All that heaven allows

First melodramatic film we watched was All That Heaven Allows  directed by Douglas Sirk. As expected, the movie was very melodramatic and had many melodramatic ingredients to it. Those melodramatic ingredients really made the story line more dramatic and eventually controlled our emotions and feelings towards the movie. The factors such as the sound effects and the use of lighting and colors amplified the melodramatic effects. I found sound effects most helpful in really focusing and getting into the scene. For example, from the scene where Cary is telling her children about Ron and how they are getting married, the sound effect led me into the mood that could almost seem as scary. As those sound effects were leading the audiences into the melodramatic mood, the dark lighting effect came in and really intensified the mood. The lighting focused on the characters and the surroundings became so dark that it was hardly visible. This lighting effects really dramatized the situation by making the audiences really concentrate and focus on the situation as well as every gestures that the actors were carrying out. In the book Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility, the author mentions how these lighting almost seemed artificial the way he tried to make the scene too "melodramatic";"...extremely artificial lighting effects are achieved that represent the mood of a scene or a character rather than aiming for more naturalistic lighting" (John Mercer, Martin Shingler 56). I thought this film was a good example of melodrama to start off because it had many easily noticeable melodramatic effects which we could talk about as a class.