Towards World Heritage Cinema (Starting from the Negative)

Abstract

To speak of ‘heritage cinema’ is to start from the negative. This is so because the term retains a pejorative charge from the context of its first coinage. As Claire Monk (2002) has pointed out, the critical characterisation of heritage cinema, a descriptor coined by critics rather than a genre recognised as such by industry and audiences, has to be understood as emerging from the splenetic British political atmosphere of the Margaret Thatcher premiership (1979–90). Parallel and perhaps essential to Thatcher’s project of dismantling much of Britain’s industrial sector in the name of defeating socialism was a narrow version of Britishness, indeed ‘Englishness’ (Thatcher styled herself an ‘English nationalist’), which celebrated whiteness, the colonial past and the values of the upper middle classes and aristocratic elite. What came to be identified as heritage cinema was seen by scholars on the left to be a correlate of Thatcherite ideology. For these scholars, heritage cinema was 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 [became] the main attraction’ (Vidal 2012: 8).