3 - Challenging the Folklore of Romance

Summary

The largest output of films in the 1930s and early 1940s was of genre films – historical films, costume dramas, biopics, musicals, operatic films, melodramas based on novels, and comedies. Genre films are structured around familiar scenarios focusing on the folklore of romance. Popular customs and rituals concern courtship and marriage, gendered behavior, social legitimacy, authority, and contested power. On the subject of romance novels, Robin Pickering-Iazzi writes:

Much of the pleasure of reading formula stories, whether detective novels or romance novels, derives from the repeated discovery of what the reader actually knows and anticipates, as conflicts, which may be aroused at both the textual and subjective levels, are then engaged and finally resolved in a satisfying manner at the novels' end.

While narrative repetition is important to the pleasure of the text, also important in the genre cinema are its nondiegetic elements: its uses of spectacle, iconography, the topography of space, and embedded topical allusions that produce uncomfortable emotional responses and even militate against a satisfactory resolution despite the “happy ending.” The folklore of romance entertains the possibility of failure, mobilizing affect toward ends that may also be consonant with what the spectator knows but that may lead in the direction of cynicism and skepticism rather than affirmation or identification. Narrative strategies, images, dialogue, or music are embedded in cultural matrices that cannot be completely controlled by the filmmakers.

Many of the genre films produced during the Fascist era are not seamless.