The British Heritage and Colonial Film

Universität Gesamthochschule Siegen
Seminar: The British Heritage and Colonial Film
WS 1999/2000
Dozentin: Prof. Dr. Angela Krewani

Essay zum Thema:
The British Heritage Film

Name: Sylvia Brand
Fachsemester: 7. Semester
Qualifizierter Studiennachweis für: LW Anglistik Hauptstudium

(Anm. d. Red.: Abbildungen können nur in der Flashansicht und im E-Book angezeigt werden)

National Heritage in Great Britain

The evolution of a national heritage in Great Britain was symptomatic of cultural development after the reign of Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980s. (Higson 1996: 238) The Thatcher years saw widespread unemployment, encouragement of multiculturalism, and the general decline of England as a world superpower. Britons felt under attack, their values and beliefs were threatened by such dramatic changes.
During this time Britain established radical conservative attempts for a resurgent nationalism. One cultural aspect of this process was the emphatic projection of new perspectives upon the national past (Corner/ Harvey 1991: 45). People started to produce an imaginative continuity, whilst admitting new principles of economic and cultural change.
In the 1980s the word "heritage" became the principal label for a whole range of cultural, political and economic practices concerning "pastness and pride" (Corner/ Harvey 1991: 47). It became a keyword in the organisation and institutionalisation of a historical reference.
The National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983 supported the increasing activities in preservation, restoration and display of historic properties and provided the heritage project with a "new public philosophy" (Corner/ Harvey 1991: 48). A new official body, the English Heritage, was formed to oversee the management of buildings and monuments and to co-ordinate and fund schemes of preservation and redevelopment. In 1982 the Heritage Educational trust was set up to promote the educational use of heritage properties.
But the most established institution of the British national heritage is the National Trust, which was founded in 1895 by three Victorian philanthropists: Miss Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. Concerned about the impact of uncontrolled development and industrialisation, they set up the Trust to act "as a guardian for the nation in the acquisition and protection of threatened coastline countryside and buildings" (Official National Trust Homepage 1999).
Although heritage nowadays expresses the idea of the construction and reconstruction of history in general, the emphasis on the countryside, especially the aristocratic, remained central to the heritage culture.

The National Cinema

The cinema has occupied a centrally important place in British popular culture since its beginnings in the mid-1890s. From its beginnings a history of crisis and renewal marked the development of British cinema.
The seventies began on a low note with a dramatic decline in American investment compared with the previous decade. British film making was thrown back on its own resources. The EMI music company, who took the Associated British Picture Cooperation over, appeared to have little interest in the revival of an identifiably "British" cinema and rejected projects such as Chariots of Fire and Gandhi (Ryall 1999). Like the American market during that time they decided on producing medium budget pictures.
The eighties began on a note of optimism with the resounding success of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire (1981). Once again British films seemed on the brink of establishing a secure position in the international film market. The British film industry, supported by television companies took their chance and responded to the cultural crisis of the 1980s by creating a series of films that celebrated the national past to contrast the individualist and materialist values of Thatcherism with the values of the liberal census, making unions despite social boundaries of class, gender, sexuality and nationality (Light 1991: 63).
The bleak situation of the British film industry in the wake of Thatcherite deregulation policies, when production in the UK reached an all-time low of 47 films in 1992 caused a call for a "national cinema", which, in fact, was a call for government support for culturally valuable films (Drexler 1998: 108).
The decision by Britain′s new Labour government to support the local film industry a financially augured well for independent film making. Along with the lottery funds awarded by the Arts Council of England, the government′s 100% tax write-off scheme for British films with budgets up to £15 million should help to provide a secure base of production. The new tax incentives caused an increased level of production that reached a 15-year high of 114 films in 1996. (AFMA 1999)

Characteristics of the Heritage Film

Heritage film is a term invented recently with the rise of the heritage industry and national cinema in Britain. There were attempts to see the heritage film as a sub-genre of historical, costume or woman′s drama. But because of the number of films and their corresponding characteristics most of the critics have agreed on handling the heritage film as an individual genre. (Higson 1996: 234-236).
Charles Barr defines the Heritage film as "a genre of film which reinvents and reproduces, and in some cases simply invents, a national heritage for the screen" (Barr in: Higson 1995: 26).

In "The Heritage Film and British Cinema" Andrew Higson adds a number of conventions to this definition which characterise the heritage film in more detail (Higson 1996. 232-233).
Heritage films are mainly low-budget independent productions, with emphasis on authorship, craft, and artistic value. These films intend to be "middle-class quality products" (Higson 1996: 233) valued for their cultural significance.
The distribution of these films is limited to a target audience. Martina Hipsky even believes them to be designed for a special middle and upper class audience "who need the cultural capital of the educated elite to understand these films" (Hipsy 1994: 103).
Most heritage films are a reproduction of literary texts. They are adoptions of novels and plays which already have some sort of classical status (Wollen 1991: 189).
One of the central characteristics of the heritage film is "the artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of the national past" (Higson 1996: 233). In many cases the characters of the British heritage films belong to the Aristocracy and share their values and lifestyle. To strengthen the tradition of English acting those characters are often performed by actors from theatre rather then from film and television (Higson 1995: 27). Many of these actors cast in more than one heritage film.

Most of the heritage films are set in the kind of buildings and landscapes, which are today conserved by National Trust and English Heritage (e.g. country houses and Cambridge colleges). The films are situated at places defined as locales of high culture: elegant Edwardian London, Renaissance Italy, Classical Greece. (Hipsky 1994: 101) The iconography of the genre is completed by the rich mise-en-scène including costumes, interior design and furnishings. It may be added that the mise-en scène should not be read as separate discourse of scenic display, but as an expression of the emotional intensity of the scene and a symbolic representation of the inner life of the characters (Higson 1996: 241).
Heritage films often present personal stories and private romances. Frequently they films deal with marginalized social groups, such as feminists, gay and are concerned with conflicts of identity especially national identity. (Higson 1996: 244)
The narratives of the heritage films are slow moving and episodic, avoiding the efficient and economic causal development of the classical film. The concern for character, place, atmosphere and milieu tends to be more pronounced than dramatic, goal-directed action. (Higson 1996: 233)
The camera-work of these films is mainly fluid, artful and pictorialist, editing slow and undramatic. One prefers long takes and deep focus, and long and medium shots rather than close-ups. (Higson 1996: 234).
It is very difficult to regulate the heritage film genre only in terms of these characteristics. Not every heritage film fulfils all these conditions, for example are not all of them literary adaptations and some of them deal with great events of national history. There is an unsolved discussion about how strict the cycle of heritage films has to be regulated and which of the characteristics have to be fulfilled to make a film belong to the heritage film genre.

Heritage Films in British Cinema

The term heritage film is mainly applied to a group of contemporaneous British films which share the characteristics discussed in the last chapter (Higson 1995: 26). These films of the 1980s and 1990s have been major players in the heritage industry.
To this cycle of heritage films belong the high-quality films of the producer-director team Merchant and Ivory, e.g. The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), A Room With A View (1986), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992, Remains Of The Day (1993) and Feast Of July (1995).
Films which are also counted to the narrow cycle of heritage films are: Hugh Hudson′s Chariots of Fire (1981), Charles Sturridge′ s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) based upon a novel by E.M. Forster and A Handful of Dust (1987), Marek Kanievska′s Another Country (1984) based on the award winning play by Julian Mitchell and Sally Potter′s Orlando (1992) based upon Virginia Woolf′s novel.

In a less restricted way of defining heritage film one might consider recent British films as Comrades (1987), The Fool (1990), Hope and Glory (1988), A Private Function (1984), Dance with a Stranger (1985), Wish You Were Here (1987), Scandal (1989), and Backbeat (1993) also as heritage films (Higson 1996: 236). These are set in a quit recent past and their characters are ordinary working class people which engage with the idea of a national past in a national context.

In "Heritage Discourses and British Film before 1920" and "The Heritage Film and British Cinema" Higson tries to show that while there is a clearly identifiable cycle of heritage films with a strong group style and institutional coherence in the 1980s and 1990s, this type of film-making has a much longer history which can be traced back to from the beginnings of cinema. And indeed we can find numerous films which in various way mobilize heritage discourses:
One could start with Maurice Elvey′s patriotic bio-epic, Nelson (1918), which appeared just after the end of the First World War and Cecil Hepworth′s much admired quality film making of the late 1910s and early 1920s, in particular his film Comin′ Thro′ the Rye (1924), followed by The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) from the Hungarian-born producer Alexander Korda.
British director David Lean produced the anti-war epic drama The bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Recent examples of biographical films include Sir Richard Attenborough′s Gandhi (1982).

Beside the cult of national heroes which was renewed in moving pictures, the plays and novels of Shakespeare, Dickens, and others performed a particularly important role in the revival of British film-making after 1911. Literary adaptations of novels and plays have provided the plots and storylines of hundreds of historical dramas. Some prominent examples include Louisa May Alcott′s Little Women (1933), Emily Bronte′s Wuthering Heights (1939), Jane Austen′s Pride and Prejudice (1940), Charlotte Bronte′s Jane Eyre (1944), Shakespeare′s Hamlet (1944), and Charles Dickens′ Great Expectations (1946).

One might discuss which of these films really belongs to the genre of heritage films. It is obvious that is it not helpful to regulate the cycle of heritage films to loosely so every costume or historical drama is defined as a heritage film. Andrew Higson holds the opinion that most of the films before 1970s are no heritage films because they are less concerned to play out nationalistic concerns and do not display authentic heritage attractions. (Higson 1996: 237)

Interpretation of Heritage Films

Films of the recent heritage cycle can be read in a variety of ways. For Higson most of them seem to deal in nostalgia for an old England (Higson 1996: 238). Nostalgia is always in effect a critique of the present, which is seen as lacking something desirable situated out of reach in the past. An escape from the troubled present into the imaginary stability and grandeur of the past.

Although at the level of narratives the films note an instability, the flux in identity, the hybrid quality of Englishness, at the level of image this narrative instability is overwhelmed by an alluring spectacle of iconographic stability, providing an impression of an unchanging, traditional, and always delightful and desirable England. (Higson 1996: 239)
Tana Wollen sees the main function of heritage films in their production of a national identity. Social difference and the possibility of making connections across social boundaries, are replaced by social deference, everyone has his allotted place. We are presented with an upper-class version of the national past, secured in images of exclusive and private heritage property which depict England as once more great. We are situated in the privileged position of an idealized English identity from which the outside world is viewed from above and without engagement. In the end everyone standing outside this imaginary English unity (members of the working class, foreigners) are proved to be in a way either savage or untrustworthy (Craig 1991: 13) .

The feeling of nostalgia and national identity produced by the heritage film show us that the present popularity of these fantasy visions of an England gone by suggests that they do address very real desires: "they configure a social world entirely of human making, where individuals have the luxury of being in charge of their own destinies, where material well-being, copious leisure time, and, most important, authentic-seeming community all coexist together" (Hipsky 1994: 106).
Finally we shouldn′t forget that these films have other sources of enjoyment beside creating a nostalgia for an idealized old England and a national identity. The heritage films delight the audience in a way Hipsky calls "quit refreshing" in contrary to most other commercial film productions. This includes their humour and irony and elements of romance and melodrama. They do not depend on sensationalism of sex or violence. They portray individual conflicts of identity quite convincingly and provide real characters, often very well acted. The heritage films capture the paradoxes of modern love and sexuality and they point up hypocrisies of traditional bourgeois and upper-class social conventions. (Monk 1999)

Critical Attempt

One of the key terms in the discourse of heritage film is authenticity. Tana Wollen states that although the screen cannot possibly show everything `as it really was′, the popularity of the heritage films lies, apart from their narratives and characterizations, in their claims to historical authenticity ..." (Wollen 1991: 187). Also Higson agrees that heritage film productions intend to establish the adoption of the heritage property as an authentic reproduction of the original (Higson 1995). Like in documentary film is aiming at the production of a contemporary reality, the heritage film is aiming at a reproduction of what is taken to be pre-existing historical reality.
In his criticism-led approach to national cinema Higson tends to reduce national cinema to the terms of a quality art cinema. In his opinion a culturally worthy cinema should portray a high-cultural and modernist heritage of a particular national state rather than a view which appeals to the desires and fantasies of the popular audience. (Higson ?: 37)
Many authors criticize that heritage films rewrite history, suffering from inauthenticity, excessive religiosity, hard-to-follow details and characters, romantic dream worlds, ostentatious vulgarity, and leaden scripts. Most audiences usually prefer historical films which focus on a romance or an adventure in the foreground, with the historical events serving only as the colourful backdrop. The past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films.
The authenticity of these films to the literary is also fundamentally flawed in the relationship they set up between the historical and the contemporary. We achieve a false sense of consistency by updating memories to accord with our present views, remaining unaware how much our attitudes have changed over time. (Craig 1991: 11)
The films change history to make it fit into frame of unity and wilfully naïve humanism (e.g. Henry Wilcox of the novel must for the film′s sake be made into a more morally mixed character) (Hipsky 1994: 106).

The problem with authenticity is not only concerning the heritage film but the term heritage in general. Heritage is not the same as history. Although heritage uses historical traces and tells historical tales, it relies on revealed faith rather than rational proof.
David Lowenthal describes some ways in which heritage alters the past: "it upgrades, making the past better than it was (or worse, to attract sympathy). It updates, anachronistically reading back from the present qualities we want to see in past icons and heroes. It jumbles the past in a synchronic undifferentiated Dumpster. It selectively forgets the evil or indecorous or incomprehensible in acts of oblivion and bowdlerizing. It contrives genealogies to satisfy mystiques of lineage. It claims precedence as a bona fide of possession, superiority or virtue " (Lowenthal 1999). In his opinion these are the same strategies used in film production and in the end what is media-fabricated may even seem more real, because more familiar, than the original.
Nevertheless on should question if it′s wrong to update the past to make it fit to the wishes of its audience. The desire to rewrite the past to conform with group pride is a universal fact. All historical events are modified for consumption because people need examples they can understand and which impress them. Past cannot be stored in a museum or in a book. Only a heritage which is constantly reshaped and reanimated stays relevant (Lowenthal 1999).

Works Cited

1. AFMA - American Film Market Association: "Winds of Change for the British Film Industry", http://www.afma.com/NEWS/ukchange9709.htm, 27.12.1999.
2. John Corner and Sylvia Hardy: "Mediating Tradition and Modernity: the Heritage/Enterprise Couplet", in Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) pp.44-75.
3. Cairns Craig: `Rooms without a view′, Sight and Sound, June 1991, pp.10-13.
4. Peter Drexler: "Editorial: British Cinema", Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 5, 2/98, pp. 107-110)
5. Mark Finch and Richard Kwietnowski: "Melodrama and Maurice: Homo is where the het is", Screen, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1988, pp.72-80.
6. Andrew Higson: "The Concept of National Cinema" ???
7. Andrew Higson: "The Heritage Film, British Cinema, and the National past: Comin′ Thro′ The Rye", in Andrew Higson : Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain, Oxford: Clarmdon, 1995), pp.26-29.
8. Andrew Higson: "The Heritage Film and British Cinema", in Andrew Higson (Ed.): Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 1996, pp.232-249.
9. Andrew Higson: "Heritage Discourses and British Film before 1920", http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/nmpft/film100/panel10d.htm, 27.12.1999
10. Martina Hipsky: "Anglophil(m) - Why does America watch merchant -Ivory Movies?", The Journal of Popular Film & Television, No. 3, Autumn 1994, pp. 98-107.
11. Alison Light: "Englishness" (letter), Sight and Sound, July 1991, p.63.
12. David Lowenthal: "Fabricating Heritage", History & Memory, Volume 10, No.1, 1995. http://viator.usc.indiana.edu/~iupress/journals/history/ham10-1.html
13. Claire Monk: "The Heritage Film and Gendered Spectatorship", Close Up - The Electronic Journal of British Cinema, 1990. http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/ lc/closeup/monk.htm, 02.01.2000
14. Official National Trust Homepage: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/, 27.12.1999.
15. Tom Ryall: "Popular British Cinema", Close Up - The Electronic Journal of British Cinema, 1990. http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/closeup/ryall.htm
16. Tana Wollen: `Over our shoulders: Nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s′, in John Corner and Sylvia Hardy (Eds.): Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) pp.178-193.

The British Heritage and Colonial Film Prof. Dr. A. Krewani, WS 99/00