From October-December at BFI FAN venues across the UK, get ready for Too Much: Melodrama on Film.
Cinema is, by nature, melodramatic.
Beautiful people perform impossible stories, hearts on sleeves as they dance through an artificial world. In a passionate purge of emotion, melodrama employs exaggerated staging, score and performance to create the ultimate spectacle. The stories it tells are intimate and familial, but stakes are high, and characters rarely behave rationally. They are human, after all.
Despite (or because of) its popularity, melodrama has repeatedly been dismissed by critics. They find sincerity confronting, a lack of restraint distasteful. As women through the ages have been told: it’s not right to be so hysterical.
The rare cinematic form concerned with women’s inner lives, these films span infidelity, motherhood and exploitation to capture our hearts and evoke our empathy. The legacy of early ‘women’s pictures’, created for female audiences with their favourite female stars, echoes across generations and around the world. As in life, these women do not always triumph. Imperfectly feminist yet endlessly relatable, their sensationalist struggles carry searing social commentary beneath their glossy veneer.
In the coming months we will embrace the vivid visual language and heightened dramatics of melodrama, inviting you to leave your cynicism at the door and feel something.
Don’t forget your tissues.
In the South West, there are a host of events being run by FAN members from one-off screenings to wide-ranging seasons.
They include:
- Create Studios, Swindon (Info coming soon)
- Screams By The Sea – Shape of Water
- Lighthouse, Poole (Info coming soon)
- Reel Life Monsters
- South West Silents: Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson double bills, Bristol Megascreen
- Purbeck Film Festival: Focus on Melodrama
- C Fylm (Info coming soon)
- Exeter Phoenix: Too Much – Melodrama on Film
- Cary Comes Home (Info coming soon)
- Watershed (Info coming soon)
- Mor Media Charity (Info coming soon)
- The Poly (Info coming soon)
- Bridport Arts Centre (Info coming soon)
There are also UK-wide touring programmes happening from Oct-Dec including:
- Invisible Women present: Stronger Than Love: ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama!
- The New Black Film Collective: ‘Nolly-Oh’
- Phizzical Productions: A tour of a new restoration of Bollywood classic Sholay (Info coming soon)
- Crip Melodrama
- Depot, Lewes – Phantom of the Opera (Info coming soon)
To view the full list of events happening around the country, visit https://www.bfi.org.uk/too-much
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