16-Nov-04
224 pages
Published/distributed by BFI Publishing
ISBN/EAN: 9781844570249
Hardback
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Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past Pidduck, Julianne
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Within the 1990s, costume drama has proliferated internationally as a popular, critically acclaimed, and controversial cinematic cycle. While critics lambast British ' heritage cinema' as a nostalgic anachronism, Contemporary Costume Film argues that these films use the frame of the past to dramatise post-modern dilemmas including: gendered, class, colonial and queer struggles over representations of the past; ' heritage tourism ' and cultural identity; love, intimacy and deep feeling in a (post) modern age; a return to 'quality' culture and authorship in an age of cultural recycling. The book investigates these issues through themes of space both the intricate textual places within the films themselves, and the cultural and critical locations through which the cycle travels. From the compressed interiors of the 19th-century novel so influential to dominant period drama (adaptations of Austen, James, Forster and Wharton), to the increasingly fragmented, theatrical and postmodern spaces of arthouse works ( the films of Sally Potter, Jane Campion, and Julie Dash and Derek Jarman).
Contemporary Costume Film charts the spatial imaginary of contemporary costume film. Addressing a wide range of important recent films including Orlando, Sense and Sensibility, Portrait of a Lady, The Age of Innocence, Dangerous Liasons, Gosford Park, Elizabeth, Edward II and An Ideal Husband, the book combines close readings of specific films and filmmakers with an extensive genre study of English-language costume film. A critical attention to issues of space, place and the past bring into relief both costume drama's increasingly international scope, and the symbolic struggles that take place within its frame.
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