Screening European Heritage: Negotiating Europe’s Past via the ‘Heritage Film’

Abstract

In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser observes that ‘European cinema distinguishes itself from Hollywood and Asian cinemas by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past.’1 Even if one takes the briefest of looks at the most celebrated European films internationally, Elsaesser would appear to have a point. From Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) to The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), historical dramas play a key role within national film cultures across the continent, acting as international ‘shop windows’ that can help support not only the domestic film industry but also the wider heritage and tourist sectors by attracting international visitors to the country. At the same time, such films can generate major debates at home on the role of the past in contemporary national identity construction and the problematic sedimentation of cinematic representations of history in collective memory. What forms has this enduring engagement with the continent’s history taken across different European film cultures? How and why do historical dramas reach the large and small screens across Europe, and what is their role in the promotion of European heritage, however this might be defined? These are the questions that are the focus of this chapter, which results from 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.