Rewriting European History on Film: An Essay Review

Retelling European History Nicholas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2008, p/bk 234 pp. ISBN 0786434435; Costas Constandinides, From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking the Transition of Popular Narratives and Characters Across Old and New Media. London and New York: Continuum, 2010, h/bk 166 pp. ISBN 1441103802; Jefferson Hunter, English Filming, English Writing. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 2010, p/bk 280 pp. ISBN 0253221773; Paul Newland (ed.), Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s. Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2010, p/bk 280 pp. ISBN 1841503202. Laurence Raw Although differing in terms of theoretical focus and subject, these four volumes are unified in intention to follow the precepts of the historian E. H. Carr by showing how filmmaker-historians on both sides of the Atlantic have reworked European history ancient and modern to communicate different stories to their viewers, and how the viewers have responded to such material. Nicholas Haydock’s Movie Medievalism takes as its subject the enduring fascination – in Hollywood and elsewhere – with the Middle Ages. Inspired by Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, Haydock argues that cinémedievalism (his term) has not been preoccupied with anachronism but with “a cultural fantasy wherein the reel/real divide is reinterpreted as the Imaginary/Real” (36). Films such as Jean-Jacques Annnaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986) recreate an imaginary past as a way of commenting on the real present: “The formation of a persecuting society, said to have begun in the late Middle Ages, can […] be seen behind the rise of capitalism but it is responsible for the failure of socialism” (32). Haydock proposes that this past/ present relationship can be approached in Deleuzian terms as “a double arc, a present that passes and a past that is preserved [….] Put more simply, the past that the present is always becoming and the present nature of recollections mirror one another” (39). This phenomenon underlies the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (1957), where Antonius Block’s (Max von Sydow’s) situation “marks a kind of midpoint in his transition between a genocidal holocaust (the Crusades), and the threat of an apocalypse (the Black Death), analogous perhaps to Bergman’s own situation in 1957 between World War II and the prospect of all-out nuclear war” (41). The bulk of Movie Medievalism consists of a series of case-studies of recent films, looking at the ways in which their respective directors have explored the past/ present relationship. First Knight (1999), and A Knight’s Tale (2001) constitute good examples of Hollywood’s transformation of European medievalism into “the practice and study of pastiche, or rather of generations of pastiche stretching back not to an original but to earlier acts of composite forgery” (110). The medieval period did not acknowledge modern concepts of ‘authenticity,’ or ‘realism’; they were more interested in portraiture and apocryphal continuation (106). Haydock’s observation explains why medievalism proves so attractive to postmodern directors in the new millennium; they do not retell the past – either in the script or in visual terms, but construct their own apocryphal versions of it. This strategy contrasts with that employed by big-budget filmmakers such as Luc Besson in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), or Ridley Scott in Gladiator (2000) or Kingdom of Heaven (2004), who use the past to construct symbolic and unified national identities in the face of daunting imperialism (111). Haydock examines Kingdom of Heaven in detail to show how Scott uses the past to comment on contemporary western – specifically American – intervention in the Middle East (134). In another chapter Haydock proposes that Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004) is dominated by notions of convergence, not only between past and present but between film and newer media – for example, CGI technology. Rather than spending his not inconsiderable budget on historically accurate settings, Fuqua uses CGI to create an imaginary world, “coherent in itself but opened to future development” (186). Present and past unify in a manner that might not have been available to previous generations of filmmakers. On this view, it seems as if medievalism will become an enduring subject of fascination for any director interested in exploring the limits of technology in the filmmaking process. While Movie Medievalism is predominantly concerned with examples from Hollywood’s recent past, I’d have welcomed a more sustained analysis of how filmmakers from different generations have approached the issue of medievalism – for example, by contrasting films such as King Arthur with earlier Hollywood studio products such as Richard Thorpe’s Knights of the Round Table (1953), or The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) (most fondly remembered for Tony Curtis’ portrayal of the medieval hero with a Brooklyn accent). This kind of analysis might have given a deeper insight into the ways in which the past represents different things to different generations on both sides of the camera. Costas Constandinides’ From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation develops Haydock’s thesis by showing how the onset of digital technology has occasioned a radical rethink in the way history is portrayed onscreen and viewers respond to it. He draws upon Baudrillard, who suggests that in the new millennium “it is no longer possible to manufacture the unreal from the real, to create the imaginary from the data of reality. The process will be […] to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because the real has disappeared from our lives” (37). Constandinides cites the example of Steven Spielberg’s version of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (2002), which some critics have identified as an allegory of the American government’s foreign policy – specifically George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” In contrast Constandinides argues that the film is a good example of a “post-celluloid adaptation,” in which “the viewer is a participant within the space of the illusion” (53). In a world where adaptations are relentlessly advertised through the media as well as and online, and viewers can prolong their experiences by means of fansites, we have to consider exactly who controls the dramatic narrative. Retelling history becomes a participatory process that is “difficult to tame and condense” (54). Constandinides develops this thesis through a discussion of Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006), based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name (1998). The film depicts the battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) between the Spartans and the Persians that breaks away from the realist mode: “[L]ive action footage becomes graphic in order to aestheticize blood/ bleeding [….] This action is complemented with graphic rather than photographic elements [….] inherent in the language of comic books” (82). In this kind of historical retelling the viewer assumes an active role as “an implied video-gamer and an implied consumer at the same time” (88). They write back to the historical narrative represented on screen, and by doing so are transformed into “a thought co-author in his/her attempt to activate a transmedia storytelling [….] in order to play this new role and activate this cultural shift he/she has to consume” (145). Examples of this storytelling process – completed after the experience of watching the film – include video art, web camera and fandom web cinema, which cumulatively represent playful historical narratives created with digital cameras and nonlinear editing software, and distributed online via sites such as YouTube. Constandinides’ interpretation of contemporary historical films assumes that the past/ present relationship no longer matters, as viewers construct their own interpretations based on their responses to the film. Jefferson Hunter’s English Filming, English Writing expresses a completely antithetical view; he believes that historical films – especially those focusing on British history – have invoked the notion of a common culture, one in which the past informs the present. Even works set in the contemporary inner city, such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), both written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, incorporate references to past masterpieces such as Great Expectations and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Hunter believes that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) constitutes a “looming presence” in Sammy and Rosie; both texts evoke “the sense of belonging and detachment” to the industrial city” (17). Kureishi’s writing technique, the product of “a cultivated imagination” (a very Leavisian term) implies a respect for the past and the contiguities of English writing and English filming (18). The notion of a common culture was particularly significant in historical films produced during the Second World War. Humphrey Jennings’ documentary Listen to Britain (1942), and Powell and Pressburger’s moral fable A Canterbury Tale (1944) invoke a medieval dramatic genre – the village pageant, a symbol of the kind of traditions that the British people were trying to sustain by fighting against the Germans. This technique is similar to that used in Kingdom of Heaven, where the medieval past is used to comment on America in the Middle East. Hunter argues persuasively that Listen to Britain actively involved viewers in the process of “joining collaboratively in the production of meaning” (93). Following Constandinides, he shows how the film’s significance at that time emerged out of a participatory process involving the director and the audience. This is a significant point, suggesting that while technological advances over the last seven decades might have influenced the ways in which films retell history, the viewers’ position vis-à-vis the film they are witnessing has hardly changed at all. Hunter develops this argument by examining how music is used in retelling history in films such as Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). The director has been inspired by “the mysterious action of memory, catching at certain images and sounds” (246). He draws on a wide selection of musical themes, ranging from popular hits of the 1940s and 1950s to Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to the Virgin,” to evoke a range of complex emotions such as wistfulness and pleasurable melancholy (especially amongst those viewers who grew up in the immediate post-1945 era). Davies uses such music “on behalf of the characters for the audience in the cinema” (251), and thereby draw them into the experience of the past. As in Jennings’ Listen to Britain, they are viewed as active participants in a common culture in which the present informs the past and vice versa. We might ask whether Hunter’s thesis can actually prevail in the postmodern era, in which viewers can retell their own historical narratives online. Hunter has no doubts whatsoever, using Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2006) to prove his point. Bennett grew up with the films of the 1940s, which provided him with “a cultural shorthand, a way of describing experience […] [and] seeing in discrete and photogenic images” (291). This experience informs Bennett’s view of the immediate past, as represented in The History Boys. In Hunter’s view the film “dramatizes and celebrates individual acts of recollection” (307). One character uses her memories of the 1940s character-actor Raymond Huntley to express her contempt for the head teacher, while the schoolteacher Hector (Richard Griffiths) sums up his educational philosophy thus: “Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on.” For Hunter the pronoun “it” encompasses all types of text – cinematic, literary or otherwise – that make up the common culture: Gracie Fields, Brief Encounter, George Orwell, Philip Larkin and Bennett himself. If these names retain their meaning for succeeding generations in whatever form (films, television, or online), then the future of that culture seems assured. Paul Newland’s edited collection Don’t Look Now offers a different slant on the relationship between history and film, as it tries to explain the significance of British films in the 1970s in terms of past and present. Following Haydock and Constandinides, the book suggests that film culture diversified in new and interesting ways during that decade: large cinemas were converted into two, three or even four-screen houses, allowing for a greater choice of products for exhibition, encompassing big-budget blockbusters as well as more experimental work by auteurs such as Terence Davies. Sue Harper’s essay “Don’t Look Now” suggests that the films of this era can be grouped into four categories, each with their own conditions of production: American histories, auteur histories, low-status schlockers and marginal histories (28). With this distinction in mind, Andrew Patch looks at the auteur-history of Nicolas Roeg, who wanted “to fully explore film as an act of time, and to question film as innovatively as Godard, Antonioni and Resnais” (263). In similar vein Karl Magee and his co-authors liken Lindsay Anderson’s O, Lucky Man (1973) to early Truffaut, especially in its concentration on “absent fathers and distant mothers,” and “their passionate championing of the cinema and their belief in the centrality of the author” (234). Robert Shail’s essay “Stanley Baker and British Lion: A Cautionary Tale,” looks at the hazards of mainstream filmmaking. Baker was a major international actor/ producer, whose credits included Zulu (1964); nine years later he headed a consortium that took over the ailing British Lion studios. Within a year the entire venture had collapsed. Shail believes that this catastrophe signalled the end of the British studio system; from now on the majority films would be independent ventures aimed at specific sections of the viewing public, whether domestically or abroad. Some of these films were undoubtedly significant: Paul Newland argues that Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1981) “presciently captured the type of tensions that were developing in London between the black community, local whites and the police” (95). William Fowler’s essay looks at the works of experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin, whose works have enjoyed greater currency in mainstream Europe as opposed to Great Britain. Despite the book’s claims, it is a fact that some seminal texts of the 1970s became successful because they did appeal to a common culture – particularly on television. Ridley Scott made his name by directing commercials broadcast on Independent Television (ITV) such as the one for Hovis (1975) (a make of brown bread on sale since 1886), which consciously recreated the world of the mid-twentieth century north of England – factory chimneys, cobbled streets and a child wearing a cloth cap pushing his bicycle home – to illustrate the slogan “it’s [Hovis] as good today as it’s always been.” The advertisement remains enduringly popular today; it can be readily accessed on YouTube. Amy Sergeant suggests in Don’t Look Now that Scott’s advertisement manifested “a brash confidence in advertising as a legitimate activity,” as well as proving how potent the past could be for all types of audience. Sergeant cites further examples of this strategy: in a Bird’s Eye Supermousse advertisement, both David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) and Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968) were invoked in support of the tagline “If you have tried one, you have to try the other.” She comments: “Such ads assumed a viewer’s ability to recognize the source materials – possibly from television screenings” (208). Taken together, these four books emphasize the pitfalls of trying to impose certain theoretical schemata on historical films. While advances in technology have obviously expanded the range of possibilities for retelling history on film, the viewers’ response to such texts has seldom changed throughout the last seven decades. While Ringan Letwige’s 2008 version of the Hovis advertisement invokes several important events of twentieth-century British history (including England winning the soccer World Cup in 1966), it also refers to Scott’s 1975 text. Like those fans creating their own versions of 300 online, Letwige’s advertisement constitutes an imaginative response inspired by a source-text. Most historical films make reference to common cultural elements, even if they are intended for specialist audiences. This is as true for Bennett’s History Boys as it is for the recent British-made cricketing documentary Fire in Babylon (2011), which charts the successes of the West Indian team of the 1980s and early 1990s, and relates it to wider issues of racism and multiculturalism in the West Indies, Great Britain, Australia and (most significantly) South Africa in the pre- and post-Mandela eras. Instead of constructing a developmental narrative of historical films – assuming some kind of movement from primitiveness to sophistication (a characteristic of Haydock’s book, as well as Constandinides’ although to a lesser extent), perhaps we should look for evidence of continuities through time, and how they have been shaped in different contexts of production. This is what makes Hunter’s book such a stimulating read. Laurence Raw Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey