Remystifying Film: Aesthetics, Emotion andThe Queen

Abstract

Part way through Stephen Frears’s film, The Queen (2006), the monarch (Helen Mirren) undergoes an extraordinary, magical experience whilst journeying into the Scottish landscape that surrounds Balmoral, her grand ancestral holiday home. Despite the anxious offers from her estate workers to chauffeur her, she drives alone into the mountains and proceeds to break down in the centre of a fast flowing river. While awaiting help a strange event occurs: a stag appears magically as if from nowhere and, unable to hide her admiration for the beast, the Queen gently utters the words, ‘Oh! You beauty’ before the animal disappears as mysteriously as it arrived. Framed in a painterly way, and providing a marked punctuation to the urban settings that have dominated the film so far, this short sequence presents a series of sumptuous landscape images that elicit a spectator response which is instinctive and intuitive. When analysed using an aesthetic approach – a methodology one might use for the examination of a painting – an emotional relationship is mobilised between the spectator and the film: a sentiment not necessarily available through a narrative reading. The Queen concentrates on the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death and the hysterical response from the British public in the lead up to the funeral. Emotion and, in particular, what is perceived by the public as the Queen’s suppression of emotion (although this is never fully explicated) is a narrative theme in the film. It is only by implementing an aesthetic analysis of a number of landscape images in the film – which occur as ‘frozen pictorial moments’, presented in excess of narrative plausibility and more or less as tableaux – that a particular kind of ‘affect’ is proposed as a pleasure of cinema, rather than meaning, consonant with recent tendencies in Film Studies. This article explores aesthetics and emotion as a complementary approach to cinema through the analysis of a number of pictorial landscape compositions within the film frame. The first part introduces the grounds for an aesthetic approach, followed by an art-historical analysis of the film.