All That Melodrama Allows

Get swept up in a wave of emotion this winter with our season of romance, passion and heartbreak.

From the vivid technicolor melodramas of émigré filmmaker Douglas Sirk in 50s Hollywood, to queer reinventions in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) and Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother), through to more recent provocative works from Todd Haynes (May December), this season brings back to the big screen a cinematic line of influence within the melodramatic style.

We’re kicking things off by marking the 70th anniversary of Sirk’s romantic classic All That Heaven Allows (1955), starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman – there’s an opportunity to join us to chat about the film together at our Deaf Conversations About Cinema screening on Mon 27 Oct. Fassbinder reworks this convention-crossing romance for a 70s German society in his powerful, moving critique Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), before Haynes later offers his own homage, with his rich period pastiche Far From Heaven (2003).

Alongside celebrating the female stars of melodrama who have drawn audiences to the cinema in their millions, the season also explores the common melodramatic trope of the ‘hysterical’ woman – join us for a discussion after a screening of Todd Haynes’ psychological drama Safe (1995) to dig into depictions of disabled women within the genre.

Moving beyond the cinema screens, we're also playing host to the Love Lost Hotline (Mon 3 - Thu 13 Nov) – an audio project inspired and informed by cinematic notions of story and longing, straight from the classic melodramas of Sirk. Here, in our Café & Bar, you're invited to enter a phone booth where strangers leave messages for a lost love, with each message forming part of the heartbreak archive: a collection of raw confessions, warped truths, spectral yearnings, and unresolved monologues.

Melodrama at its best manages to elegantly blend social critique with its trademark visual excesses, expressive staging and exaggerated performances – this is a season full to the brim with heightened tension, stylistic flourishes and big emotions. Time to get sucked in!

"You can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living." - Douglas Sirk, as quoted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Part of Too Much: Melodrama on Film, a major UK-wide season celebrating cinema’s biggest emotions and heightened dramatics from around the world. Presented with the support of the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funds from the National Lottery.