Melodrama as film genre

Abstract

This article will try to reel off the common characteristics of a major film genre: melodrama. Often tends to confuse or mix with other genres. But it really has its own signs and a long tradition throughout the cinema, literature and even music history. In Baroque Italy or in the coming years of the French Revolution, there was talk of melodrama as a theatrical piece. The concept is referred to works in the spoken parts were combined with musical parts. The arrival of new audiences in the nineteenth century, produced a semantic change that much closer to the actual meaning, because the term melodrama going to cover all popular dramas written in prose, with sensational or melodramatic plot and full of novelistic dyes. These dramas always tried similar themes, with a confrontation between good and evil, a happy ending, and very stereotypical characters.