Abstract
The mid-1970s saw a diversification of cinematic products that changed the industry as well as the representation of passionate love. From the 1980s onwards, the number of popular romantic dramas began to rise. The genre flourished as some texts gained commercial success at the box office and others earned a heightened appreciation from popular culture some years after their release. While the films produced in the past three decades employ similar narrative, stylistic and thematic conventions to earlier romantic dramas, a variety of social, political and filmic influences led to significant developments in the genre.
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Notes
Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond. ‘The 1990s and Beyond: An Introduction’ in Contemporary American Cinema, edited by Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond, 327. London: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Williams and Hammond. ‘The 1990s and Beyond’ 327. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond. ‘The 1980s: An Introduction’ in Contemporary American Cinema, edited by Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond, 227. London: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
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See, for example, Lyden. ‘Melodrama, Tearjerkers and “Women’s Films”’ 170. For a discussion of inter-racial relationships, see also James J. Dowd and Nicole R. Pallotta. ‘The End of Romance: Demystification of Love in the Post-Modern Age’ Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 4 (2000): 552.
Diane Elam. Romancing the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1992: 13.
Laura Mulvey. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Feminist Film Theory Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, 58–69. 1975; Reprint, New York: New York University, 1999; John Berger. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin, 1972. There has also been subsequent feedback and counter-arguments to these examinations about the ‘gaze’. See for example Stephen Kern. The Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels 1840–1900. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Kern’s time period is different to Berger’s, however, he observes that in his sample the depiction of women suggest they have a ‘wider horizon of visual interests, a broader range of purposes, and more profound, if not more intense, emotions’ (7).
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Steven J. Zani. ‘Traumatic Disaster and Titanic Recuperation’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 31, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 128. See also, David Lubin. Titanic. London: BFI, 1999: 96, to whom Zani refers.
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Trice and Holland. Heroes, Antiheroes and Dolts. 213–214. They also use the male protagonist in Shakespeare in Love as another example.
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See Trice and Holland. Heroes, Antiheroes and Dolts. 204; Zani. ‘Traumatic Disaster and Titanic Recuperation’ 130.
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Williams and Hammond. ‘The 1990s and Beyond’ 326. See also Williams and Hammond. ‘The 1980s’ 225.
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See, ‘Multiple Grammy Winner Celine Dion’s music video “My Heart Will Go On”’ Titanic, directed by James Cameron (1997; Moore Park, NSW: Twentieth Century Home Entertainment, 2005), special ed. DVD.
Maltby. ‘Taking Hollywood Seriously’ 12; Richard Maltby. Hollywood Cinema 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003: 300.
The Notebook, DVD See also Josh Grant. ‘The Book of Love: Romantic Love in Nick Cassavetes’ The Notebook’ unpublished essay (online). 30 November 2009. Accessed 31 May 2010. http://www.westga.edu/-jgrant/Love/The %20Notebook%20Sample.doc. As Josh Grant notes. The Notebook mirrors Ovid’s classical tale of Baucis and Philemon in the eighth book of his Metamorphoses, in which the supreme God Zeus makes the two elderly lovers into entwining trees upon their deaths, granting their wish to be together forever. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tanslation by A. D. Melville, introduction and notes by E. J. Kenney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. see in particular Book VIII.
Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. ‘Narrating the Ship of Dreams: The Ethics of Sentimentality in James Cameron’s Titanic’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 47. See also Lyden ‘Melodrama, Tearjerkers and “Women’s Films”’ 176. He says that the reunion is a ‘transcendental reality’.
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© 2014 Erica Todd
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Todd, E. (2014). Passionate Love in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Dramas. In: Passionate Love and Popular Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295385_5
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