Abstract
In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser observes that ‘European cinema distinguishes itself from Hollywood and Asian cinemas by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past.’1 Even if one takes the briefest of looks at the most celebrated European films internationally, Elsaesser would appear to have a point. From Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) to The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), historical dramas play a key role within national film cultures across the continent, acting as international ‘shop windows’ that can help support not only the domestic film industry but also the wider heritage and tourist sectors by attracting international visitors to the country. At the same time, such films can generate major debates at home on the role of the past in contemporary national identity construction and the problematic sedimentation of cinematic representations of history in collective memory. What forms has this enduring engagement with the continent’s history taken across different European film cultures? How and why do historical dramas reach the large and small screens across Europe, and what is their role in the promotion of European heritage, however this might be defined? These are the questions that are the focus of this chapter, which results from an AHRC Care for the Future project run by the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds and B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies.
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Notes
Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 23.
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 (London: University College London Press, 1993), p. 109.
‘From Political Critique to Online Fandom: Claire Monk on British Heritage Film, its Origins and Afterlife’, Screening European Heritage, 25 July 2013 (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 1 September 2013). See also Claire Monk, Heritage Film Audiences: Period Film and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: Period Film Audiences and Online Film Cultures’, in Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 8 (2011), pp. 431–477.
Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation Genre Representation (London: Wallflower, 2012), p. 4.
A comprehensive discussion of Basque heritage film will be offered by Rob Stone and Marίa Pilar Rodrίguez in Basque Cinema: A Political and Cultural History (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2015).
For further discussion of this subversive trend in European heritage cinema see Paul Cooke and Rob Stone, ‘Crystalising the Past: Slow Heritage Cinema’, in Nuno Barradas Jorge and Tiago de Luca (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2015).
See Stuart Hall, ‘Whose Heritage? Unsettling “the Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post Nation’, in Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt and Ziauddin Sardar (eds), The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 72–84.
Eckart Voigts, ‘Heritage and Literature on Screen: Heimat and Heritage’ in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 123–137.
Paul Cooke, ‘Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (2004): An Image of German Wartime Suffering Too Far?’, German Monitor 67 (2007), pp. 247–261.
‘Dark Heritage, Identity and Community: In Conversation with Matthew Boswell’, Screening European Heritage, 14 June 2013 (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 15 September 2013). Visitor interest in sites of dark history is explored in John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000). With regard to Germany’s dark heritage, see in particular
Sharon Macdonald, Negotiating the Nazi Past in Germany and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2009).
Jaimey Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others’, in Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (eds), The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 186–215.
See Ib Bondebjerg, ‘Coming to Terms With the Past: Post-1989 Strategies in German Film Culture’, Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1 (2010), pp. 29–42.
A comprehensive account of this trend in European film is given by Daniela Berghahn in Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
With regard to France’s post-colonial heritage and its role in French film, see Dayna Oscherwitz, Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
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© 2015 Axel Bangert, Paul Cooke and Rob Stone
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Bangert, A., Cooke, P., Stone, R. (2015). Screening European Heritage: Negotiating Europe’s Past via the ‘Heritage Film’. In: Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (eds) Film, History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_3
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