British Historical Film: Its history and generic classification

This paper on British historical films and problems relating to its generic classification originated from two sources. The one was Andrew Higson’s writings on heritage film, that is, the historical costume films and literary adaptations made in the 1980s and 1990s. Somewhat hesitantly, he has described these films as a genre and a negative one at that. According to Higson "one of the central pleasures of the heritage film is the artful and spectacular projection of an elite conservative vision of the national past." He then lists the main representational strategies with which this vision is created: concentration on the Edwardian era, the country house, canonic literature, select landscapes, the middle and upper classes, significant moments of national history, nostalgia to name a few (Higson 1995, s. 26–8; 1996, 232–4, 239–42). This seems quite broad a definition and he has been criticised for ignoring the subversive sides of the heritage boom. For instance, Philip Powrie has analysed the ’alternative’ heritage in films such as The Long Day Closes (1992) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which exhibit very uncompromising images of working class history (Powrie 2000, s. 316–27). Julianne Pidduck has revealed the feminist and other subversive moments in the heritage proper, the Austen adaptations (Pidduck 1998, s. 388–98). Amy Sargeant has pointed out the way in which the heritage films democratise history by making it available to large audiences (Sargeant 2000, s. 302–5). The same argument was forwarded by the late Raphael Samuel in the historical context of the heritage industry in general (Samuel 1999, s. 160-4). This is not to say that there are no suspicious ideological contents in these films; conservatism, nostalgia and an elite view of history are important, though not always as dominant as Higson maintains. He has backed a bit and admitted that heritage film is a hybrid term, more akin to a cycle than a genre and concludes by replacing the heritage genre with a corresponding discourse (Higson 1996, s. 235, 237–8).

Here we find the second influence underlying this paper, that is, the genre theory as presented by Rick Altman in his book Film/Genre. Among his radical revisions of the concept of genre the following are relevant to this paper: rather than being stable and transhistorical genres change over time; rather than belonging to one genre only, most films exhibit multiple and mixed genres (actually, this has been the preferred strategy of the producers); rather than transcendental truths about film types, genres are discursive entities, that is they find their meaning in the uses to which they are put as a part of the language games ‘played’ by the users of the genre and the, not least by the genre and other critics themselves (Altman 1999, s. 99, 123, 136, 142, 208–14). On the one hand Higson is aware of these properties of genre; on the other, however, his wavering between the discursive and generic status of heritage film might be read as genre production in progress. Altman describes a similar situation in relation to the birth of ‘the woman’s film’, which has become established genre through critical, academic discourse, and ‘the Hollywood plantation genre’, which has not gained currency (ibid., s. 72–4, 93). Rather than trying to use heritage in order to speak about the most British films of and about the past as Higson seems to be doing, I will first outline a broad discourse of historical film, a genre if you insist, and then proceed to suggest its fluctuating and interlacing subcategories or subdiscourses. In these sublevels, or to use an un-hierarchical term, specific and competing areas we can deposit both the negative or hegemonic heritage and films, such as Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996), which seem to fulfil Higson’s criteria for heritage, but lose too much of their content on this generic Procrustean bed.

To which ends history is constructed

What do I understand with the term ‘historical film’? As can be expected with any genre, things are less than clear. Usually, for instance in Amy Sargeant’s recent article, a distinction has been made between historical and costume film, the historical being based on documented events, the costume films on fictional events (op.cit., s. 301) Some researches, however, prefer to use these terms more or less interchangeably: in her short article on Basil Dean, Sue Harper labels King Salomon’s Mines (1938) as a historical film (Harper 1990, s. 81). I am inclined to agree with Harper. Why? Because at least in the cinematic field of representation fact and fiction are much more intertwined than in, say, in the academic research of history where we should preserve this distinction. In films about admiral Nelson or Lawrence of Arabia, original texts, manuscripts, actors and strategies of visual manipulation import the fiction into the ‘documented history’, whereas in, say, in an adaptation of an Austen novel, filmmakers cannot escape alluding to the fashions, social history and the political economy of the Georgian period and hence introducing facts – or at least some version of the facts – into the films. So we have fiction in supposedly factual films and facts in films which are usually seen only as works of imagination. Radical postmodern theorists of history would now conclude that history is fiction, a narrative like any other (White 1987, s. 55–67, 115–8; Jenkins 1992, s. 5–7, 30–9).

However, we must note that in order to be intelligible in the first place, even the vaguest of melodramas must refer to some basic historical stereotypes and facts. It must fulfil certain basic conditions in order to pass as historical. For instance, there cannot be any light bulbs, revolvers, cars or microwave ovens in an Austen adaptation (unless, of course, they serve some conscious, artistic, e.g. Brechtian function). In other words, no matter what its topics, subjects and styles are, a film narrative situated in the past can never totally escape the facts and received concepts of history. In the context of cinema we can say that, although there has actually been one past, we can construct various, but always at least marginally factual histories, stories and narratives based on its fragments, whether they were statistical tables or melodramatic novels.

Following these definitions I will move all film narratives situated in the past, from die-hard melodrama to war films, under the banner of historical film. This does not mean that all the usual generic categories, such as biopic, war film, melodrama, are deemed redundant, this reshuffle is rather meant as a clearing of the table, a starting point in an analysis which offers a new way of looking historical films. In context of British cinema from 1945 to the present, I will concentrate on how history is constructed and around which discursive focal points it is clustered.

But before that, a sort digression is in order. What is an historical film? Are not all films in some sense situated in the past? I cannot offer a water tight definition, but I find Pierre Sorlin’s effort worth while: "There must be details, not necessarily many of them, to set the action in a period which the audience unhesitatingly places in the past – not a vague past but a past considered as historical." (Sorlin 1980, s. 20). Within this point of view we can set not only canonical literary adaptations or depictions of great historical ‘heroes’ or events but also topics concentrating on a more recent past. For instance, Absolute Beginners (1986) is a historical film, since it builds upon the popular iconography of the late fifties’ and Swinging Sixties’ London. An American example is provided by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), constructed on the narratives and popular images about the seventies and eighties, or ‘kasari’ as the decade is already called in Finnish. Where the borders go between historical and other kinds of films is of course hard to define. The space here does not allow for a thorough examination of this dilemma and we will have to make do with these briefly sketched heuristic guidelines.

When watching the films of this type, the crucial questions to pose are the following: in which function does history operate? To which ends is it constructed? What kinds of pleasures is it made to cater for? It seems to me that five broad discursive areas emerge as an answer to this question. The first three are Monumental, Antiquarian and Critical histories. These I have adapted from Friedrich Nietzsche’s pamphlet On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. It is obvious, however, that these cannot cover all forms of history seen on the screen and must by supplemented by two other discourses, which I call the Melodramatic and the Artistic. I shall define these one by one a bit later. Furthermore, I suggest that we can present the history of British historical film from the forties to the nineties as a succession of these five discourses. One of them was the dominant at one time, the dominated at another time while all of them were co-present in more or less marginalized form: these are not totally exclusive, traditionally monolithic generic categories. I will start in the 1940s when the Melodramatic mode dominated the construction of cinematic history.

The Melodramatic history

During the war, films were to show a unified nation; de-emphasised or beneficial class relations (In Which We Serve, 1942); realistic portrayal of people's plight (Fires Were Started 1943); self-confidence but also self-sacrifice and restraint from selfish pleasures (Brief Encounter 1945); and also the cause for which to fight, namely the heritage and traditions of Britishness [Went The Day Well (1942) (countryside community), Lady Hamilton (1941; naval tradition), Henry V (1944; Shakespeare)]. Only a few of these films were box office hits. Towards the end of the war serious topics could not satisfy the people who lived in bleak conditions and other types of film began more clearly to feature in and dominate the box office. For instance, spiv films, 'British film noir' and films employing popular history came to the fore. Hollywood films had been in constant circulation during the war, and the Gainsborough's quasi-historical melodramas, which enjoyed their Golden Age from 1942 to 1946, catered for a similar kind of demand for escapism (Street 1997, s. 57).

The authorities, most notably The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) still hung on to its Victorian guidelines of decency and paternalism. For historical film the official, politically correct language meant difficulties in the portrayal of the relatives of the living aristocracy, of class conflict and of other more brutal aspects of history. Sexuality, especially in its female form, was also frowned upon. However, time had rendered this approach an anachronism and often the BBFC found itself being ignored, most notably in the case of Gainsborough and its racy and non-conformist 'bodice-rippers' (Harper 1994, s. 150–1; Cook 1996, s. 53).

The Gainsborough Studios channelled most of its money into props, setting, coiffures and costumes, that is, into visual extravaganza, the very thing the audiences lacked and longed for (Harper 1994, s. 119–121). Visual style did indeed become an end in itself: historical periods were mixed, anachronisms abounded, realism gave way to fantasy and reconstructed history was replaced by a malleable hybrid of different periods, a history in flux (Cook 1996, s. 56–8). Also the script diverged from that of national cinema. Although moral and class boundaries are clearly defined they are frequently transgressed in order to indulge in pleasure, vengeance, profit hunting or in some other selfish goal. Members of the working class and lower middle classes, but particularly women, are allowed to speak, act and move between the classes in a dynamic, unprecedented fashion while the aristocracy is usually seen as static and decadent. In the end, however, establishment morality usually contains and suppresses too bold instances of subversive behaviour, thereby securing peace and the continuation of the establishment values. Nevertheless, there remains a hint of democracy, a possibility for "rebellion." The most known examples of these films are The Man in Grey (1943), Wicked Lady (1945) and Jassy (1947).

These are the hallmarks of the melodramatic construction of history. While the historical accuracy is unimportant, history is constructed as a place of escape, as a set piece of lust and desire, reminiscent of Mihail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival: melodramatic history provides a temporary release from conventions, received truths and order and celebrates imagination and fascination with the Other (Bahtin 1995, s. 7–12, 33). As in carnival, this kind of history encourages transgressions of the conventional class and gender boundaries in the guise of fluctuating past only in order to return to ‘normal’ with the enclosure, which distinguishes rebellion.

Gainsborough melodrama and more conventional costume films went into a decline in the fifties. Historical film found, however, another field in the visual texture of pop culture, which was beginning to emerge in films and in the works of nascent British pop art under the influence of American comics, among other things. The popularity, style and content of Tales from the Crypt et al sparked a national moral panic in 1954–5, which resulted in banning imports of American comics to Britain. To win the attention of young cinema audiences this (very popular) texture of "sadism, crime, lust, physical monstrosity and horror", as it was called by its critics, had to be transferred to the screen (Springhall 1998, s. 141–5; Pirie 1980, s. 32-6). The first films of the New Wave did introduce "novelties", such as strong sexuality and upwardly mobile workers, but the most complete recipe of success was found in the combination of fantasy, fear and desire. The latter half of the fifties was dominated by the phenomenal boom of British horror films.

At Hammer Films, a studio founded in 1947, films were considered first and foremost as products for a market. Its films were made on a tight budget; the stories or topics used were already familiar to the audience; the emphasis was on mise en scène and style rather than content, on sensation rather than message; profit was the only motivation. The company was much like Gainsborough and Ealing – a studio specialised in comedy – in that it had a small studio base (at Bray), a skilled, unchanging team, a family atmosphere, an accurate vision for each film, and vetted scripts. But against Ealing's "documentary", reassuring and restrained content, Hammer pitted fantasy, horror, desire and violence (Porter, 1983, s. 193–5, 200, 203–7).

In the first half of the fifties, Hammer, like the whole industry, was in recession, but its fortunes turned in 1955 with the launch of the space invasion/horror film The Quartermass Xperiment. The film and its immediate two sequels exploited the fears prompted by the Cold War, the arms race, the H-bomb, the alleged dangers of science and threats to the middle-class familial idyll. The success and the subsequent TV-series provided finances for the groundbreaking The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. Sci-fi was diagnosed as a dying genre, while supernatural horror was pronounced dead long ago. However this was the very niche where Hammer was most successful. Unlike the previous horror films, Hammer's were explicit, sensual, violent and glowingly Technicolor. Frankenstein was a soaring success on both sides of the Atlantic. With its "progressive pioneering spirit started a world cycle in horror films - certainly something no other British company ha[d] ever achieved." (Motion Picture Herald, 9.5.1959; Pirie 1980, s. 39–41).

By the early sixties, Hammer horrors already had the label of history on them, that is, they used the classics of Gothic literature, which placed the action at least into 19^th century. As in Gainsborough films, Hammer’s past was inaccurate, thrown together by mixing exotic and luxurious objects and topics in order to create a fascinating, titillating context for escapism, thrills and, as in the explicit case of Dracula films, sexual licence. The difference was that now the protagonists were mainly males, females were portrayed as helpless and passive victims to Dracula’s erotically charged attacks. History is again a kind of carnival, a relief from the every day world which was in the late fifties only beginning to open up into the permissive society.

The Monumental history

In the fifties between the Gainsborough melodrama and Hammer’s historical horrors, there was another kind of thriving historical film, the war films. Especially the films about the second world war were regularly at the top of the box office. Their popularity was based on and sustained by the larger interest and nostalgia for the war, which understandably was one of the defining periods of many people’s lives. This interest was evident for instance in the book market, which was dominated by the popular – often middle-brow – bestsellers concentrating on the heroism of the war. Eric Williams’ and Alistair Maclean’s novels are prime examples of the genre. The war films, which formed the biggest single group of British films in the early post-war period (Ramsden 1998, s. 35–45), were often based on popular books, as in the case of The Wooden Horse (1950), or on actual events, as was the case with The Dam Busters (1954) and The Battle of the River Plate (1956).

Unlike the wartime melodrama and its vague notions of history, which privileged the female interest, the documented and restrained war films centred on the middle-class male. According to Sarah Street "The Dam Busters… is a key film in the perpetuation of certain images of the Second World War which have become entrenched in the popular imagination: the ingenuity of British boffins; the romance and superiority of British aircraft; the camaraderie of male groups who fight the enemy in a spirit of sacrifice and professionalism." (Street 1997, s. 73) Although there were moments of critical approach to the heroism and the war in general, the biggest box-office winners were more or less war-glorifying films sporting heroic lead characters. These films were made, as John Ramsden has pointed out, with the foreknowledge of victory, and each therefore had to offer its reassuring share of an explanation of why Britain had won." Citing director Lewis Gilbert, he maintains, that "the genre arose because ‘after the war Britain was a very tired nation’. Already in the mid-1950s, war films were needed as ‘a kind of ego boost, a nostalgia for a time when Britain was great.’" (Ramsden 1998, s. 59). The image of Britain in this context differed from the one seen in the wartime films, which largely supported a cross-class co-operation, social harmony and common task. In the war films of the fifties Britain is reduced to the middle-class and depicted through the familiar 1930s stereotypes of officers-as-heroes and other-ranks-as-comic-figures (ibid., s. 56). These mainly positive representations of the war and soldiers was thought so beneficial by the Armed forces, that they used some of the films in recruitment (ibid., s. 53).

Towards the end of the decade and the early sixties the budgets of the war films tended to grow and their sweep became more and more epic. David Lean had touched critical registers in his The Bridge of the River Kwai (1957), but proceeded then into the more elusive and ambivalent terrain of Lawrence of Arabia. Lean’s and scriptwriter Robert Bolt’s version of the story was released in 1962. Although there are some scenes which do acknowledge the problems of racism and conduct of war, the main structure of feeling in the film seems to be the sense of loss, the decline and fall of the learned, courageous and idealistic upper-class hero. He is an anachronism, not a ridiculous, but a melancholy one: his higher civilization and principles are taken over by the cynical and mediocre bureaucracy of the British army. Dissolution of his allegedly apolitical hopes and his personal disappointment are the main focus of the story, not the fate of the Arabs (Bohne 1990, s. 4, 14–5). Lawrence is a tragic, but also a nostalgic hero, and as a hero still an exceptional individual destined to change the fate of nations were it not for the betrayal of his own organization.

The war films of the fifties and the likes of Lawrence of Arabia in the sixties embody the mode of history, which I call, after Nietzsche, the Monumental. This kind of history represents the past as a field moulded by heroes and marked out in canonical history, with ‘great turning points’, victories and ‘finest hours’. The focus is on the leaders, traditional and monolithic national identities, sometimes on the past as Golden Age. As Nietzsche says, it presents only the effects worthy of imitation and emulation, which is not altogether harmful, but at the same time excludes the multiple causes behind those effects, which makes them unique, and thus simplifies history (Nietzsche 1999, s. 20–4). Despite the occasional incursion of the Critical history – more about that a bit later – the Monumental themes and forces usually prevail at the end restoring harmony to the national or empirical whole or providing it with glorious surplus-value. An extreme example, which is not to be taken as a representative of the group, can be used to illuminate these definitions. This film is Cy Enfield’s Zulu, released in 1964. Based on a true story from the year 1879, the film accounts for a battle between Zulus and the British army, in which the latter suffered its bloodiest casualties before the First World War. The twelve-hour battle is condensed into an hour-long fight, which ends in a British victory and is crowned with this aural monument read by Richard Burton.

This seems a proper place to go back to the definitions I made at the beginning. The different modes of history are not mutually exclusive. More often than not two or more of them can be found in the same film. Furthermore, the chronological presentation of these modes must not be understood as rigid and absolute; strong examples of these modes can be found in the middle of other periods of time. For instance, there is a stark monumental tendency in Lady Hamilton, a propaganda film released in 1941. The story re-enacts the achievements of admiral Nelson and thereby re-produces the monumental history of the British navy and nation. The scene of his death in the film is arranged in a tableau imitation of a famous painting by Arthur William Devis on the same subject. Canonical, monumental history is merged with a monumental, pieta-like painting to create a weighty moment of cinematic monumental history.

Another, more recent example, Chariots of Fire (1981) shares many of the characteristics of the monumental. Heroic sports achievement in the 1924 Olympics is coupled with sentimental depiction of Oxford and nationalist nostalgia represented, for instance, by the boy choir singing Jerusalem. This film represents rather different heritage, if you want to call it that, than the one seen in, say, Merchant-Ivory productions and thus it is not helpful to put them under the same category – heritage – as Higson insists. The discursive or modal approach presented here appears to be a more distinct and accurate classificatory tool.

The Critical

The Monumental histories such as the ones discussed above were rapidly falling out of fashion by the mid-sixties. Why was this? The overall context was the declining authority of the traditional, conservative, in many ways Victorian and hypocritical establishment, that is, politics, the army, the BBC, the church, censorship, etc. For the reasons of space, it is impossible to go into the details of the cultural sea change of the sixties, I hope a brief list of some of the iceberg tips support my argument. Within "high-culture" the anger manifested itself in the Angry Young Man Theatre, New Wave films and the farcical trials against obscene literature, for instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. The rising living standards and the affluence of the youth boosted the already booming pop-culture and its irreverent attitudes towards the ‘squares’ of the older generations. The espionage scandals of Burgess, MacLean and Vassall cast the Conservative administration into incompetent light while the Profumo/Keeler scandal revealed its hypocrisy and the double standards. The latter was gift for satirists, who experienced a minor boom of their own in the sixties and in their part nurtured the anti-authoritarian attitudes.

Last but not least, the cynical and critical aftermath of Suez fuelled by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and later the protests against US involvement in Vietnam widened the possibilities in the cinematic representation of monumental history, especially war. At first the change became visible in the disapproving reaction against the old-fashioned spectacles. For example, the bravery, honesty and praise of the upper-class military caste in Michael Powell’s Queen’s Guards (1961), though still championed by some, was condemned in many reviews, which pointed out that "the majority today think of the aristocracy as humorous relics of an unreal past." (Crewe quoted in Murphy 1992, s. 96).

In their stead came a more critical and pessimistic view of the army and war. Great deeds of the past were replaced by the commentary of failures and war crimes. In King and Country (1964) Joseph Losey extended his uncompromising analysis of class to the trenches of the Great War and revealed the defects, brutalities and the deplorable social tinges of the martial court. Another kind of approach was entertained by Richard Lester, whose How I Won the War (1967) employed farce, black humour, flashy editing, pop art imagery and the persona of John Lennon in its shameless rendition of the Second World War (Walker 1974, s. 218–20; Armes 1979, s. 261). Tony Richardson’s big project of the sixties was The Charge of the Light Brigade, released in 1968. Denuding the famous military blunder from Tennyson’s tragic and balladic heroism, he first exposed the snobbery, sexism, envy, obsessions of the Victorian army and then laid bare the anachronistic ideals, incompetence and misunderstandings which caused the disaster. In the end, no one "honour[s] the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred", instead we see the command pickering about who is to blame, who is to become the scapegoat.

The Charge of Light Brigade is, once again, an extreme example, but helpful in defining the next mode of history, which is the Critical. Following Nietzsche, we can define the Critical as thorough and uncompromising questioning, deconstruction and even destruction of the deeds, monuments and artefacts of history (op.cit. s. 28–9). Within the field of historical film, the Critical discourse represents history itself as a battle over meaning, interpretation and appreciation. It represents history as full of problems, contradictions, and differing and conflicting visions. It confronts and questions the simple national and heroic narratives by viewing them from a fresh or satirical angle and by introducing marginal and disharmonious voices and minorities ignored by the Monumental history.

Critical history was not however, as singularly dominant as the melodramatic and monumental before it. Melodramatic or carnivalesque features were adopted into prestige literary adaptations, such as Tom Jones (1963), with Albert Finney in the lead as the promiscuous Regency James Bond and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), with the iconic independent woman Julie Christie as Bathsheba. Some monumental films, such as Alfred the Great (1969), were garnished with a couple of scene of sexual abandon. With the whole film industry, historical film was in deep decline in early seventies, but the genre and its newly established Critical discourse survived. Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971) dissected the morals and class prejudices of the Edwardian era by concentrating on the illegitimate love affair between Julie Christie’s upper-class lady and Alan Bates’ working-class farmer. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) satirised the life of the upper class and made a few sharp comments on the image and the reality of war.

The Critical history is also clearly present in the ‘heritage genre’. Not all of these films are conservative, canonical, fetishist artefact collections saturated with hegemonic ideology through and through. These characteristics certainly have a part in heritage films, as a part of the antiquarian mode of history, but it is equally certain that they do not dominate all of these films. Some films, such as Chariots of Fire, are more monumental, or, in the case of Shadowlands (1993), more melodramatic than antiquarian. There are, of course, many films whose approach to history can easily be classified as critical. Hope & Glory (1987) revisits the Second World War from a child’s point of view and foregrounds not heroism, but boredom and dislocation and class tension created by evacuation. Maurice (1987), a product of the notorious Merchant-Ivory team, crosses traditional class borders and centres on plight of a minority, homosexuals. Plenty (1985) explores the difficulties of a strong headed woman in a still rather patriarchal society of post-war Britain. Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996) is indeed an adaptation of a literary classic, but appears quite critical – and topical – on the issues of class background, social mobility, cultural and economic capital (Gibson 2000, s. 118–20). I could go on, but I think my point is by now clear: it is not reasonable to file these films under the present definition of heritage genre (Vincendeau 2001, s. xvii–xviii). The films mentioned in this paper are just too diverse and correspondingly the singular genre term has become too wide to be analytically useful.

The Antiquarian

The next cycle of films I want to look at is the so called heritage cinema of the eighties and the nineties. It has often been pointed out that behind the successful costume films of the eighties were the television dramas of the seventies. However, the roots go a bit further, to the late 1960s, which was the time when the diverse branches of the heritage industry were formed. Historian Raphael Samuel lists some of the signs of the nostalgia for the past: fashions for Victorian clothes, the music hall ethos and nostalgia represented even by Sgt Pepper, Arts & Crafts, Art Deco and Art Nouveau revivals; fads for the ‘Naughty Nineties’ paraphernalia and ‘other historical garments.’ There was a dramatic growth of museums (including the establishment of the Victorian wing in V&A); the number of museums increased five fold between 1965 and 1985. Interest in stately homes, local history and the industrial archaeology was intensifying as was the increasing recycling in the world of pop music. These were some of the instances of retroist fashions, which come to the fore in the late 1960s and contributed to the birth and growth of what came to be called the heritage industry (Samuel 1999, s. 89–92; see also Hewison 1987, s. 88–91).

Some sixties’ films, such as Far from the Madding Crowd in 1967, could already be seen as exploiting this trend, but the first real heritage boom was found in television. While the British cinema industry was in a slump, television continued and augmented its triumph. This was due to the widening spread of the colour-TV and easier and cheaper distribution made possible by the video cassette. In the seventies Britain was one of the worlds largest exporters of TV serials, of which the majority was literary or historical adaptations. These sold particularly well in the United States, which returned profit also in the form of increased overseas tourism: the spectators wanted to experience in flesh the Olde Englande, the manors and the landscapes depicted in the films. This demand for heritage further boosted the corresponding industry and made history into a kind of commodity or service offered to the consumer (LeMahieu 1990, s. 243–5).

In eighties came Chariots of Fire, Gandhi (1982), Another Country (1984), Merchant-Ivory’s Forster adaptations, in the nineties the Austen adaptations, Orlando (1992), Mrs. Brown (1997), Mrs. Dalloway (1997), Elizabeth (1998), Shakespeare in Love (1998) etc. While there may be a sense in which the term heritage is applicable to all these films – they portray well known episodes of British history or famous British novels – it can only serve as the starting point of the analysis. As we have seen the histories constructed in these films are too diverse to fit in one single category. We must therefore adjust this category to make it more precise. When Higson and, say, Andy Medhurst (Medhurst 2001, s. 12) talk about heritage as conservative nostalgia and as fetisisation and commodification of the past, they are right, if they are understood as referring to one particular discourse among many, not to an overall dominant or, worse, exhaustive term. Heritage in the narrow sense – as fetisisation and commodification of the past – can be understood as a discourse on par and in interaction with the Melodramatic, Monumental, Critical and the Artistic history.

This is where the third Nietzschean category – the Antiquarian – comes into picture. The Antiquarian history is necessary, because it preserves history, roots and offers delight for the present. It may, however, degenerate into a kind of obsession, which does not offer creative inspiration but passive mummification and attitudes of conservatism and traditionalism (op.cit. s. 25–7). Nietzsche’s words can be adapted to form the definition of the Antiquarian historical film: it represents history through foregrounding the period dresses, period houses and customs. In contrast to Critical, antiquarian history is static and inert with its meaning frozen into an ‘authentic truth’. It is an arranged collection of exotic objects great and small which the spectator enjoys as ‘museum pleasures’, as Richard Dyer calls them. In negative version, the museum of history is fetisistic and exclusive, that is, portraying only one, usually the upper stratum of society and reproducing its legitimate tastes. In the more positive version, ‘museum items’ are used provocatively as in Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) (Medhurst 2001, s. 14). The Antiquarian history of the first type seems to be the one the critics of the heritage film have in their minds. There are of course plenty of examples of this. Mine comes from Merchant-Ivory’s Remains of the Day (1993). It is a story of a punctilious butler – quite like Mr. Hudson in the 70s television serial Upstairs, Downstairs – who serves a high-ranking aristocrat in the 1930s. Because the story focuses on the butler and other members of the staff, we get to see the whole paraphernalia of an upper class manor being wiped clean, shined and caressed. This happens almost constantly, but there are scenes, which seem almost designed to parade the surroundings rather than the characters and which thus bring forth the Antiquarian.

(Personally, I must confess that I symphatise with the concern of the heritage critics. Many of these films do depict history which is quite lopsided. Many of them have been international box-office hits, which means that they have widespread discursive power over people’s ideas about England and its history. [For example, unlike much of the recent social realist cinema, most of the heritage films are available at Helsinki City Library.]) However, to avoid too wide, too loose and paradoxical genre definitions we must make the following distinction: heritage refers generally to films about British history and literature made and marketed under the growing heritage industry, that is, from the seventies onwards; Antiquarian refers to a type or a discourse of history, which fetisises and commodifies (and occasionally disrupts) the past, and which appears not only in heritage films but in films made in other periods, too, e.g. the fifties’ versions of The Pickwick Papers (1952) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).

The Artistic / The Non-Linear / Disrupted

I have chosen to call the fifth and the last mode of history the Artistic, although non-linear or disrupted history could also have been used. Although many of the films with this mode as the dominant are artistic in the sense of the avant-garde, I wanted to stretch the term to cover all films, be they comical or experimental, which construct their history in unexpected and unconventional ways.

Oppositional and independent views of history have existed as long as other modes of history and British historical cinema is no exception. I want to concentrate, however, on the period from late seventies to the present, because this era has produced some of the most famous names of British art and avant garde filmmaking. It is dangerous to speculate with broad cultural and historical causes behind this phenomenon, which is by definition marginal and elitist; its roots are found in the equally marginal world of the English and European intelligentsia of the 1960s and seventies. During that time, feminism, French structuralism, deconstruction and Marxism were mediated into England. Screen, a film journal launched in late sixties, was the main forum for new theories and gained currency as one of the worlds leading journals of cinema and theory. Ideas and topics found in the seventies’ and eighties’ Screen, such as psychoanalysis, semiotics, ideology critique and deconstruction, can also be found in more or less diffused form in the films of Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Peter Greenaway. Although they may not have applied the theories directly or consciously, their films bear the imprint of the same mentality. Stylistically, the strongest influence was the European art cinema; Jarman’s inspiration, for instance, was found in the works of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Pasolini and Visconti (O’Pray 1996, s. 184–5). The chronically dire financial situation was abated by the creation of Channel Four and its tolerant artistic bent in 1982. Under its umbrella the eighties saw a cycle of remarkable art house and other films, but in the nineties the well has somewhat drained (Murphy 2000, s. 6–8).

How is history produced in an artistic discourse? Rather than to depict it chronologically, causally and realistically, the artistic representation treats history as fragments. These fragments can be played with and arranged in puzzles and collages. The illusion of historical realism is disrupted and distanced by techniques of alienation, anachronisms, impossible allusions, etc. In metafictional manner, history is shown to be a construct, it is shown to be made as pastiche put together by an auteur (or corresponding textual construct) and endowed with meaning by the audience. Disruptive techniques are sometimes used to reveal the raw ‘will to power’ behind the cherished legends, monuments, narratives, ideologies and rituals.

Many of Derek Jarman’s films use history in unconventional ways: Jubilee (1977) merges fantastical and traditional views of the Elizabethan era with the punk rock England of the late 1970s; Caravaggio (1986) represents the structuring of history through memory and painting, while the anachronisms – type writer, traffic noise – refer to the continuation of power and double standards from history to the present; the minimalist sets of Edward II (1991) exclude history almost altogether and focuses on the issues of homosexuality, thus thwarting the priorities and excuses the mainstream history usually applies in connection with king Edward II.

In contrast, Peter Greenaway’s ornate and baroque film The Baby of Macon (1993), uses a 17^th century setting in a manner which is too theatrical and choreographed to pass for realism. History is mixed with allegory and drama in order to deconstruct the Catholic rituals, the cosy and mystical historicity of tradition and, in the end, the transparency of the performance itself. A painter himself, Greenaway often uses artistic references – Vermeer, van Hals, Mantegna, Breughel - in his films to draw attention to the fact that like painting cinema (and thus history created within it), is a representation, an artificial construction (see: Orr 2000, s. 327–37).

On a lighter side, as an intertextual playground, as a simple choice of costumes, history can be employed to serve surreal comedy; Monty Python films The Holy Grail (1975), Jabberwocky (1977), The Life of Brian (1979) and Time Bandits (1981), which are hardly high avant garde, exemplify the uses the pop culture finds for history. Recent examples of films accommodating touches of the Artistic history are Shakespeare in Love and Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, which mix together Elizabethan age and pop culture references. The use and effect of the artistic is, of course, not as thorough as in Greenaway’s or Sally Potter’s films. Nevertheless it is there dampening down and ironising the Monumental and Antiquarian discourses, which arise from the subject matter of these films.

Summary

It must be clear by now that there is no way that these five modes - Melodramatic, Monumental, Critical, Antiquarian and Artistic – can be viewed as tightly closed and mutually exclusive genre-like entities. Once again, I must stress the co-presence of these modes, not only in the field of historical film in general, but also within individual films. For example, the Melodramatic and Antiquarian come rather close to one another -think of Howard’s End (1992) or Shadowlands - as do the Critical and Artistic as in Terence Davies’ films (Powrie, op.cit.; see also: Eley 1995, s. 17–44). While Winterbottom’s Jude is technically heritage – i.e. based on a canonical British classic and situated in old towns and landscapes – its main historical discourses are the Critical and the Melodramatic. Furthermore, I want to stress that the succession of the dominant types in British historical film I have presented here is sketchy and serves mainly to illustrate different modes of history. It does not provide any absolute keys, let alone one master key, to the history of British film.

What I hope to have done, is to open up the field of historical film and its classification for clarification. My notes and terms need further elaboration, but I think that they serve the analysis better than old, too exclusive generic categories and more recent, too inclusive and wide categories, such as the heritage in the broadest sense of the word. The old genre notions, such as costume film, biopic and war film, are of course still valid and useful, but when we want to concentrate on history and how it is constructed, we would do best with a limited, moderate discursive approach like the one I have offered here. This way we maintain the critical distance to history and can fully appreciate the complex and heterogeneous fabrics of historical film, without losing our analysis into infinite intertextuality, discursivity and relativism.

teksti: © Harri Kilpi

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altman, Rick: Film/Genre. London: BFI 1999.

Armes, Roy: A Critical History of British Cinema. London: Martin Secker & Warburg 1979.

Bahtin, Mihail: François Rabelais – keskiajan ja renessanssin nauru. Helsinki: Kustannus Oy Taifuuni 1995.

Bohne, Luciana: Leaning Toward the Past: Pressures of Vision and Narrative in Lawrence of Arabia. Film Criticism, vol 15:1, Fall 1990.

Cook, Pam: Neither Here nor There: National Identity in Gainsborough Costume Drama in Andrew Higson (ed.) Dissolving Views. London: Cassell 1996.

Eley, Geoff: The Family is a Dangerous Place: Memory, Gender and the Image of the Working Class. In Robert Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History. Film and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.

Gibson, Pamela Church: Fewer Weddings and More Funerals: Changes in the Heritage Film. In Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI 2000.

Harper, Sue: A Note on Basil Dean, Sir Robert Vansittart and British Historical Film of the 1930s, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol 10:1, 1990.

Harper, Sue: Picturing the Past. London: BFI 1994.

Higson, Andrew: The Heritage Film and British Cinema. In Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views. Rethinking British Cinema.London: Cassell 1996.

Higson, Andrew: Waving the Flag. Constructing a national Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995.

Jenkins, Keith: Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge 1992.

Landy, Marcia: Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996.

LeMahieu, D. L.: Imagined Contemporaries: Cinematic and Televised Dramas about the Edwardians in Great Britain and The United States, 1967-1985. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol 10:3, 1990.

Medhurst, Andy: Dressing the Part. In Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage. A Sight and Sound Reader. London: BFI 2001.

Murphy, Robert: Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI 1992.

Murphy, Robert: A Path Through the Moral Maze. In Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Historian hyödystä ja haitasta elämälle, Jyväskylä: JULPU 1999.

O’Pray, Michael: The British Avant Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s. In Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views. Rethinking British Cinema. London: Cassell 1996.

Orr, John: The Art of National Identity: Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. In Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds.), British Cinema, Past and Present. London: Routledge 2000.

Pidduck, Julianne: Of Windows and Country Walks: Frames of Space and Movement in 1990s Austen Adaptations. Screen, vol 39:4 (Winter) 1998.

Pirie, David: Hammer. A Cinema Case Study. London: BFI 1980.

Porter, Vincent: The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer Films. In James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds.), British Cinema History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1983.

Powrie, Philip: On the threshold between past and present: alternative heritage’. In Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds.), British Cinema, Past and Present. London: Routledge 2000.

Ramsden, John: Refocusing ‘The People’s War’: British War Films of the 1950s. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 33:1, January 1998.

Samuel, Raphael: Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso 1999.

Sargeant, Amy: Making and selling heritage culture: style and authencity in historical fictions on film and television. In Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds.), British Cinema, Past and Present. London: Routledge 2000.

Sorlin, Pierre: The Film in History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980.

Springhall, John: Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics. Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830-1996. London: Macmillan 1998.

Street, Sarah: British National Cinema. London: Routledge 1997.

Vincendeau, Ginette (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage. A Sight and Sound Reader. London: BFI 2001.

Walker, Alexander: Hollywood England. London: Michael Joseph 1974.

White, Hayden: Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1987.