventing North American Classical Film Melodrama in the 21st Century
| Summary: | Looking at I Am Love [Io sonno l’amore] (2009), a film by Luca Guadagnino, in light of three possible genre categories: the family melodrama, the “melodrama of the unknown woman” (Cavell 1996) and the contemporary melodrama, I verify in what ways it deviates from the Italian film tradition to represent a new social paradigm (contemporary and capitalist), at the same time as it pertains to a cinematic matrix that is, all things considered, that of North American classical melodrama. Exploring the identity-questioning device provided in the title through a (self-)metonymic effect (“I am love”), my major topics for analysis and cornerstones in the representation of the film’s protagonist — Emma, an “unknown woman” — are the dilution and refinement of individual boundaries, the problems of recognition and non-recognition, or of self-affirmation and repression among society, and the process of naming in its ontological, literary and cinematic repercussions. These will also function as references to the melodramatic mode itself in cinema, from a classical Hollywood paradigm to a contemporary and international — critically independent — appropriation and recycling of the genre. |
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| Main Authors: | Reis, Amândio |
| Subject: | Melodrama Guadagnino, Luca, 1971-..... Io sono l'amore Cinema contemporâneo Identidade Cinema de género |
| Year: | 2015 |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | article |
| Access type: | open access |
| Associated institution: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Language: | English |
| Origin: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Summary: | Looking at I Am Love [Io sonno l’amore] (2009), a film by Luca Guadagnino, in light of three possible genre categories: the family melodrama, the “melodrama of the unknown woman” (Cavell 1996) and the contemporary melodrama, I verify in what ways it deviates from the Italian film tradition to represent a new social paradigm (contemporary and capitalist), at the same time as it pertains to a cinematic matrix that is, all things considered, that of North American classical melodrama. Exploring the identity-questioning device provided in the title through a (self-)metonymic effect (“I am love”), my major topics for analysis and cornerstones in the representation of the film’s protagonist — Emma, an “unknown woman” — are the dilution and refinement of individual boundaries, the problems of recognition and non-recognition, or of self-affirmation and repression among society, and the process of naming in its ontological, literary and cinematic repercussions. These will also function as references to the melodramatic mode itself in cinema, from a classical Hollywood paradigm to a contemporary and international — critically independent — appropriation and recycling of the genre. |
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