Seminar 3 (2013): Heritage Cinema
The third class in the 2013 course was devoted to the idea of heritage and heritage cinema. I was encouraged to think about this theme for three reasons. The first is that one of my key guiding films, as introduced in the ‘prezi’ here, is the Hindi film Jodhaa Akbar (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2008), which I think can best be described as a heritage film, and of which more below. Secondly, the ‘heritage gaze’ at history is a despised one, and as such something I’m interested in taking seriously and sympathetically. Finally, Paul Cooke, a senior colleague at Leeds, is developing a project I’m involved in, called ‘Screening European Heritage’. I’ll be presenting my material on Jodhaa Akbar at the project’s first conference in September. See the ‘Screening European Heritage’ website for Paul’s introduction to the project and for links to an already substantial variety of resources, including interviews with some of the key names in scholarship on heritage cinema.
Artefacts, history, pleasure
Heritage cinema has been one of those deplored areas of historical representation. As Marnie Hughes-Warrington (2007: 27) complains, for some scholars heritage cinema ‘denotes an absence of political engagement’:
In heritage, the past is no more than a look or style, or a mass of material artefacts. If faction [the fusion of fictional characters with historical settings] belongs to Hollywood, then heritage belongs to 1980s Britain, for it purportedly satisfied viewer and filmmaker demands for an escape from the problematic expansion and re-articulation of British identity that was prompted by immigration from past and present parts of the Empire and now Commenwealth.
An escapist and nostalgic gaze, then, but certainly a pleasurable one. And my implicit theme in this post is history (even traumatic history) as pleasure. If the past is a foreign country (L.P. Hartley’s phrase adopted as the title of a famous book by historian David Lowenthal) then heritage film allows a tourist visit that, while it might elide the distance and otherness of the past, facilitates investments of identification, pleasure and desire.
By way of illustration let’s consider this extract from the adaptation by the British Broadcasting Corporation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995) – the series that confirmed Colin Firth as a sex symbol and persuaded Helen Fielding to base the character of Darcy in the Briget Jones books on him (of course Firth goes on to play the character in the adaptations of the books).
The clip has many elements of the heritage appeal. It delights in placing attractive and capable actors in the kind of impressive surroundings that day trippers in the UK like to visit: the homes and gardens of the aristocracy. It enjoys the artefacts of the past: the costumes, bricks and mortar, as well as relationships (servant and master; male and female) that while de facto unequal are haloed in a nostalgic glow. The whole becomes a chronotope of fantasy granted concrete form by artefactual festishization in the mise-en-scéne. (Perhaps, that is. I’m mimicking a particular discourse here.)
The fact of the adaptation is part of this fantasy and one mechanism of its disavowal: one is improving oneself (engaging with an attested classic; learning about social conventions in the past) even as one strains in one’s figurative bodice for Colin Firth’s manly embrace. And, as that last (hetero‑)sexist phrase exemplifies, there’s a sense in the whole discussion of heritage cinema that it tends to be a form for women – or at least a feminized spectator – encouraged to identify with historical heroines and to desire historical masculinities. Like all genres identified as about or addressed to females, this one too is subject to misogyny.
‘Heritage cinema’
The term heritage cinema, though it is now widespread and employed in many national contexts, was coined by the academic Andrew Higson (see references) to describe a group of films that emerged from Britain in the 1980s. As the material above suggests, the term was intended as a pejorative one, and indicates the nostalgia conveyed by historical dramas, romantic costume films and literary adaptations. The films of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory (producer and director respectively) are seen as key examples, displaying conspicuous production values and offering star appeal and actorly competence in their attractive and skilled casts (to-be-world-famous figures like Daniel Day-Lewis and Helena Bonham Carter make first conspicuous appearances in the heritage cinema). The films are perceived as ‘quality’ pictures with a solid middlebrow appeal: that is, they are improving and worthy (and, so, often adaptations of classic books: Jane Austen, E.M. Forster, Henry James and so on) without being formally or narratively difficult, and are seen to conform to conventional realistic aesthetics. The films are understood to be characterized by craft rather than art, and overall to offer reactionary consolation rather than political or artistic challenge.
It’s important to realise that ‘heritage cinema’ (like ‘film noir’) was a category invented by scholars and not a genre perceived as such by industry or (initially at any rate) audiences. Likewise, as more recent writers like Claire Monk and Belén Vidal (2012) have pointed out, the critical characterization of the invented genre has to be understood as emerging from the fraught and splenetic British political atmosphere of the Thatcher prime ministership (1979-1990).
Margaret Thatcher was a deeply divisive figure who dismantled much of Britain’s industrial sector in the name of defeating socialism (decommissioned coal mines became – precisely – ‘heritage’, and many are now museums). Parallel and perhaps essential to this project was a narrow version of Britishness, indeed ‘Englishness’ (Thatcher styled herself an ‘English nationalist’), which celebrated whiteness, the colonial past and the values and architectural legacy of the upper middle classes and aristocratic elite.
A country house in Maurice (James Ivory, 1987)
What came to be identified as heritage cinema was seen by scholars on the left to be the representational correlate of Thatcherite ideology. Thus the films tend to be set in the Edwardian period or in the India of the British Raj. Locations include England’s green and pleasant countryside and its ancestral seats, Oxbridge, colonial India of course, and also Italy (often Tuscany, a favourite holiday destination for the English middle classes, with its medieval churches, frescos and museums, cheap wine, ample sunshine and flesh). The slow pace of the films allowed the viewer to luxuriate in the opulent if static mise-en-scéne, just like the films’ upper middle class and aristocratic characters. In short, heritage cinema was seen as a conservative and ideologically unsound form that proffered ‘a highly selective vision of Englishness attached to pastoral and imperial values where the past as spectacle becomes the main attraction’ (this is Belén Vidal’s summary (2012: 8) of the critical account of heritage cinema, not her own view).
After such history what heritage?
Coeval with the heritage cinema that caught the offended eye of the scholars was the foundation of a government body, called for short ‘English Heritage’ (strictly speaking, the ‘Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England’), the remit of which is to manage the historic built environment of England. (See the informative Wikipedia entry and English Heritage’s own website.) It’s interesting to look briefly at the work done by English Heritage because its surprising variety anticipates the way that the concept of heritage cinema has had to be stretched to accommodate a wider range of tones and themes than was first allowed in the critical delimitation of the genre.
To some extent, English Heritage does exactly what you might expect. It helps to maintain famous historical sites like Stonehenge as well as lots of rich people’s houses. It is responsible for the blue plaques that mark where historical figures stayed in London. But it also maintains more unusual sites (for example, a Cold War bunker) that point to an extended idea of heritage, and emphasises unusual themes under its remit of care for the built environment. Three such themes are articulated on the English Heritage website.
While it is already interesting to identify ‘sectional’ heritage in the two categories of disability and women’s history, the notion of the ‘heritage’ of the slave trade seems more complex and – one would have thought – contentious. If ‘heritage’ denotes ‘valued objects and qualities’, then the slave trade is a heritage for – whom exactly? Descendants of the enslaved may certainly wish to ensure such a historical outrage is not forgotten, and may cement an identity by claiming the experience of slavery and working against historical amnesia. But if the answer is ‘for the aristocratic white English whose homes are preserved and celebrated by another part of the English Heritage budget’, then it is a controversial, shameful and negative heritage indeed. Think of the outcry that greeted Edward Said’s suggestion that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park manifested a tacit acceptance of the slave trade. But As Walter Benjamin famously wrote: ‘There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.’ My point, though, is that the choice to treat the traces of the slave trade as ‘heritage’ resounds with the treatment in cinema of certain sets of historical events as ‘tainted’ or ‘dark’ heritage. Some of these will be discussed below (and have been discussed already in the second of the two videos in this post).
Heritage cinema migrates to Italy
Although the term ‘heritage cinema’ was coined to refer to British films, it has come to be used to single out phenomena in other national (and transnational) contexts. In Italy, it has been used to identify exportable films that Pauline Small has described as ‘rural idyll’ films (other sorts of films too have being described as heritage films in Italy – see the video interview with me, also included in this post; see also Galt 2002), which tend to take place in Sicily or one of the smaller islands. In these films, women are part of the visual spectacle, presented, like the landscape and on behalf of the cinema spectator, for the delight of the man or male child’s intra-diegetic gaze.
In effect, we get a tourist gaze on Italy superimposed on and equivalent to the gaze on the woman. Inasmuch as this suggests that the films are made to be seen abroad they are often seen as inauthentic; seen to commodify Italy’s appeal – its lifestyle and landscape, the olive skin of its people – for the export market. Such films are associated with Miramax and its policy of picking up middlebrow films from Europe for distribution in the American market. Notice how and what the English language trailer for Il postino (The Postman,Michael Radford, 1994) is selling (no original dialogue of course – apart from a repeated word that also exists in English – typical in a trailer for a subtitled film).
As an Italian/French co-production with a multinational cast and English director, Il postino had an ‘international’ aspect even before being picked up for distribution by Miramax – something true of very many films, but of heritage films in particular. In that sense, it may be more accurate to talk of the film as European and not strictly speaking Italian heritage cinema.
Still, we should not discount the distinct character of the film’s appeal within Italy itself, where the importance of the Cold War context will have been more obvious to viewers (the politics may have given a certain piquancy to the film abroad – a sense of authenticity to the picturesque proceedings). A mythologizing pride in the national landscape is widespread in Italy, as is the deep love for the film’s star, comic actor Massimo Troisi, who died of a heart attack hours after shooting wrapped on the film. Maria Grazia Cuccinotta, the film’s love interest and macguffin, went on to represent a version of Mediterranean femininity that made her a national icon (see Stephen Gundle’s discussion of her emblematic beauty in Bellissima). Of course, La Cuccinotta’s status as national icon was enabled by an international celebrity generated by the film’s international success, and this points to the contradictory structure of ‘nationality’ in cinema. It would annoy many to suggest as much, but these rural idyll/heritage films are quintessentially ‘national cinema’ according to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s prescriptive definition:
For Nowell-Smith, the paradox of a national cinema is that it must be seen (to speak) abroad. But if he (and the discipline of Italian film studies) favours neorealism to serve this ambassadorial function, the fact is that it has been displaced by heritage films like Il postino and Cinema Paradiso: no longer the diplomatic service, perhaps, but rather the country’s tourist board. In fact, if I have talked about European heritage cinema, we also, now, need to talk about regional heritage cinema. To make a film in Italy these days invariably means attracting funding from the regional film commissions, so that a script in development will often leave the setting or location unspecified until funding has been secured. Film production becomes a branch of a city or region’s self-promotion, as heritage is once again packaged for consumption elsewhere.
This is all a BAD THING, right? Self-evidently, the commodification of a country’s appeal is ideologically suspect; it ratifies inequalities and elides history in name of attracting a spectator and visitor characterized chiefly by his or her ignorance… Right?
I haven’t decided – or rather, I don’t believe there was a time before the market and ideology (before genre, before pleasure…) when truth brightly shone through cinema and allowed the real Italy, say, to be apprehended unsweetened – though this, of course, is what the critical myth would have us believe of neorealism. And I am less inclined to patronize the heritage viewer for his or her ignorance. Pleasure is, I think, more complex and interesting than mere information.
India heritage cinema?
Can we talk of a heritage cinema in India? Certainly, the concept of ‘heritage’ is alive and well here, with white and blue signs in areas of importance (Agra, for example, site of the Taj Mahal and Red Fort) proclaiming the pride felt in India’s architectural legacy. A film like Jodhaa Akbar certainly appreciates history’s ‘external’ aspect. Jodhaa Akbar, a Hindi epic set in the Sixteenth Century about a marriage of alliance that blossoms into love between a historical Moghul ruler and a Hindu princess, restages in sets the impressiveness of Moghul building and using some existing historical locations (mostly for long shots as far as I can discern). So we get sets apparently based on the red sandstone Fatehpur Sikri heritage site (for a brief time used by Akbar as his capital) revivified with billowing drapes, and no effort or expense seems to have been spared on the lush costumes.
The film, then, fetishizes mise-en-scéne in a manner familiar from the British heritage film, and in the service of a mythologized Indian identity. After all, the Moghul sites might well be construed as part of a specifically Muslim heritage; but the choice to tell the mythologized story as romance of Akbar’s marriage with a Hindu woman is a means of offering a model for Muslim-Hindu cooperation and pan-Indian identity.
The figure of Akbar already represents this in Indian myth. In tales for children – which have also been adapted for television – he is associated in old age with his wise Hindu counsellor Birbal, a kind of homosocial marriage of minds. The historical Akbar himself was seen to reach beyond religious bigotry with his invention of a ‘syncretic’ religion merging aspects of Islam, Hinduism and other belief systems, and he was reputed to have an otherworldly character in his sympathy for Sufism (illustrated in the film when he is transported by Sufi wedding music).
In Jodhaa Akbar, Akbar is returned to his prime, given the delicious form of Hrithik Roshan, and rendered sexy as well as spiritual, practical and wise. The mythical Jodha Bai is given the equally delicious form of Aishwarya Rai, and no impediment is admitted to the marriage of true minds, two bodies and the traditions they represent. Jodha was a name given to Akbar’s supposed Hindu wife many years after by a British historian, and the building in Fatehpur Sikri reputed to have been her quarters was, according to authoritative histories, nothing of the sort. The local guide who showed us around the heritage complex insisted it was, however: ignore those historians, what do they know! I’m telling you the truth and look there’s even the spot where Jodha Bai used to pray! Like my guide, the heritage film Jodhaa Akbar is asserting a mythical history that celebrates the look of the past and asserts it as a unifying cultural legacy. We need not to patronize but to value the power of this myth – why has it survived? Why is it so attractive now? (A television series influenced by the film has been airing this summer on cable channel Zee TV.)
I’ve discussed here the clip below, but this is an extended version of the sequence, with the scene of Akbar’s swordplay workout followed by an scene of Jodhaa in her quarters with attendants (all female apart from a eunuch). The man occupies in action an unadorned exterior space, while the women is, first, framed in the liminal space of a doorway (the editing’s work of suture persuades the two spaces are continuous), and then shown languorous in an opulent interior. So far, that is, so typically gendered. But interesting to me is how the fetishization and eroticization of the male body gazed upon by the woman, is translated in the next scene to female costume. Notice the cut in to a close up on the über-bling necklace (necklace? is that the word?) sent by Akbar as a mark of his regard for this wife (they haven’t yet slept together at this point in the film).
My Hindi isn’t up to much, but the dialogue in the latter scene takes a turn for the romantic-erotic, impying that female desire has been released through the gaze on male body and confirmed by feminine adornment (costume and costume jewellery). The validation of female desire in a kind of eroticized gaze at history must partly be responsible for the impact of the film on wedding fashion: for some time after the film’s release, costume and jewellery based on the designs in Jodhaa Akbar were adopted by brides in the Hindu tradition; the film catalysed the wearing (or deployment) of artefactual heritage.
Wearing history at a wedding conserves and employs the past to give particular form to the public declaration of gendered partnership in a social ritual. And it enables the orientation of the marriage itself to the nation inasmuch as Jodhaa Akbar offers a unifying vision (a myth) of India that transcends religious conflict. Indeed, this is true even for the diaspora community: over a quarter of the film’s takings came from outside India and the trend for Jodhaa Akbar wedding jewellery was international.
World heritage cinema?
In certain of its activities UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a kind of global big brother to English Heritage. As part of its ethos that ‘political and economic agreements are not enough to build a lasting peace; peace must be established on the basis of humanity’s moral and intellectual solidarity’, UNESCO recognizes that ‘certain places on Earth are of “outstanding universal value” and should form part of the common heritage of humankind’:
Interesting that UNESCO has a broad understanding of heritage, one that links the built to the natural environment, and this might be linked to the Italian films discussed above, where landscape itself is part of the national legacy (ironically, the gorgeous beach featured in Il postino was damaged by careless tourism following the success of the film). But I want to focus on the fact that on the World Heritage List are several of the sites featured in Jodhaa Akbar: arguably, the film is as much world heritage as it is Indian heritage cinema.
A quick Google search suggests that the idea of ‘world heritage cinema’ is not employed as I am using it here; it seems to be used to refer to the conservation of films of international and historical importance. I mean, instead, those films which regard heritage sites with a voluptuous gaze on behalf on an international spectator. An example is The Last Emperor (1987), made by British producer Jeremy Thomas, and directed by the Italian Bernardo Bertolucci, with an international cast and a mainly Italian technical staff (but a British costume designer). The filmmakers had unique access to the so-called Forbidden City in Beijing and I suspect their formal choices in its representation have been influential – for example on the CGI-heavy cinema of Zhang Yimou (in the slide below, the top right image is from The Last Emperor and the one underneath it from a Zhang Yimou film). Here, a ‘world heritage’ film influences local filmmakers who make of their own Chinese heritage something equally exportable. In all cases, the past is that much more vivid than our own time – cleaner, brighter, more symmetrical – enabling a voluptuous tourist gaze on the physical foreign land and the temporal foreign country of the past.
Tainted heritage
One final theme. I mentioned above the work English Heritage is doing to preserve the legacy of the slave trade, which necessarily informs British identity. Scholars have referred to this sort of approach as ‘tainted’ heritage or ‘dark’ heritage (though I’m uncomfortable with the colour symbolism in the latter tag). ‘Dark heritage’, in fact, is the term used by Matt Boswell, my colleague at Leeds, to describe ‘negative events which appear difficult if not impossible to integrate or make sense of’. Matt states:
In a subsequent post I will be discussing La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, 1997), a huge international comedy hit on the Holocaust which is certainly one of these ‘dark heritage’ films. Matt goes on to say:
Such films make some people very uncomfortable, because, among other things, they may seem to tell a ‘redemptive’ story in which the murdered of the Holocaust are seen to die for the later and greater good. And, of course, they are usually survivor stories of mettle and cunning, when the truth of the Holocaust was that ‘non-survival’ was the presiding condition: survival, when it occurred, was in no way a function of one’s wits – and it is deeply offensive to the memory of the dead to suggest otherwise (were the victims then not resourceful enough?) – but an arbitrary fact of chance.
If, as I have said, the implicit theme of this post is pleasure, and if the heritage gaze takes pleasure in the past as foreign country then there is something perhaps paradoxical or sinister in the idea of ‘Holocaust heritage’. Does the heritage gaze (ghastly history as entertainment) drain the appalling from the history and leave us off the hook in the present? Leave us, that is, without a sense of responsibility for the past and lacking a sense of duty to ensure any repetition of the past in our time?
The question is posed with particular pertinence in relation to the Holocaust, but actually we are back with the original characterization of heritage denoting, as Marnie Hughes-Warrington puts it, ‘an absence of political engagement’. But as Hughes-Warrington asks in the same book (2007: 45): ‘on what grounds do we distinguish entertainment and spectacle from intellectual and social engagement?’ In other words, can we be sure there is not something complex in the consolatory and not something profoundly efficacious in myth and nostalgia. One feels the power of the argument that a unique series of events like the Holocaust should not be used in the present, should not be ‘exploited’; but frankly such exploitation is inevitable, and entertainment may be the means of coming to terms if not of full understanding (but when is that ever possible?). I think we need to be suspicious of the assertion that the past cannot be ethically and intellectually experienced as voluptuous even when overwhelmingly negative in content.
_________________
See my video interview with Axel Bangert for more on the ‘tainted heritage’ approach to terrorism in Italian cinema. This post has more on the political efficacy of heritage cinema in Italy.
See this interview with Claire Monk for more on the complexity of viewers' engagements with the past in heritage films. The account of fan relationships to Maurice seems to me of particular interest.
Rosalind Galt (2002), ‘Italy’s Landscapes of Loss: Historical Mourning and the Dialectical Image in Cinema Paradiso, Mediterraneo and Il postino, Screen, 43: 2, 158-73
Stephen Gundle (2007), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press)
Andrew Higson (1993), ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires were Started, ed. by Lester Friedman (London: UCL Press), pp. 109-29
_______(2003) English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Marnie Hughes-Warrington (2007). History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge)
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1999), ‘Italian Neo-realism’, in The Cinema Book, 2ndedn, ed. By Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (London: British Film Institute), pp. 76-80.
Pauline Small (2005), ‘Representing the Female: Rural Idylls, Urban Nightmares’, in New Directions in Italian Cinema, ed. by William Hope (Oxford: Peter Lang), pp. 151-74
Belén Vidal (2012), Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation (London: Wallflower)
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