The seminar will explore the melodramatic cinema of three filmmakers: Douglas Sirk, Rainer Warner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodovar as well as other film melodramas and the woman’s Film in classical Hollywood cinema. For the last twenty-five years, film melodrama has been a vital terrain on which feminist, queer, racial, aesthetic, political and ideological debates about culture, representation and identity have been fought. This course will critically explore the impact of major theatrical developments on this growing field – from structuralism and psychoanalysis in the 1970s to postcolonial, queer theory and postmodernism in the 1990s. Using global classical and contemporary melodramas and the woman’s films, the course will discuss topics such as genre and ideology; the domestic space; female spectatorship; the gothic; male melodramas; as well as issues of race, class and nationalism in melodramatic representations.