Sensations of the Past: Identity, Empowerment, and the British Monarchy Films

• Authors: Zsolt Győri
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Royal bio-pics have always enjoyed a high priority among cinematic representations of British history and taken a lion’s share in defining Britishness to audiences at home and abroad. These historical narratives never render national identity by capturing the past of historians, instead reconstruct the past as a mirror of contemporary reality and in a way as to satisfy their audience’s demand for both romantic qualities and antiquarian nostalgia, for sensations they regard their own. The author’s basic assumption is that such cinema does not represent history but exploits spectatorial desire for a mediated reality one inhabits through the experience of an empowered identity. The first part of the article examines how private-life films (a subgenre of royal bio-pics) mythologized and idealized Tudor monarchs in the 1930s, while in the second part, contemporary representatives of the subgenre are analysed as they portray the challenges of the Monarchy in its search for a place within modern British identity politics. Analysed films include The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939), Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997), The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006), and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010).1

Keywords

EN

British royal bio-pics; the psychologization of history; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939); Mrs Brown (1997); The Queen (2006); and The King’s Speech (2010)

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 8
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 183-201

Dates

published

2014-09-01

online

2014-09-25

Contributors

author

Zsolt Győri

• Debrecen University (Hungary)

References

• Chapman, James. 2005. Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film. London: IB Tauris.
• Davies, Jude. 2001. Diana, A Cultural History. Gender, Race, Nation and the People’s Princess. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Driver, Martha W. 2004. What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It? Historicity and Authenticity in Historical Film. In The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, eds. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, 19-22. Jefferson: McFarland.
• Elliot, Andrew B. R. 2011. Remaking the Middle Ages: Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World. Jefferson: McFarland.[WoS]
• Higson, Andrew. 2003. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford-New York: University Press.
• Higson, Andrew. 2011. Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s. London/New York: I.B.Tauris.
• Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Luckett, Moya. 2000. Image and nation in 1990s British cinema. In British Cinema of the 1990s, ed. Robert Murphy, 88-99. London: BFI.
• Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: Michigan University Press.
• Marx, Karl. 2002. The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung. In Marx on Religion, ed. John Raines, 28-44. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
• McKechnie, Kara. 2002. Taking Liberties with the Monarch: the Royal Bio-Pic in the 1990s. In British Historical Cinema, eds. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant, 217-236. London: Routledge.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
• Vidal, Belén. 2012. Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation. New York/ Chichester: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ausfm-2014-0033