PhD Oral Exam - Meredith Slifkin, Film and Moving Image Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This project uses melodrama as a critical method for mediating the intersections of gender, genre, and nation in early Cold War cinema along and across geopolitical lines. The early Cold War period addressed here (1955-1963) covers an important era of revolution, modernization, and nation-building in the wake of World War II. Using historiographic and cultural-historical research, in addition to close analysis of narrative and aesthetics, this project examines the ways that melodrama can be used as a tool for negotiating American, Soviet, and Egyptian transitional cultural periods. Within these film cultures there exist certain overlapping themes of interest that are explored at length: analogies between woman and nation, discourses on domesticity and citizenship, and the role of cultural memory in representations of the recent past.

The case studies in this dissertation show that there is a persistent language of melodrama across issues of gender, nation, and history. By analyzing the connections between these discourses this project contributes to the growing imperative to formulate histories of global feminisms and modernities, while looking to melodrama as a method of political potential. The film analyses in the three chapters provide us with the tools to look both backward and forward to imagine the scope of women’s histories and lived experience.

The three chapters correspond to West, East, and non-aligned geopolitical positions respectively. The first chapter focuses on the disappearance of the Woman’s Film in the 1950s, and its rediscovery in Hollywood’s transnational imagination: a discursive space in which personal and political desire overlap. The second chapter argues that melodrama during the Khrushchev Thaw, influenced by global (neo)realisms, expresses a radical subjectivity and individuality to counter the suppressed understanding of self that had been imposed on a cultural-institutional level during the Stalinist era. Finally, the third chapter examines the role of Egyptian melodrama as a site for fraught analogies between women’s liberation and national modernization post-revolution, and the role of Egyptian cinema in a proxy cultural Cold War.