Screening European Heritage: History on Film, the Heritage Sector and Cultural Policy
About the Authors:
Dr Axel Bangert (University of Cambridge) has research interests in the fields of film and history, cultural memory of the Nazi past as well as transnational European cinemas. In his doctoral thesis, he examined cinema and television productions about the Third Reich since German reunification, assessing how changes in production, aesthetics and reception have impacted upon widespread images of the Nazi past. Axel Bangert has a longstanding interest in the history and memory of the Holocaust, above all with regard to recent trends in audiovisual representation. In his post-doctoral research project, he develops transnational perspectives on contemporary European cinema. Recent publications include Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (2013), edited together with Libby Saxton (Queen Mary, University of London) and Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge)
Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) was educated at the University of Birmingham (BA and PhD) and Nottingham (MA) and worked for a year as a Lektor at the University of Cologne and for 3 years as a Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He came to Leeds in September 2002.His research interests include Contemporary German Cinema in its political, aesthetic and industrial context and the role of Hollywood in World Cinema. His publications include: Contemporary German Cinema (2012); Representing East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia (2005); The Pocket Essential to German Expressionist Film (2002) and Speaking the Taboo: a study of the work of Wolfgang Hilbig (2000).
Rob Stone (University of Birmingham) is Professor Rob Stone is Chair of European Film and Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. He has published widely on Spanish, Basque, Cuban, European and independent American cinema and has further research interests in film theory and the politics of aesthetics, Modernism, Cubism, Surrealism and Spanish and Basque cultural and visual studies. His publications include: Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013); Julio Medem (2007); Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura: The Wounded Throat (2004); Spanish Cinema (2002); with J. D. Gutiérrez-Albilla (eds), The Companion to Luis Buñuel (2013); with L. Shaw (eds), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2012); with G. Harper (eds), The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (2007).
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‘Screening European Heritage’ is an AHRC project (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage/) set up to explore the ways in which heritage films across Europe choose to present the continent’s history. Axel Bangert (University of Cambridge), Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) and Rob Stone (University of Birmingham) map the terrain.
In his seminal collection of essays European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Thomas Elsaesser observes that ‘European cinema distinguishes itself from Hollywood and Asian cinemas by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past’. And, even if one takes the briefest of looks at the European films most visible to international audiences he would appear to have a point. From Germany’s The Lives of Others (2006) to the UK’s The King’s Speech (2010), historical dramas dominate mainstream European film production, their impact further increased by the fact that they often generate major national debates on the role of the past in contemporary national identity construction.
An important part of this production trend are so-called ‘heritage films’. This is a term coined by Andrew Higson to describe a cycle of British historical costume dramas produced in the 1980s. Films such as Chariots of Fire (1981) and A Room with a View (1985) were analysed as a new genre, identified by slow-moving, episodic narratives organised around props and settings as much as they were around narrative and characters, and read as part of a national project of nostalgic remembrance celebrating British heritage culture just as the country was undergoing the seismic social shifts of the Thatcher years. At the same time, heritage film was championed by the UK heritage sector, hoping that it would act as a ‘shop window’ for foreign tourists and investment.
Over the last two decades, Higson’s original definition of the term has been repeatedly challenged, redefined and stretched almost to breaking point. Moreover, it is increasingly noted that such films were not, and are not, unique to British cinema. Indeed, more recently, heritage film has been identified as a dynamic global film genre. Clearly film studies has largely moved on from the original debate that Higson initiated, much of which ultimately became somewhat semantic. However, its core concern, namely what do we mean by ‘heritage’ and how might this be communicated, instrumentalised or challenged by cinema, remains a key concern. If we stick closely to Higson’s original aesthetic definition of the concept, but accept that heritage cinema is a global phenomenon, such films are produced and consumed within very different and distinct social and political contexts, all of which inflect the specific concept of heritage they seek to communicate. A country house draped in a swastika such as we see in Dennis Gansel’s 2004 film Napola (Before the fall) immediately creates a very different affective relationship with the spectator to a shot of a similar building in a British heritage drama. Downton Abbey, this clearly isn’t. The disparate modes of engagement with the past we see across European heritage films are always invariably inflected by the preoccupations of the present, evoking conflicting emotions amongst those that make and consume such films, emotions driven variously by nostalgia, mourning, or more nationalist, even jingoistic strategies .
Screening European Heritage is 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 and was set up to explore the ways in which heritage films across Europe choose to present the continent’s history. In particular, we are interested in how film interacts with the wider heritage sector, both in terms of film production and in terms of the many and complex ways in which heritage films either challenge or support the agenda of the heritage sites they present on screen, asking us to reflect upon who ‘owns’ the rights to historical representation. Thus, the project has focussed on a number of interrelated questions:
- What role does European, National and Regional policy play in the production of heritage film? How have production companies in a variety of countries across Europe negotiated the film funding landscape and how has this impacted upon the projects chosen for development?
- How do heritage films extend, or delimit, the possibilities of historical representation? How do filmmakers perceive national ‘heritage’ on screens across Europe and how does this reflect the changing politics of national identity formation?
- How are European heritage films consumed across and beyond Europe? Who are their audience and what are the mechanisms of their consumption? In particular this question explores the role of digital transmission and consumption of heritage films. Along with traditional audience analysis, it looks at the ways in which films are consumed via digital social media, from Youtube mashups to interactive fan sites, a form of reception that often feeds back into the broader media response to such work.
- How do heritage films interact with the wider heritage sector? How do the imperatives of the tourist industry impact upon the aesthetics of these films and how has the film industry actively worked with regional, national and transnational tourist boards to enhance ‘film-induced tourism’?
Over the last year, the project team have been exploring these questions through discussions with film scholars and industry professionals. The ultimate aim of the project was to provide a scoping study for a wider investigation. With this in mind, we focussed largely on heritage films produced in the UK, the Basque Country, Denmark and Germany, all of which have very different film cultures and, most importantly, relationships with the past.
In addition to the main research questions, we also set ourselves the challenge of collaborative events, and of developing innovative and useful research outputs and activities that would enhance, attract and showcase the whole range of interaction the project undertook. In this way we hoped we might have immediate, accumulative and ultimately demonstrable impact that was not abstract or impossible to calculate. The project began with a research workshop in December 2012. This event was rooted in knowledge exchange, with academics and colleagues from the film and heritage industries coming together to collectively explore our research questions. In reaching out to the wider academic sector and public audience, we recognised that the digital 21st century has transformed the 20th century initiative to study film.
The effect of multiplying media platforms on the academic discipline of film studies ... reflects the way that the digital age has impacted upon educational technology in particular ...
The effect of multiplying media platforms on the academic discipline of film studies, the take-up of filmmaking skills by those who teach film studies and the deployment of those competences in influencing, informing and even shaping of relevant, coherent curricula reflects the way that the digital age has impacted upon the audio-visual world in general and on educational technology in particular, with increasing crossover and convergence. Such technological transformations must be integrated within academic study because student skills will only become professional competences when the curriculum reflects and deploys them accordingly. It thus behoves educators to add skills in filmmaking and (at least) online distribution to their traditional deployment of textual and comparative analysis that conforms to the humanities model. Thus, the participants in this project committed themselves to personal investment in transferable skills that included practical and theoretical knowledge of new technologies. Thanks to lightweight digital cameras and screen-based editing programmes we were able to create video interviews with key participants and video essays too - short films of between five and 15 minutes that covered overarching themes, examined key films or provided specific scene analysis. These are all available on our project website. The take-up of these has been interesting - they now figure on the syllabi of several courses in European and American universities. We made a more abstract short film too. Between Sunrise and Sunless considered tourism and cinematic pilgrimages in relation to the film Before Sunrise (1995), channelled through Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans soleil, and this video has registered several thousand plays on the various Internet sites in which it has been embedded.
We are also making a full length documentary on Basque Heritage Cinema, which is currently 32 minutes long, with ambition to reach an hour. This was shown at the project’s international conference in September this year and has been invited to be screened at the universities of Pamplona, Cambridge, Queens at Belfast and William and Mary in the USA. We have also begun to explore the potential public policy implications of the project’s findings, along with its potential for enhancing the way young people can use heritage films and heritage sites to explore their individual histories.
The project is ongoing, so if you’d like to know more please take a look at the project website (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage/) and get in touch.
Axel Bangert (University of Cambridge) Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)