Scott Loren/Jörg Metelmann:

Twenty-five years ago, you described melodrama as a “cultural category.” Over the past two decades, work in melodrama studies seems to have confirmed this assertion. How would you qualify your description now, not only in response to recent developments in melodrama studies, but also in relation to the current political and cultural climate?

Christine Gledhill:

I suppose I would say that all aesthetic practices have a cultural dimension to them. They have their own histories, situated within their cultural formations. I was interested in melodrama as a mental framework that went beyond simply a dramatic practice in the theater and became a way of seeing how the world worked. Marx's Das Kapital and Freud's psychoanalysis have suggested to several critics the polarized conflicts of melodrama – a moral polarization that of course has come back since 9/11 with the war on terror. And I suppose it is melodrama as a mode of imagining, of thinking, which links melodrama to the concerns of the political sociologist. But a few years ago, when I was writing a piece about genre and trying to think through the relation between genre and melodrama as cross-generic mode, I was confronted by the question: what do we mean when we invoke “melodrama”? And that led me into thinking how melodrama entered the film studies field and what it has meant as a cultural category, critically speaking. It seems to me that you could see its cultural function shifting across decades; that whereas it had initially contributed to creating a broadbased popular audience in nineteenth-century France and England, by the end of the nineteenth century it had the function of dividing audiences. It is extraordinary that, except as a taken-for-granted pejorative, “melodrama” did not appear in the vocabulary of film studies until, I suppose, the 1970s. So there is a long, long period of film history in which we could not think about melodrama as a serious category. It came into film studies via Sirk and the search for progressive film-making, and then got taken in a feminist direction through the importance of family melodrama for female audiences. Both of these moves, I think, made it difficult to reach a full understanding of melodrama.