Cinema is a dominant force in the lives of many people living in Asia, a continent that has a number of distinguished national film industries. A concept central to much of Asian film production is melodrama. This path-breaking study examines the importance of melodrama in the film traditions of Japan, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia. Exploring with theoretical sophistication the various ways that melodrama operates, the essays contained in this volume shed light on the different traditions of Asian cinema, as well as on the wider cultural discourse in which they participate.

1. Introduction; 2. Melodrama/subjectivity/ideology: Western melodrama theories and their relevance (or not) to recent Chinese cinema; 3. Symbolic representation and symbolic violence: Chinese family melodrama of the early 1980's; 4. The Goddess. Reflections on melodrama East and West; 5. History and its discontent: melodrama as historical understanding; 6. Melodrama, postmodernism and Japanese cinema; 7. Staging the subject: the melodramatisation of gender in An Actor's Revenge; 8. Insiders and outsiders: cross-cultural criticism and Japanese film melodrama; 9. Psyches, ideologies and melodrama: US and Japan; 10. Andaz; 11. The concept of evil and social order in Indian melodrama: an evolving dialectic; 12. Politics of melodrama in Indonesian cinema; 13. Power, pleasure and desire: the female body in Filipino melodrama; 14. The register of nightmare: melodrama as it (dis)appears in Australian film; 15. Overview: what is American about film study in America?