Costume Drama Research Articles

From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”

From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”

History on Film/Film on History (review)

Reviewed by: History on Film/Film on History Ron Briley History on Film/Film on History. Robert A. Rosenstone . Pearson, 2006. 182 pages; $26.00. Real McLuhan In Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the director's alter ego, Alvy Singer, is annoyed in a movie line when the person behind him (a media studies professor) pontificates upon the media theories of Marshall McLuhan. A frustrated Singer then produces the real McLuhan, who informs the verbose professor that he has no [End Page 97] understanding of modern media. When my colleagues in the historical profession dismiss film history or narrowly focus their film commentaries upon cinematic adherence to historical detail, I wish that I could summon the eloquent Robert A. Rosenstone to expose their lack of intellectual imagination. Lacking such powers, I will simply have to rely upon Rosenstone's insightful History on Film/Film on History to counter the conventional wisdom that real history may only be conveyed via the written word. Rosenstone, who teaches history at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of such scholarly works as John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary (1975) and the innovative Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Japan (1988), in addition to being one of the first historians to seriously study film and theorize the impact of cinema upon historical thinking. In History on Film/Film on History, Rosenstone argues that filmmakers who seek to understand the present through engaging with the past have much in common with academic historians; for both refer to actual events, moments, and movements from the past in their efforts to construct history. Of course, critics of history depicted on the silver screen maintain that filmmakers often invent dialogue and play loose with the facts. Thus, filmmakers lack the "objectivity" of academic historians. Influenced by post modernism, Rosenstone challenges the myth of scholarly "objectivity," observing that academic historians are reconstructing a version of the past with the written word just as a film director does with celluloid. Traditional historians use traces of the past to develop their historical interpretations by deciding which facts and events and from whose perspective to tell the story. It is a reading of the past, but it is not "the past" which scholars are able to recreate. Rosenstone questions the notion of scientific history, concluding, "History (as we practice it) is an ideological and cultural product of the Western world at a particular time in its development, one when the notion of 'scientific' truth based on replicable experiments, has been carried into social science, including history (where no such experimentation is possible" (133). In line with Aristotle, Rosenstone believes that the muse of history should be realigned with ethics and poetry. Such realignment might encourage greater acceptance of cinematic history by academics who often bemoan the fact that the public increasingly obtains its history through film and media. Rosenstone, however, wonders whether the growth of cinematic history is necessarily a negative thing. History on film allows viewers to emotionally engage with individuals from the past, providing metaphors that allow us to better grasp the larger truths of history. Rosenstone does not insist that all costume dramas contain such metaphors. Instead, he characterizes history films as dramatic feature films in which a filmmaker, such as D. W. Griffith with The Birth of a Nation, seeks to render an interpretation of the past; the documentary film; and the oppositional or innovative historical film which employs parody, non-linear stories, and absurdity as modes of interrogating history. Rosenstone observes that the innovative historical features are often the product of Third World cinema, and certainly one of the volume's strengths is that the author takes his readers beyond the narrow confines of Hollywood and American cinema. Although Oliver Stone now eschews the term "cinematic historian," Rosenstone asserts that filmmakers such as Stone, Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, and Theo Angelopoulos should be described as historians. It is not necessary, argues Rosenstone, for viewers or scholars to accept the controversial conclusions reached by Stone in JFK (1990). Of greater significance is the process in which the director "makes films that enter into, engage, comment upon, and contest the existing body of data and arguments on...

The Historian as VIP

March/April 2007 Historically Speaking 41 The Historian as VIP1 Daniel Snowman H istoriane are Very Important People. Some of them, anyway. Let me explain why. History is everywhere, or so it seemed as we entered our new millennium. On television Pyramids and Puritans, Hitler and Stalin, war epics and costume dramas josded to fill the airwaves and garner large audiences on a plethora of popular channels. Visitor numbers to museums, galleries, and heritage sites burgeoned while a raft of new historical magazines sprouted. In the bookshops, sales of biographies and war books almost rivaled those on how to enhance your corporate, coital, or culinary competence, and the "qualipop" press mined new gold with daily stories purporting to show how recendy discovered historical documents threw new (often contentious ) light upon historical personalities, artifacts, and events. Family and local history flourished, while monarchs and emperors, presidents , popes, and premiers were pressed to apologize for the actions of their predecessors several generations or even centuries before. Journalists, with their penchant for catchy labels, have dubbed history "the new rock 'n' roll" and "the new gardening" (and even "the new sex"). Let's not overstate the case. History isn't any of those things and has probably never been quite tiiat popular! But there's no doubt: history sells—not just to a cultured elite but, nowadays, to a mass market. The past may be a foreign country; but by the early 21st century, history, it seemed, was inescapable. Or was it? Was the succession of sensational press stories new gold or fools' gold? Was the demand for historical apology a serious attempt to come to terms with the past or a form of crude (and often financially fueled) gesture politics? Did radio and television programs or the opening up of Heritage sites provide a genuine sense of continuity between past and present or an anesthetized dieme park, fun to experience but nothing to do with us? Our age, many argue, is one that lives in an immediate present, obsessed with die new, die fashionable, with little awareness of the ways our living present derives from its continuity with all that has preceded it. The point was not lost on historians. "Most young men and women," wrote a disgrunded Eric Hobsbawm, "grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in." We live, said David Cannadine, in "a society * This article is an edited version of the introduction to Daniel Snowman 's book Historians, just published by Palgrave Macmillan. which is increasingly amnesiac and ahistorical." So: is an interest in history in the ascendant? Or, per contra, do we live in an age singularly bereft of historical awareness? Could bodi be true? A WPA Poster announcing a reenactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debate. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZC2-5233]. Perhaps there is no mystery and we are simply talking about different groups of people: those who are more interested in history and diose who are less so. Evidence from book sales, televisionaudience and Heritage-visitor research, and the like suggests diat people expressing an interest in the past tend to be older, better educated, and wealdiier than die average. Since the population of most Western societies contains more and more elderly people with disposable time and income dian ever before, an overall increase in the consumption of history would seem almost inevitable. Against diat, however, is the fact that it is the younger generation , not the oldies widi time and money on dieir hands, who are most at home with diat miraculous modern gateway to local and family history, the computer, while cheap travel enables even youngsters with limited resources to visit such hitherto remote exotica as Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu. The historical reenactment societies that have sprouted like hydra heads succeed in recruiting plenty of young enthusiasts keen to learn what it was like living as a Cavalier or a Roundhead, a Yankee or a Confederate. Yet these are the same youngsters who, in other aspects of their lives, are preoccupied widi the transient and the fashionable . While there is a plethora of...

重建帝國﹕歷史正劇與中國當代民族主義在大眾文化中的新的表現形式 (Rebuilding the Empire: Historical TV Drama and the New Expressive Form of Cultural Nationalism)

This paper explores the discourse of cultural nationalism and its recent articulation in historical TV dramas (Lishi ju): TV serials set in the Chinese imperial past and depicting court politics and the private lives of imperial families. First, I briefly survey the recent resurgence of historical drama on the TV screen, especially comparing two different ways of representing history: “history light” (xishuo) and “history orthodox” (zhengju). While history light, a new genre strongly influenced by the costume dramas imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan, emphasizes the entertainment values of popular culture and adopts a postmodern attitude towards history, history orthodox renews the pedagogical tradition and the moralistic narrative of historical drama in modern China since the May Fourth enlightenment movement. I then focus on TV dramas in the history orthodox mode and their ideological messages, examining two representative works by Hu Mei: Yongzheng Dynasty (Yongzheng wangchao, 1999) and The Great Emperor Wu of Han (Hanwu dadi, 2005). While drawing attention to the various narrative strategies, intertextualities and audio-visual styles employed in these dramas to represent the glorious national history and portray a strong leader (the emperor) as national hero, I also provide a contextual analysis of the production and circulation of these two dramas as well as the critical and media response to them, to reveal the social agencies and social formation of these dramas behind the screen. I suggest that the revisionist reframing of the past in historical TV drama reflects a new nationalist historical consciousness and cultural identity borne out of China’s rapid rise and aspirations to become an economic and political superpower.

Vivaldi's Tito Manlio

Given that so few of Vivaldi's operas have been recorded complete, it might seem rather a pity that two rival versions of Tito Manlio (written in only five days in 1719 for a princely wedding in Mantua, which was cancelled at the eleventh hour when the bride failed to turn up) should appear almost simultaneously. However, these recordings—from Modo Antiquo, conducted by Federico Maria Sardelli (CPO 777 096-2, rec 2003, 195′) and from Accademia Bizantina, conducted by Ottavio Dantone (Naïve op 30413, rec 2005, 185′) do in fact provide a valuable opportunity to reflect on some of the problems involved in presenting complete Baroque operas on CD. Even the finest audio recordings of opera, of course, provide only half the intended experience. Indeed, if Baroque operas set in ancient Greece and Rome were, for their original audiences, a kind of 18th-century equivalent to a lavishly produced Classical TV costume drama, in which genuine historical events provide the setting and raison d'être for assorted romantic entanglements, then a CD version is the equivalent of a radio play, in which everything must be conveyed by voices alone, without any help from stage action or visual spectacle—or even, where these particular recordings are concerned, from sound effects.

Staging Act 5 of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell

Of the nine plays completed by Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (1804) is probably the most well known to general theater audiences and students of theater history. annual outdoor presentations of the play in Interlaken, Switzerland, attract wide audiences with the delightful Alpine setting of the theater, the opportunity to see a medieval costume drama, and, as the Interlaken production is performed by local amateurs, the chance to see the Swiss performing in a play that deals with their country's origins. In America the annual outdoor productions in New Glarus, Wisconsin, likewise emphasize medieval spectacle and Swiss heritage. (1) Wilhelm Tell provides the opportunity for good summer stock theater. Yet Schiller engaged in more than just writing an entertaining costume drama. As a playwright Schiller was deeply concerned with philosophical and political problems, as well as with history, aesthetics, and poetics. Indeed, Schiller stands among the most contemplative poets to write for the stage in the past two hundred years. In his plays one notices recurring questions about abuses of political power and the possibility and necessity for individual action in the face of tyranny and oppression. Schiller's lifelong quest to reach toward a better world in his writings is part of his legacy to modern civilization. In Wilhelm Tell Schiller localizes a particular manifestation of the quest for liberty in the Swiss fight against the Austrians, a quest that the character Tell brings to a climax with his assassination of the tyrannical Austrian governor Gessler. Characters in the play and audiences at the theater hail Gessler's death; there is not much to like about him, and with Gessler dead the way is clear for a happy ending. However, Schiller's text includes reference to another political assassination in act 5, the murder of the Hapsburg emperor Albrecht I by his own kinsman, Duke Johann of Swabia. In Schiller's text Tell encounters the duke, thereafter referred to as Johannes Parricida, in the play's penultimate scene. This juxtaposition of Tell and Duke Johann complicates the otherwise festive ending of the play. Might this be why the scenes with Duke Johann are sometimes excised from productions? In the contemporary political landscape where the boundary between freedom fighter and terrorist is often obscure, the time seems right to emphasize the importance of the entirety of act 5 of Wilhelm Tell in light not only of Schiller's dramaturgy, but of his aesthetics and ethics as well. Beginning around 1791, Schiller, intrigued with philosophy since his student days, became very interested in studying Kant, especially the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment). This interest in aesthetics continued throughout the first half of the decade and culminated in the publication of the Uber die Asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in eine Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters [1796]). (2) While Schiller's interest in aesthetics frequently receives attention, the connection between his aesthetics, his ethics, and his plays does not always receive the emphasis it deserves. moral purpose that Schiller envisioned for dramatic literature and theatrical presentation needs emphasis both when reading the plays and when staging them. Beginning with his early writings, such as the address given at the Mannheim Theater in 1784, Die Schaubuhne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachten (The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution), (3) Schiller outlined a program for German drama and theater which he subsequently put into practice in his plays and in his collaborations with Goethe in the Weimar Theater. (One may observe that Schiller's theory and practice of the theatrical arts with its strong ethical component prefigures Brecht's Lehrstucke without being as didactically heavy-handed.) In The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution, Schiller considers especially the educative function of theater. …

History and Fiction

Despite the fact that my university education focused on historical studies, and that I completed an MA at the University of Saskatchewan, for most of my adult life I have been a writer of novels, short stories, and plays. Some people have professed surprise at this, perhaps believing that a smattering of historical knowledge inevitably excludes someone from the practice of fiction, cluttering the brain with so many facts that subtler, more creative operations are incapacitated. Skeptics might grudgingly allow that historical training in research skills can be applied to historical novels, of which I have written a niggardly two, but are unlikely to grant much more. In fact, some commentators active in the Canadian literary scene decry the current popularity of the historical novel, disparaging its success with the public, which they regard as a flight from reality on the part of writers and readers, and evidence of a debased taste for irrelevant costume drama. This challenge seems to be rooted, consciously or unconsciously, in the notion that an unbridgeable abyss separates the present from the past, and that while the present is actual and real, the past is a theoretical construct of interest to only a small cadre of professional historians. Such critics argue that by turning their eyes backward, Canadian writers neglect life as it is lived now, retreating to the safer ground of events consigned to the dustbin of history, events rendered of little matter or moment by the mere passage of time. As a sometime writer of Canadian historical novels, and a one-time student of history, I, of course, beg to differ with them. For me, then is not radically divorced from now, the two are not airtight, exclusive compartments. As T.S. Eliot noted in his poem Burnt Norton, Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past. This conviction remains the heart of historical education, which emphasizes continuity and causation, preserves the record of societies' achievements and failures, and also instills a profound sense of the tenuous nature of civilization. These are beneficial attitudes for citizens of every sort, but perhaps particularly so for writers of fiction. Donald Creighton's insistence that History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance ... the encounter between character and circumstance is essentially a story, might seem too old-fashioned a notion for many historians, but early on I adopted it as a personal mantra, a definition of what I aspired to do as a novelist. If nothing else, Creighton's emphasis on the connection between people and events offered a useful frame of mind in my attempt to bend the raw, reluctant material of life into narrative. …

Hollywood behind the Wall: the cinema of East Germany

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The East German film industry and the state 2. Coming to terms with the Nazi legacy: DEFA's anti-fascist films 3. In the guise of costume drama: The appropriation of Germany's cultural heritage 4. The forbidden films 5. Women on film, or how political is the private sphere? 6. German cinema after unification References Index -- .

‘Not I, my shadow’: Pilar Miró's adaptation of Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger (1996)

In 1996, Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century classic The Dog in the Manger was adapted for the screen by Spanish film director Pilar Miró. Not only was it a popular success, but it also won seven prestigious Goya awards, including those for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. As a costume drama in verse form, the film has generally been categorized as a faithful adaptation of the Lopean original. But is it? The aim of this article is to assess to what extent Miró maintains fidelity to the source material while simultaneously accommodating the horizon of expectation of a contemporary audience. The appeal of The Dog in the Manger to a Spanish film-viewing public will be analysed in terms of camerawork, textual modifications and omissions, setting and costume. Furthermore, a consideration of Miró's decoding strategies will reveal how the film's principal theme and the emotional turmoil of the main female protagonist are clarified and reinforced through colour and character positioning. Ultimately, absolute faithfulness to the original will be examined in connection with the dénouement of The Dog in the Manger to determine whether it, like the leading male protagonist's noble status, is indeed a façade.

Celebrating Witold Gombrowicz

centenary of Witold Gombrowicz's birth was celebrated in 2004 amid worldwide testimonials to his importance as a writer. Fame did not come early or easily to Gombrowicz, although his hunger for it was the driving force of his life. Of the three works he published while still living in Poland the minor story collection Pamietnik z okresu dojrzezvania (1933; A memoir from adolescence); the absurdist costume drama Iwona, ksiezniczka Burgunda (1938; Eng. Ivona, Princess ofBurgundia, 1970) on the theme of otherness; and his first novel, Ferdydurke (1938; Eng. Ferdydurke, 1961) only Ferdydurke evoked any reader response. A demolition of traditional Polish values and a vehicle for his ideas on the tyranny of Form over Life, the novel remains Gombrowicz's best-known text. As if driven from Poland by the furor it raised, Gombrowicz in 1939 eagerly joined a journalist friend covering the maiden voyage of the Polish liner Batory to Buenos Aires. They reached Argentina a few weeks before the German invasion of Poland. However, the kind of reflexive heroism Gombrowicz rejected in his writings negated a return to Europe and participation in the liberation of Poland. Barely knowing Spanish, and dependent financially on contacts in the Polish emigre community in Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz nevertheless remained in Argentina for nearly twenty-four years. Ignored by, and ignoring, the Argentine literary establishment (as indeed virtually any other aspect of Argentinean life and culture), Gombrowicz built an alternative life around a small group of young Argentines that he encountered in Buenos Aires cafes. With their assistance, he published a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke in 1947; it marked, in a sense, the beginning of his international career. Subsequent publication of Gombrowicz's works in Polish in the cultural journal Kultura, issued by the Paris-based Polish emigre Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute), opened a broader readership. By 1963, when a Ford Fellowship to Berlin made possible his return to Europe, Gombrowicz had published his best play, Slub (The marriage; originally published in Spanish in Buenos Aires in 1948), a dreamlike Shakespearean parody with a World War II setting; the novel Trans-Atlantyk (first published in Kultura in 1953, together with The Marriage); the first part of his Dziennik, 1953-1956 (1957; Diary); the intriguing novel Pornografia (i960; Eng. Pornografia, 1966); and the second part of Dziennik, 1957-1961 (1962). Apart from the first two portions of his delightful and engrossing diary, which many regard as the richest fruit of his Argentinean exile, the only other significant book by Gombrowicz from this period is his masterful novel Trans-Atlantyk (1953), a Rabelaisian account of his early years in Argentina, written in a parody of the old Polish gentry oral narrative. Witold Gombrowicz I

Signoret's star persona and redressing the costume cinema: Jacques Becker's Casque d'Or (1952)

This article comes in three parts, all three with a view to revealing how Signoret's star persona does not necessarily occupy the place that we might imagine. First, an investigation as to how Signoret was shot in the film shows that she is framed less conventionally than at first might appear. Second, a brief outline of the differences between the filmic and the original historic personage she plays in this film reveals a different type of displacement, this time at the level of narrative. Finally, a rather detailed study of the film as a costume drama with particular reference to Signoret's costumes will provide a reading which shows how her body challenges both the generic prototype of the costume drama and, just as powerfully, the notion of the split subject.

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (review)

Reviewed by: Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time Richard Menke (bio) Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, edited by Christine L. Krueger; pp. xx + 195. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, $44.95, $19.95 paper. All calendar-obsessed Victorianists must have suffered a trauma in the first years of our new millennium: suddenly, more than a century separated us from the period we studied. Responding to this transition, the essays in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time explore and reaffirm the afterlives of Victorian culture within our own, with varied but sometimes provocative results. The subjects and approaches of the pieces here are at least [End Page 328] as diverse as in most edited collections; the book uses five section headings in an attempt to organize eleven articles. Yet all of the essays here are clearly written and refreshingly modest in length—although it's probably not realistic to hope, as Christine L. Krueger does in her introduction, that the book will reach many undergraduates or much of a "wider audience" beyond "Victorianists and Victorianists in training" (xiii). Since the articles tackle such different topics, it seems appropriate to discuss the most intriguing among them in terms of the general ways in which they stage the encounter between Victorian culture and our own. One of the most popular approaches to the conjunction between the Victorian and the contemporary is simply to interpret particular present-day cultural developments and norms from a Victorianist's point of view. Miriam Bailin's witty "The New Victorians" reads neo-Victorian interior decoration through both the cultural fantasies it encodes and the real Victorian décor it displaces—for instance, stuffed or skinned domestic pets as objets d'art. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman analyzes recent dramatic representations of the story of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, concluding that—as compelling as they may be on stage—these adaptations ultimately affirm their audience's complacent sense of remoteness from a caricatured Victorianism. And Ellen Bayuk Rosenman offers a splendid two-for- one, an argument about the representation of fine objects in both Victorian novels and their recent adaptations on film and television. Her "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities" begins by skillfully scrutinizing Victorian novelists' careful disengagement from vulgar detail even as they delineate the object-world in which they set their fictions. This paradigm then helps Rosenman explore the different relationship of our sumptuous historical costume dramas (many adapted from Victorian fiction) to the world of commodities they lovingly present for viewerly delectation. Some of the most ambitious contributions to the volume offer critical reflections on the stories we tell about history, time, or identity. Simon Joyce's astute "The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror" examines the late Victorians' (and early Edwardians') treatments of contemporary history as the pattern for a future anti-Victorianism as well as for the twentieth century's rhetoric of rupture and return to Victorian values. In a somewhat related vein, Ronald R. Thomas reads the story of the much-ridiculed Millennium Dome as a postmodern echo of Victorian efforts to exhibit and reorganize time and space via the Great Exhibition and the establishment of an international prime meridian centered on Greenwich's Royal Observatory. Other essays analyze the emergence of particular Victorian identities in the service of contemporary cultural critique. In "Wilde Americana," Jesse Matz rereads gay history through Oscar Wilde's trip to America at the dawn of corporate identity and modern marketing. Matz's audacious alignment of Wilde's prototypical gay identity in the years after his 1882 visit and the consolidation of corporate personhood (in the 1882 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision) struck me as exciting but a little sketchy; more convincing are his analyses of Wilde's lessons in self-promotion and his critique of present-day alliances between corporate marketing and sexual identity. Krueger's own essay examines the place of storytelling in Victorian legal reform around the new figure of the juvenile delinquent. Her account helps explain the prominent reformer Mary Carpenter's acceptance of sensational jailhouse "memoirs" that turned out to be manifest fictions—and provides a caution to present-day...

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Christine L. Krueger.FUNCTIONS OF VICTORIAN CULTURE AT THE PRESENT TIME. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Reviewed by: Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time Richard Menke (bio) Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, edited by Christine L. Krueger; pp. xx + 195. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, $44.95, $19.95 paper. All calendar-obsessed Victorianists must have suffered a trauma in the first years of our new millennium: suddenly, more than a century separated us from the period we studied. Responding to this transition, the essays in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time explore and reaffirm the afterlives of Victorian culture within our own, with varied but sometimes provocative results. The subjects and approaches of the pieces here are at least [End Page 328] as diverse as in most edited collections; the book uses five section headings in an attempt to organize eleven articles. Yet all of the essays here are clearly written and refreshingly modest in length—although it's probably not realistic to hope, as Christine L. Krueger does in her introduction, that the book will reach many undergraduates or much of a "wider audience" beyond "Victorianists and Victorianists in training" (xiii). Since the articles tackle such different topics, it seems appropriate to discuss the most intriguing among them in terms of the general ways in which they stage the encounter between Victorian culture and our own. One of the most popular approaches to the conjunction between the Victorian and the contemporary is simply to interpret particular present-day cultural developments and norms from a Victorianist's point of view. Miriam Bailin's witty "The New Victorians" reads neo-Victorian interior decoration through both the cultural fantasies it encodes and the real Victorian décor it displaces—for instance, stuffed or skinned domestic pets as objets d'art. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman analyzes recent dramatic representations of the story of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, concluding that—as compelling as they may be on stage—these adaptations ultimately affirm their audience's complacent sense of remoteness from a caricatured Victorianism. And Ellen Bayuk Rosenman offers a splendid two-for- one, an argument about the representation of fine objects in both Victorian novels and their recent adaptations on film and television. Her "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities" begins by skillfully scrutinizing Victorian novelists' careful disengagement from vulgar detail even as they delineate the object-world in which they set their fictions. This paradigm then helps Rosenman explore the different relationship of our sumptuous historical costume dramas (many adapted from Victorian fiction) to the world of commodities they lovingly present for viewerly delectation. Some of the most ambitious contributions to the volume offer critical reflections on the stories we tell about history, time, or identity. Simon Joyce's astute "The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror" examines the late Victorians' (and early Edwardians') treatments of contemporary history as the pattern for a future anti-Victorianism as well as for the twentieth century's rhetoric of rupture and return to Victorian values. In a somewhat related vein, Ronald R. Thomas reads the story of the much-ridiculed Millennium Dome as a postmodern echo of Victorian efforts to exhibit and reorganize time and space via the Great Exhibition and the establishment of an international prime meridian centered on Greenwich's Royal Observatory. Other essays analyze the emergence of particular Victorian identities in the service of contemporary cultural critique. In "Wilde Americana," Jesse Matz rereads gay history through Oscar Wilde's trip to America at the dawn of corporate identity and modern marketing. Matz's audacious alignment of Wilde's prototypical gay identity in the years after his 1882 visit and the consolidation of corporate personhood (in the 1882 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision) struck me as exciting but a little sketchy; more convincing are his analyses of Wilde's lessons in self-promotion and his critique of present-day alliances between corporate marketing and sexual identity. Krueger's own essay examines the place of storytelling in Victorian legal reform around the new figure of the juvenile delinquent. Her account helps explain the prominent reformer Mary Carpenter's acceptance of sensational jailhouse "memoirs" that turned out to be manifest fictions—and provides a caution to present-day...

English heritage, English cinema: costume drama since 1980

List of Illustrations Introduction 1. The English heritage film in the 1980s and 1990s: mapping the field 2. Critical reception: heritage, ambivalence, and interpretation 3. The commercial context of the heritage film: home affairs 4. American commercial interests in the heritage film 5. Case Study I: Howards End (1992) 6. Case Study II: Elizabeth (1998) Conclusion Select filmography: 'British' Costume Dramas of the 1980s and 1990s Select bibliography Index

‘The Gangs of New York’: the Mean Streets in History

First a confession: I'm a sucker both for costume drama and a good romance. And I love a good adventure story. Loved 'Pride and Prejudice'; when Mr Darcy finally professes his love to Miss Elizabeth Bennett, I get tearful. Adore almost any Merchant and Ivory film. And I can handle violence, whether the cartoonish sort of 'Batman' and 'Pulp Fiction' or the realism of 'Saving Private Ryan'. So, 'Gangs of New York' should have been right up my alley. It was not. Frankly, I could tolerate the romance as a modern-day love affair. Cameron Diaz is easy to look at, and I suspect DiCaprio has his admirers. But the dramatic core of the film belongs to the anti-hero, Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The costumes which I thought caricatured individuals were nonetheless evocative of the era, especially in the gangs' stovepipe hats and dead rabbits. And the cinematography made it all look beautiful albeit, borrowing from the title of a book about New York in the 1920s by the historian Robert Allen, it is a 'horrible prettiness'.' For the heart of the film is mid nineteenth-century New York as a place of unending gang warfare, violence seen as embedded in ethnic conflict, nativism and racism. And the embeddedness of ethnic and racial violence in the very fabric of New York City's history is not an inappropriate message to take from New York's history. It is also of a piece with director Martin Scorsese's other films depicting the violent streets and peoples of New York: 'Mean Streets', 'Goodfellas', 'Raging Bull' and 'Taxi Driver'. Scorsese on 'Gangs' makes the connection explicit: this film is 'the foundation from which those works emerged. And, yes, there's no doubt. This is based on history. There's no doubt about it. But it is still a film that is more of an opera than history'.2 Scorsese's operatic invocation is probably lost to audiences, however: they see a film, which announces itself as set in New York City in 1846 and in 1862-63. Gangs also takes its title from Herbert Asbury's 1928 history of New York, which 'now a major motion picture', is prominently hawked in bookstores to a devouring public in a new toney edition with a Foreword by Jorge Luis Borges. Finally, credits thank the popular historian Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. Audiences have every reason to expect and to wonder 'is it true?'3 Popular narrative films work with dramatic conventions in which the history is more in the conception than in precise recounting of 'facts' what is usually referred to as dramatic licence. Sorsese's own expressionist style, as Wendy Plotkin has noted, portrays 'essential reality through exaggeration

English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980

Journal Article Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 Get access Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 282 pp. Belén Vidal Belén Vidal Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 44, Issue 3, Autumn 2003, Pages 351–354, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/44.3.351 Published: 01 October 2003

Rethinking the Costume Drama: Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square (1997)

This article looks at Agnieszka Holland's film of "Washington Square" (1997) as an example of a costume drama, focusing especially on the ways in which it tries to attract attention though the use of historically accurate locations, sets and costumes. However, it will also suggest that Holland uses "movement images" (e.g. the woman at the window) to reinvent many of the conventions of the genre and thereby demonstrate how Catherine Sloper transcends the patriarchal conventions of her society in her search for an independent existence.

Film and History, Foxes and Hedgehogs

Maligned for trashing a priceless heritage, condemned for fobbing off hallucinations as documentaries, and damned for trading pure truth for filthy lucre, Hollywood film has long been written off by historians. Hands wring before Patriot (2000), heads shake during Pearl Harbor (2001), and minds boggle at JFK (1991). To teachers and scholars in the history racket, the pre-credit tag line based on actual events is a warning sign that suggests everything that follows is basically made up. Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided. Whether as bearers of past tidings (the purview of biopics and fact-based melodramas) or as archeological artifacts (the trea sure trove of 35 mm material in studio and government archives), the motion picture legacy is too important to leave to the ama teurs. Besides, to study World War II without screening Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934) or Frank Capra's Prelude to War (1943) is to neglect more than audiovisual aids: both films were weapons of war as well as expressions of the ethos of the combatants. Likewise, to deny that Saving Private Ryan (1998) and even Pearl Harbor transmit and transmute that ethos is to ignore the strength of dominant culture in American life. As ever, the question is not whether to use film for historical study, but how to make the best use of it. In a famous formulation, the scholar Erasmus divided thinkers into two categories?foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing, he declared, plagiarizing from the Greeks. Adapted slightly, the metaphor offers two enlightening methods to chase down meaning in film and history: the way ofthe peripatetic, microminded fox, scurry ing about the text to check out minutiae, or the way of the deliberate, macrominded hedgehog, taking the long view and biting into one big thing. For the historian-cineaste, the bifocal outlook can also serve as a guide for when to unleash moral outrage and when to not sweat the small stuff. microangle on film and history bewails the dumb mistakes that infest the conceit of cinema and decries the poetic license that streamlines the motion picture experience. focus is on pinpoint accuracy in historical recreation. official film jargon term for fidelity to the known record is verisimilitude, the faithful duplication of period detail in dialogue, set design, costuming, and so on. In a combat film, verisimilitude means the faithful depiction of weaponry, uniforms, insignia, and military bearing; in a costume drama, it means a careful restora tion of the once fashionable clothes, furniture styles, and so cial manners. Nitpickers by na ture, historians delight in fixating on micromistakes in verisimili tude, snickering over the way people from foreign countries and remote epochs all seem to speak colloquial American English and inhabit bodies sculpted by Nauti lus, dressed by Donna Karan, and coiffured by Vidal Sassoon. Of course, the historian who blanches at poetic license in the art of cinema, who demands a scrupulous duplication of the common vernacular and standards of beauty in Salem in 1692, had better just avoid celluloid and video altogether. To be sure, at some point, a cascade of shameless departures from known facts and habits will cause even the most carefree historical epic to collapse under the weight of slipshod scaffolding. Suspension of disbelief is no longer possible if the GIs at Normandy are wearing Nikes or sporting Walkmans. But given that Hollywood cinema traffics in entertainment, the medium can not be expected to surrender the pleasures of spectacle and story for static pageants Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided.

Appeals to Incalculability: Sex, Costume Drama, and The Golden Bowl

Appeals to Incalculability: Sex, Costume Drama, and The Golden Bowl

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance Are Taking the Rage Out of Feminism

V Hollywood:' asserted Time magazine in its 1998 cover story about the future of the feminist movement.1 Less controversial is that in the past ten years Shakespeare, too, has gone Hollywood, garnering an unprecedented amount of airtime as a screen sensation. What I wish to explore here is the extent to which Shakespeare's rise in Hollywood and feminism's alleged retreat to Hollywood are related, focusing on the distinctly cinematic backlash against women in recent Renaissance-period films and Shakespeare adaptations featuring transgressive female characters. Period films such as Elizabeth (dir. Shekar Kapur, 1998) and Dangerous Beauty (dir. Michael Herskovitz, 1998) and Shakespeare adaptations and spinoffs such as William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) and Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) purport to dramatize striking exceptions to Renaissance rules of gender decorum, presenting us with heroines who succeed as politicians, poets, and even players. However, the kaleidoscopic view of female subjectivity purveyed by these films is eclipsed by their more powerful fetishization of sex-the power to deny or to enjoy it-as the heroine's only legitimate means of career advancement. Thus, while seeming to offer an array of politically-enabling identifications for the spectator, these films reduce their female characters to so many layers of easily removed clothing and invest their costume dramas with the imprimatur of History or, worse, Shakespeare. By contrast, Artemisia (dir. Agnes Merlet, 1997) and Titus (dir. Julie Taymor, 2000), two tragedies directed by women, resonate as inspiring if ironic exceptions to these antifeminist appropriations of the life, times, or works of William Shakespeare, subscribing to a politics of representation that explores the possible futures envisioned by cyborg feminism.