Melodrama and Modernity

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic book on silent cliffhanger serials!
Review: This book is a well written description of the origins and history of the silent cliffhanger serials. The author explains how the chapterplays are similar to and an expansion on the "melodrama" genre of stageplays and 1 reel films popular in the early 1900's.

The second half of the book is the heart of it, focusing on the serials themselves. The book has a number of old trade magazine advertisements for serials that show the excitement and drama serials conveyed to those theater patrons so many years ago.

This is a good companion to the books on silent serials by Kalton Lahue published back in the 1960's.

Rating:
Summary: Readable introduction
Review: This study has many of the earmarks of a Ph. D. dissertation--muted claims and qualifiers, allusions to the Frankfort School, periodic summaries--but it's a lucid, jargon-free beginning of a conversation that's long overdue. Many great American texts (literary as well as cinematic) have been excluded from academic canons and college reading lists on the grounds that they don't belong in the ironic, modernist tradition. By showing that melodrama is modernity's child, not its antithesis, Singer invites us to pay serious attention to texts whose only crime may be full disclosure of meaning and undeniable influencing of the witness.