Rewriting History from the Margins: Diasporic Memory, Shabby Chic and Archival Footage

Abstract

Since the beginning of the heritage cinema debate in the 1980s, the concept has proven enormously popular and, in the British context, virtually all period films made subsequently have been subsumed under this proliferating critical framework (Monk and Sargeant 2002: 11). That heritage cinema has emerged as such an attractive label is all the more surprising given that it has come under attack for promoting a class-biased, conservative and consensual notion of Englishness. The excessive pictorialism, museum aesthetics, and privileging of mise-en-scène, elaborate costumes and retro fashion over narrative has even provoked some derogatory comments from critics who have dubbed heritage cinema ‘the Laura Ashley school of filmmaking’, the ‘Merchant Ivory “Furniture Restoration” aesthetic’ and the ‘white flannel school’ (cited in Vincendeau 2001: xviii–xix). Perhaps the lively scholarly debates that have surrounded heritage cinema ever since Andrew Higson coined the term spring from the fact that it offers a ‘clear explanatory model [that] makes things look simple […] because it confers a pleasing symmetry onto the seeming chaos of cultural forms’ (Harper 2004: 140). The vibrant critical interest in heritage cinema coincides with the actual growth of this successful production trend. As Randall Halle notes, no other genre flourished as much during the 1990s, the decade when the European Union was founded, as the historical film. This simultaneity, he proposes, points towards a significant dialectical tension, ‘because typically the historical genre has been deployed within the national ensemble precisely as a vehicle for the imagining of the national community’ (Halle 2008: 90). It seems as if becoming part of a larger transnational community had stimulated a growing desire to be securely contained in the smaller community of the nation. The surge of heritage films since the 1990s thus reflects a certain nostalgia to be part of a specific national heritage.