Article Abstract: “Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and Modern Melodrama”

Kovács, András Bálint. "Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama." Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 135-145. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 5 Mar. 2010.

This essay proposes that Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical concept of Nothingness is illustrated in the film genre of modern melodrama. In the first section of the essay, the author analyzes Sartre’s theory of Nothingness as opposed to the German romantic conception of Nothingness from other philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Sartre’s Nothingness is defined as the nonbeing of something that should be, of human expectation for a thing to exist which does not. In the second section, melodrama as a genre of film is explored in it’s various forms (naturalist, classical, and modern) using examples of melodramatic films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. The author focuses on modern melodrama, which is characterized by characters who find themselves in situations that they do not understand , and react passively to the situation as opposed to emotionally, which is typical of naturalist and classical melodramatic styles. In the third section, Michelangelo Antonini’s L’eclisse, a modern melodramatic film, is explored as an example of the concept of Nothingness in modern melodrama.  The suffering of the characters of a modern melodrama is a result of their inability to understand the situation, and thus a realization of emptiness, or Nothingness, as the ultimate power of their situation. The essay follows and employs dialectical research to support the argument.