Hyperdrama realism

Although particular filmmakers have been affiliated with hyperdrama— Luis Bunuel throughout his career, from Spain to Mexico to France—the genre is more often affiliated with humorists, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Modern Times (1936) is a fable about industrialization and its explicit tendency to mechanize and dehumanize. The many set-pieces in the film have an internal logic, but they are so fabulist in their content that realism is actually beside the point. A similar quality infuses the majority of Chaplin s work. 

The tone of hyperdrama has to embrace both the ritualistic and the fantastic—the opposite of realism. Even the poetic tone of the Western is insufficient to capture the tone in hyperdrama. Hyperdrama is a form that simulates the children s fairy tale, and as such it has to be filled with an excess (without the pejorative connotations of the word) that embraces the fantastic. "Operatic" is a description that comes to mind "florid" is another. The key is essentially an over-the-top tone that allows a story to seem plausible in which anything goes. Ridley Scott s Legend is a good example of this "anything goes" tone, and so are Boorman s Excalibur, Schlondorff s The Tin Drum, and Frankenheimer s Seconds. 

In a sense, the tone of hyperdrama is as far from the realism of melodrama as you can imagine, plus a bit farther. Even the more formal examples of the style are over the top they have a greater aura of ritual than of anarchy. Kubrick s A Clockwork Orange, Herzog s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Von Trier s Breaking the Waves exemplify this dimension of tone in hyperdrama. 

The short film is actually a more natural form for hyperdrama. The long film, with its complexity of character and relationships, is more immediately compatible with realism. The short film, with its relationship to the short story, the poem, the photograph, and the painting, is a more metaphorical form, and thus it adapts easily to hyperdrama. 

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