The Sentiments of War in Spielberg and Tarantino

Chapter Five’s examines two ‘post-classical’ examples of Hollywood’s war/combat genre, examining their problematic negotiation of sentimentality as fundamentally melodramatic films. The ‘camp’ appropriation of violence and identity of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is conceived in such respects as an apparent rhetorical antidote to the ‘New Sincerity’ of Steven Spielberg’sSaving Private Ryan (1998), a negotiation that is problematised by its own reliance on gendered discourses of action and resistance as adequate responses to trauma and memory. The chapter draws on ideas examined in previous chapters regarding the functions of irony and violence as countrapuntal registers to sentimentality, contextualising the two films as tonally different responses to US militarism in the post-Vietnam era.

The Sentimental Chaplin: Comedy and Classical Narrative

Chapter Three focuses on the critical functions of comedy in relation to sentimental narrative structures in the early and classical Hollywood eras, focusing on how humour is both celebrated and critiqued in terms of its counter-balancing, compensation for, or even negation of the sentimental in film. Charles Chaplin’s early work is analysed with reference to the critical opposition to his features on the part of intellectuals wedded to a more ‘naturalistic’ cinema or to Chaplin’s more ‘anarchic’ deployment of slapstick, such as the American writer Gilbert Seldes and the early work of Siegfried Kracauer. The discussion turns to the classical genres of Hollywood’s 1930s and 1940s period, using sequences from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as an exemplary negotiation of sentiment and slapstick. Focus is maintained on the way that such categories are influenced by sentimental codes, particularly in terms of the persistence of genteel sensibilities and/or moralistic narrative structures. The chapter draws in such respects on key theorists of film comedy of that era, such as Stanley Cavell, Henry Jenkins and Lea Jacobs.

Affect, or Postmodern Sentimentalism

Chapter Four provides a wider theoretical basis for the ‘sophistication’ and self-consciousness that characterises post-classical or postmodern forms of sentimentality in US film culture, with particular attention paid to notions of ‘excess’ and distanciation. It accounts in particular for the influence of key modernists like Adorno, Benjamin and Brecht on taste categories that persist in contemporary film studies, with particular reference to the ‘ideological stoicism’ that is alleged to predominate in critical film culture. The discussion will provide context for a discussion of the ‘affective’ turn in film theory, around which the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell loom large in their centralisation of a film-as-thought paradigm.

Towards a Genealogy of Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter One charts a genealogy of the sentimental mode, from the sentimental literary cultures of 18th century Europe through to the widespread success of popular melodrama in Europe and America. It draws connections between the sentimental novel, ‘Moral Sense’ philosophy of the 18th century ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, and 19th century melodrama, as discourses and traditions each bound up with questions relating to affect, the subject and society. While textual analysis of specific texts seeks to draw out the continuities and problematics of sentimentalism as a literary and theatrical genre, a focus remains on establishing the critical contours of the term’s cultural history. The section’s particular aim is to trace the term’s fall from grace while nevertheless establishing its full theoretical significance to film theory. It will also review influential literary scholarship on the cultural gendering of sentimentalism of the period, whether discerned in the ideological consolidation of bourgeois society, the continuance of sentimental narrative in theatrical melodrama and the novel (Stowe, Dickens) or in the various periodicals, guidebooks and assorted paraphernalia that make up a feminizing culture for theorists like Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins and Lauren Berlant.

Conclusion

In a 2010 article for The New York Times, literary theorist Stanley Fish comments on recent manifestations of the ‘crisis in the humanities’ in the form of language department closures at US universities such as at the State University of New York at Albany. Defending a ‘liberal arts’ education amid the neoliberalist reality of higher-education funding and knowledge production, Fish is nevertheless highly critical of a fellow respondent’s claims concerning the value of the humanities. This respondent asks in his letter, ‘What happened to public investment in the humanities and the belief that the humanities enhanced our culture, our society, our humanity?’ Fish advises caution concerning this line of defence, arguing:...

Sentiment and the ‘Smart’ Melodrama

Examines the ‘camp’ sensibility of two contemporary art-films, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (2004), focusing in particular on their respective treatments of melodrama as a genre attuned to the experience and suffering of women in US society. Meditating on the problem of gender and childhood in pastoral America, the analysis seeks to explore the negotiation of sentimentalist conventions borrowed from traditional film genres like the musical and the ‘maternal melodrama’, focusing in particular on issues of ‘play’ and camp performance. The discussion thus raises problems introduced in earlier chapters with regards to the self-reflexive bracketing of sentimentality as a discourse of sincerity and ethical subjectivity, emphasising its ambiguous presence in the art-film as a mode of fantasy and self-reflexive mythologizing.

Introduction

Schindler’s List, the 1993 film by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of a businessman and member of the Nazi party who finds moral purpose through the discovery of his altruism towards Jews in wartime Poland both before and during the Holocaust. It was a film that famously divided the critics, particularly its tearful ending and its alleged descent into bathos and sentimentality....

Sentimental Aesthetics and Classical Film Theory

Explores how classical film theorists of the early-to-mid 20th century were able conceive of cinema as a sentimental medium alongside the sociocultural and intellectual backdrop of modernity and modernism respectively. Theory is selected from formalist and realist traditions, both familiar and less well-known texts, using a critical lens attuned to the representation of individual virtue, the face, the sympathetic ‘auteur’, and cinematic pedagogy. Key work by such theorists as Sergei Eisenstein, the writers of 'Close-Up' magazine, André Bazin and Béla Balázs, are examined in terms of a revisionist understanding of modernist emotion and intimacy. Such theory is aligned in turn with sentimental principles introduced in the first chapter; for instance, in relation to the face in close-up (Balázs on Dreyer’s Joan of Arc), ‘sentimental humanism’ (Eisenstein on Dickens), the importance of a virtuous hero or heroine (Balázs’ critique of avant-garde film) and notions of ‘sympathetic’ filmmaking (Bazin on Chaplin and De Sica).