Film Genre, Social Identity and Gender. A Case Study: The Melodrama in 1950s France

Combining micro-history and ethnographic observation, the author of this article endeavours, using a study of the market for new film releases in a small French town from 1948 to 1960, to provide an objective account of the film-going experience of working-class female viewers, and in particular the individual ways in which they appropriated the film melodrama. Through analysis of Italian melodramas, which met with considerable box-office success in France in the 1950s and were widely disseminated in the women's press in the form of serializations and novelizations, and a survey of the discussions they gave rise to in readers' letters to Film complet, the author establishes the ambiguity of their reception. The patriarchal ideology in which these film fictions were rooted did not prevent some female viewers, in light of their personal experience and the socioeconomic dynamic of which they were a part, from seeing them as opportunities to question the fairness and justice of social relations between the sexes. This study thus seeks to correct a reductive and pejorative vision of the film melodrama and of women's tastes, to which the melodrama gives expression.