Representing Romance at the Movies

About this book

The research comprises seven chapters. Chapter one explores cultural assumptions, definitions and depictions of love. Through this analysis, two notable, distinct types of intimate relationships between men and women emerge: companionate love and passionate love. Chapter two takes the approach of genre studies, which seeks to find recurrent patterns in stories, in order to understand how these two definitions of love inflect cinematic stories about love. This examination finds that the majority of existing scholarship focuses on a single dominant genre dealing with love: the romantic comedy, which centres on the problems of representing companionate love. As no study has concentrated on films that foreground passionate love, this research isolates the possible traits that would allow these films to be classified as part of a film genre. The following chapters look closely at three Hollywood and one non-Hollywood passionate love stories to ascertain their features: chapter three at Casablanca (Michael Curtiz: 1942); chapter four at Titanic (James Cameron: 1997) and The Notebook (Nick Cassavetes: 2004); and chapter five at Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier: 1937). Chapter six takes the…