Quan la principal ocupació de les dones és estimar: el woman's film i la seva influència en el cinema contemporani

Identifier:  TDX:4052

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4052

Authors:  Iglesias Huix, Eulàlia

Abstract:
In the golden age of Hollywood movies, the main occupation of women was love, especially in the woman's film, a genre with women-centered narratives designed to appeal to female audiences. This research makes a detailed examination of the characteristics of the woman's film, its connection with melodrama and the role it has played within feminist film studies as the ideal terrain for exploring the forms in which women are represented and communicated within industrial and patriarchal modes of production. It also discusses the identification between womanhood and romantic love that largely defines the genre, and the extent to which the woman's film functions as a valid intergeneric pattern translatable to other historical periods, after the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, and other national cinemas. Finally, we leave the specifically feminine realm of the genre to analyze how the woman's film and melodrama influenced contemporary auteur cinema by male filmmakers. We explore the 'woman's films' by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a pioneer in bringing the codes of melodrama up to date by using the precepts of modern cinema and the practice of queer cinema, and we investigate how Pedro Almodóvar's filmography connects with classic maternal melodrama. And we attempt to provide insight into how love is understood as an extreme sacrifice in the Golden Heart trilogy by Lars von Trier.