Heritage film

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As Heritage film (also heritage movie or heritage cinema , derived from English Heritage = heritage ) is a sub-genre of the period film called, which especially in the United Kingdom is particularly popular. Was the concept of during the reign of the first English-language film criticism for the evaluation of a certain type of Margaret Thatcher incurred costume films used today, much of the produced since 1981 British period films are as Heritage movies called.

Based on the Oscar-winning drama The Hour of the Winner and the literary film adaptations produced by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant , some of the most internationally successful works in the British film industry were created in this genre in the 1980s and 1990s. The heritage films also include the wave of Jane Austen film adaptations known as Austenmania or Janespotting in the mid-1990s, as well as adaptations of works by William Shakespeare and other English literary classics. At the same time, numerous mini-series and television series were created for British television, which are also assigned to the genre.

Description of the film genre

Castle Howard in North Yorkshire was the location of the television and cinema productions of Reunion with Brideshead

The term heritage film was coined in 1993 by the British film historian Andrew Higson. It describes a sub-genre of the period film, in which usually no significant historical events or personalities are in the center, but rather the individual fates of the British upper class are treated. This view of history is rather nostalgic . Characteristic of heritage films are pictorial image guidance and lavish and detailed equipment , in which national cultural assets are often presented . Many of these historic structures became popular tourist attractions after being used as the setting for a heritage film . The target group of the heritage film is an audience that is older than the normal moviegoer, belongs to a higher social class and has a high proportion of women.

The heritage film is primarily associated with true-to-original adaptations of classic English literature by authors such as Charles Dickens , Jane Austen, the Brontë siblings or EM Forster . But the Shakespeare film adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s, adaptations of more modern historical novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro's What Was Left of the Day and film biographies such as Richard Attenborough's Gandhi or John Madden's Her Majesty Mrs. Brown with Judi Dench as Queen Victoria are counted among the genre. The “Raj Revival” of the 1980s, which aroused new interest in the history of British India with several films and television series , is also assigned to the genre.

Similar to the British New Wave of the 1960s, the producers of the heritage films relied on proven regular actors. Actors such as Helena Bonham Carter , Anthony Hopkins , James Wilby or Hugh Grant , as well as the directing and producing team Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, are representative of the heritage films of the 1980s and 1990s.

Even if the film historian Charles Barr had already described the British period films made during the Second World War as “heritage film” in 1986 , film studies are largely confined to the British cinema of the 1980s and 1990s when defining and discussing heritage films. Some film historians, however, describe the genre as a European film movement, especially French cinema produced works with films such as The Return of Martin Guerre or Jean Florette that stylistically corresponded to British heritage films. German film, too, has undergone a similar development since the mid-1990s; films such as Comedian Harmonists , Aimée and Jaguar and Gripsholm impressed above all with their detailed reproduction of the time color.

When Andrew Higson defined the genre of the heritage film in 1993, this definition was linked to a criticism of the ideological attitude of these period films. With the romanticization of the past and with the focus on the upper classes of society, the heritage films represented the Thatcherism in British society, which was shaped by the Conservative government . Higson criticized the fact that the excessive focus on the visual design of the films made the irony and criticism of the social system in the literary models fade. In contrast, film historian Sarah Street sees elements of social criticism in the E. M. Foster film adaptations of Merchant Ivory that correspond to the literary models.

It is now considered controversial whether the heritage films are inherently conservative or liberal . The violent part debate on the concept of "Heritage Movie" led the mid-1990s to alternative definitions, such films were as Sally Potter Virginia Woolf film version Orlando or Christopher Hampton biopic Carrington with her unnostalgischen look at the past as "Post- Heritage Films ”. At least since Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair took office in 1997, film scholar Claire Monk believes that one can no longer speak of an “ideological substance” of heritage film. Associated with this is the free use and meaning of the term “heritage film”, which is now based more on the stylistic genre features than on the ideological content of the films.

Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter on the set of The King's Speech

literature

  • Sheldon Hall: The Wrong Sort of Cinema: Refashioning the Heritage Film Debate . In: Robert Murphy (Ed.): The British Cinema Book . British Film Institute, London 2001, ISBN 0-85170-852-8 , pp. 191-199.
  • Andrew Higson: Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film . In: Lester Friedman (ed.): Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism . University of Central London Press, London 1993, ISBN 1-85728-072-5 , pp. 109-129.
  • Andrew Higson: English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-925902-X .
  • Brian McFarlane (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of British Film . 3rd edition. Methuen, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-413-77660-0 .
  • Sarah Street: British National Cinema . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-06735-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jörg Helbig: History of British Film . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-476-01510-6 , p. 276.
  2. ^ Sarah Street: British National Cinema . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-06735-9 , p. 103.
  3. ^ Brian McFarlane (ed.): The Encyclopedia of British Film , p. 339.
  4. ↑ Sheldon Hall: The Wrong Sort of Cinema: Refashioning the Heritage Film Debate , pp. 192–193.
  5. ^ Jörg Helbig: History of British Film . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-476-01510-6 , p. 279.
  6. ^ Charles Barr: All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema . British Film Institute, London 1986, ISBN 0-85170-179-5 , p. 12.
  7. ^ Guy Austin: Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1996, ISBN 0-7190-4610-6 , pp. 142-170.
  8. ↑ Lutz Koepnick: “America doesn't exist at all”: Notes on the German Heritage Film . In: Agnes C. Mueller (Ed.): German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2004, ISBN 0-472-11384-4 , pp. 191-208.
  9. ^ Andrew Higson: Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film , pp. 126–128.
  10. ^ Andrew Higson: Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film , p. 120.
  11. ^ Sarah Street: British National Cinema , pp. 104-105.
  12. ↑ Andrew Higson: English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 , pp. 69-71.
  13. ^ John Hill: The Heritage Film: Issues and Debates . In: John Hill (Ed.): British Cinema in the 1980s . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999, ISBN 0-19-874256-8 , pp. 73-98.
  14. ^ Claire Monk: Sexuality and the Heritage. In: Sight and Sound , No. 5, 1995, p. 33.
  15. ^ Claire Monk: The British heritage-film debate revisited . In: Claire Monk, Amy Sargeant (Eds.): British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film . Routledge, London 2002, ISBN 0-415-23810-2 , pp. 194-195.
  16. ^ Eckart Voigts-Virchow: "Corset Wars". An Introduction to Syncretic Heritage Film Culture since the Mid-1990s . In: Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Ed.): Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid-1990 . Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-8233-6096-5 , pp. 14-16.