Stephen Frears Research Articles

“Have you got any soul?”: reinterpreting High Fidelity’s relationship to Black cultural production

ABSTRACT This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine the interpersonal dynamic between Rob and Cherise in High Fidelity (Hulu 2020), two Black female characters at the center of a gender- and race-flipped TV remake of Nick Hornby’s (1995) novel and Stephen Frears’s (2000) film. It centers Cherise in the frame by examining how she opposes her secondary status as a supporting character with her undervalued critical and creative acumen, traits she shares with her white male literary and cinematic counterparts but activates differently as a Black woman. It situates Cherise and actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s interpretation of the source material through the practice of cover singing. Though covers are often dismissed as unoriginal, reinterpretation is particularly useful for Black female performers who transform other peoples’ songs as a tactic against artistic marginalization, one that allows them to critique institutional racism and sexism. This acuity implicates the media industries’ limited imagination for Black female characters and the performers who bring them to life. Thus, Cherise and Randolph reveal the work ahead to bring Black female characters into focus by embellishing the margins of a story and challenging an adaptation process that was not designed to center them.

From the Teen Film to the Emerging Adult Film: The Road to Adulthood in Say Anything (1989) and High Fidelity (2000)

In the past decades, the transition to adulthood in post-industrial countries has become longer, giving rise to emerging adulthood, a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood (Arnett and Taber 1994, Arnett 2000, 2004). Cinema has reflected this change, with a growing number of narratives exploring the challenges of this life stage. Through a comparative analysis of Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989) and High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000), this article seeks to establish the emerging adult film as a youth film subgenre of its own by outlining some of the generic conventions that make it different from teenage films.

My Neighbor is Lesser: A Look At Xenophobic Social Borders That Would Lead To Brexit

When thinking about Brexit, it is important to dive into the preexisting social borders among those who lived in pre-Brexit Britain. These social borders are represented in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. These works not only convey these social divisions between neighbors, but also reveal the cultural circumstances that led up to the vote for Brexit. In this essay, I highlight how these texts work to do just that.

Cinematic empire and nostalgia in Viceroy’s House and Victoria and Abdul

The commercial viability of Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017) and Stephen Frears’ Victoria and Abdul (2017) can be attributed to their effective use of heritage film elements to offer romanticized versions of British rule. Decoding the teleological intent behind these romanticized versions, this article contends that the chosen films promote nostalgia in response to the postimperial melancholia that Britain is experiencing in the contemporary period. Exploring the cinematic recreation of nostalgia, this article analyses the spatial, material, and racial aspects of Victoria and Abdul and Viceroy’s House. The spatial analysis highlights the cinematography used to depict heritage space to commemorate British tradition, the material examination focuses on colonial gifts of economic mobility and political emancipation bestowed on the colonized, and the racial analysis focuses on Muslim stereotyping through exoticism and animalization to reinforce British pride in civilizing the “inferior race”. An explication of these cinematic and narrative elements highlights the films’ invocation of nostalgia for an idealized past through a return to a closed epoch of empire that uncritically and dangerously reproduces ideologies of British cultural and racial superiority. Furthermore, this invocation of nostalgia works to glorify British historical origins and strengthen national cohesion in order to allay collective anxieties about the abject loss of the empire’s global recognition in the wake of Brexit.

"In this damn country, which we hate and love”: The Pakistani-British Diaspora During the Thatcher Years in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Set in Britain during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) depicts the complex formation of Pakistani-British diasporic identities in a time of rising migration levels and anti-immigrant sentiment. Thatcher and her government famously celebrated Britain’s colonial past and its legacies in an attempt to produce fixed definitions of what being British meant as a cultural and national identity marker. As such distinctions of Britishness and non-Britishness determined who was believed to belong and who was not, Britain exercised what Jacques Derrida calls ‘conditional hospitality’ (2000): creating an environment which accepts those who it considers ‘British’ enough and rejects those who do not fulfil the dominant notion of Britishness. Due to this political climate, the Pakistani characters’ relationships with ‘Britishness’ are represented as fraught, ambivalent, and in some cases, characters reject Thatcherite ideas of Britishness all together. In the film, the experiences of Pakistani characters — Nasser, Hussain, and Omar — demonstrate that to obtain agency in Britain, some Pakistani subjects had no choice but to work within the system that oppressed them. This paper examines how the three characters individually resist imperial discourse and explores the ways in which My Beautiful Laundrette shows the impact of Thatcher’s speeches on Britishness on the Pakistani-British diaspora during her premiership.

(Post)colonial friendships and Empire 2.0: A Brexit reading of Victoria & Abdul

ABSTRACT A 2018 report published by the British think tank Demos claims that, in Britain, “nostalgic rhetoric clearly played a significant role in the Referendum campaign, in particular, emphasising particular tropes around the Second World War, empire and the ‘re-instation’ of British sovereignty”. Indeed, these tropes feature heavily in popular culture, with several films and TV series centred on Britain’s imperial past. Taking on board Nadine El-Enany’s suggestion that “Brexit is not only an expression of nostalgia for empire, but it is also the fruit of empire”, this article discusses the role of imperial fantasies in the debate over Britain’s membership of the European Union and draws a connection between these fantasies and recent re-presentations of Britain’s imperial past on screen. Focusing in particular on Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul (2017), it argues that the film offers a sanitized version of the empire, which contributes to the reproduction of nostalgic imperial fantasies in post-European Britain.

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In a New Yorker article anticipating the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland in August 2018, James Carroll reflected on the recent report produced by a Pennsylvania Grand Jury that identified one thousand children (and speculated that there were thousands more) who were abused by three hundred priests over a seventy-year period across six dioceses. Comparing the United States with Ireland, he claimed that “the Irish wound is deeper still.” Citing the revelation that nearly eight hundred infants had died at and had been secretly buried in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, Carroll concludes: “there had been monsters not only among the priests but among the sisters” (emphasis added).1 Carroll inadvertently identifies, here, one of the most significant differences in Irish compared with US (particularly, but not exclusively, Irish [End Page 185] American) cultural depictions of the clergy in relation to the abuse scandals that have been revealed over the past twenty years. US literature and culture has dramatized many predatory priests—several of them with Irish names— in narratives that deal predominantly (Spotlight [dir. Tom McCarthy, 2015]) or only tangentially (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [dir. Martin Mc-Donagh, 2017]) with clerical abuse.2 However, nuns are largely represented not just as innocent of the crimes perpetrated by their male counterparts in the clergy but as themselves beleaguered targets of the Catholic Church’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and/or as heroic defenders of the victims of sexual abuse. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable (2004), set in 1964, a righteous school principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, succeeds in having a priest she believes to be a child molester moved to another parish. While the play ends with Sister Aloysius expressing serious “doubts” over her own actions, her concern for the welfare of the child, Donald Muller, is never in question.3 Moreover, the play is dedicated to “the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.”4 Meanwhile, in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017), former students of the Baltimore teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, speculate that the nun was murdered in 1969 because she had evidence that a fellow teacher at Archbishop Keough high school, Father Joseph Maskell, had been abusing teenage girls. These examples exist in stark contrast to representations of nuns in Irish culture, in which the “evil” or “sadistic” nun was immortalized at least as far back as 1992 when Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed débuted at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. In February 1996, RTÉ screened the (now infamous) Dear Daughter documentary (dir. Louis Lentin) built upon testimony from Christine Buckley and other victims of abuse at the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin. Since then, we have seen cinematic and literary representations such as The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan, 2002)5, Sinners (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2002), Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) Christine Falls (2006), Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009), adapted as Philomena (dir. Stephen Frears, 2013), all of which portray Irish nuns as complicit—and sometimes active participants—in the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of women and children. This contribution to the forum will consider two recent novels by Irish American women writers, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017) and Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions (2017), which present their readers with nuns who take liberal, if not radical, views on a range of Catholic doctrinal issues such as suicide, contraception, marital infidelity, and homosexuality. While they engage, to an extent, with clerical abuse (and [End Page 186] Sullivan does this more directly than McDermott), both novels ultimately uphold Mary Gordon’s claim that “[a]t least since the priesthood was first shaken by the sexual-abuse scandal two decades ago…America’s nuns have been the de facto leaders of the country’s liberal Catholics, especially those more interested in social justice than in holding the Vatican’s line on sexual politics.”6 The question I want to consider...

Hanif Kureishi ed. by Susan Alice Fischer

Reviewed by: Hanif Kureishi ed. by Susan Alice Fischer Ruth Maxey (bio) Susan Alice Fischer, editor. Hanif Kureishi. Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. xvi, 175. £22.99. The British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi is often regarded as a trailblazing figure. For over three decades, he has produced plays, screenplays, short fiction, novels, and essays, frequently breaking taboos and exploring under-represented and marginalized people within British society. Several studies on Kureishi focus on his ambitious response to contemporary realities and his impact on British culture. Commentators have focused particularly on his early, groundbreaking cinematic collaborations—the Stephen Frears directed films, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)—and his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). [End Page 157] A number of the contributors to Hanif Kureishi, edited by Susan Alice Fischer—for instance, Fischer, Peter Hitchcock, and Geoff Boucher—emphasize the continuingly political nature of Kureishi's putatively more "personal" and "post-ethnic" writing from the late 1990s onwards (1–2, 37, 100–101). As such, they respond to a particular critical orthodoxy surrounding the work of Kureishi's middle, even late (the author is now in his 60s), period: namely, that his work post-Intimacy (1998), a controversial roman à clef charting infidelity and the breakdown of a relationship, has lost its political edge and become introspective, self-indulgent, and navel-gazing. The need to rescue Kureishi's more recent writing from such a charge becomes a refrain across the collection. And the contributors are right to explore the continuing political engagement of Kureishi's twenty-first-century work, including his post-9/11 and 7/7 non-fiction, discussed in Fischer's essay, "Hanif Kureishi's 'better philosophy'" (Chapter 5), and his screenplay Venus (2006), discussed in Deanna Kamiel's essay, "'I believe my eyes'" (Chapter 2). Kamiel accurately notes that Venus, directed by Kureishi's long-term collaborator Roger Michell, gives a voice to young, working-class, white British women—a group often derided as "chavs" and "mingers" by British society at large and without recourse to the protections afforded by multiculturalism and political correctness (32). According to Kamiel, the screenplay's subversiveness arises from placing Jessie, a representative of such socially disregarded women, center stage as the object of desire and focusing on her elderly white admirer, Maurice, and thus on the indignities of aging in a contemporary world obsessed with youth. Connected to this idea of growing old, Jago Morrison's essay "The parallax of aging" (Chapter 6), examines the politics of Kureishi's sci-fi novella The Body (2002) and offers a new reading of this under-examined text in relation to seeing and voyeurism while engaging directly with the theories of Slavoj Žižek. Morrison's nuanced treatment of the politics of aging in Kureishi's recent writing makes this a valuable and timely contribution. Following Fischer's introduction, Michael Perfect's chapter "The enigma of abandonment" argues against interpretations of Kureishi's writing as "representative" of any category within identity politics. His essay usefully ranges across the author's work from the novel The Black Album (1995) onwards, with some fine close readings of the 2003 screenplay The Mother about an older white woman's need for sexual fulfilment. Kamiel's elegantly written essay, mentioned above, follows, reading the much-discussed My Beautiful Laundrette against Venus. Her stimulating contribution accomplishes this comparative reading with style and verve. Hitchcock's "Culture and anarchy in Thatcher's London" (Chapter 3) revisits the turbulent politics of Sammy [End Page 158] and Rosie Get Laid. In Chapter 4, Ryan Trimm finds new things to say about the oft-researched Buddha of Suburbia by exploring it as a rewriting of "metropolitan multicultural novels," that is, the post-Windrush urban fiction of such figures as Sam Selvon and George Lamming (60). In Chapter 5, Fischer considers religion versus capitalism and Kureishi's positing of a "better philosophy" or a third way, provided through art and love. Her analysis of The Black Album alongside more recent post-9/11 non-fiction is helpful and necessary since Kureishi's second novel examines Muslim radicalisation, but she could take up a stronger final position on the more...

Lesley Brill, The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears

Lesley Brill, <i>The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears</i>

Reading for Discords and Fissures: A Comparative Reading of Dangerous Liaisons and Untold Scandal

This essay reads two different filmic versions of the 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The Hollywood version Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988) and the Korean version Untold Scandal (J-yong E, 2003) both closely follow the original story, even though the latter is set in 18th century Korea instead of France. Despite the difference in spatial setting, the two films share many similarities, encouraging a superimposition of interpretations. But this transcendence of spatial boundaries have also produced several significant differences - some intentional, others not. These disparities prompt the viewer to reflect on the production of unforeseen changes in the process of adaptation and the implications of these transformations. This essay sets out to examine the similarities and differences of the two films while focusing on the three main protagonists in the context of the social, historical background of the period; this focus, in particular, enables us to compare the depiction of the restricted female position in patriarchal society in the two films.

Queer Intimacy and the Impasse: Reconsidering My Beautiful Laundrette

This paper reconsiders the queer interracial relationship in Hanif Kureshi and Stephen Frears’ seminal film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Rather than analyze the romance between the main protagonists as a national and personal “union” that provides resolution to complex racial issues, I argue that Omar and Johnny’s relationship makes room for the possibility of connection and contact, however fraught and tenuous, without denying histories of racial violence or flattening out forms of difference. As an “impasse,” their queer relationship suggests the potential of coexistence that does not offer reconciliation between the nation and racialized subjects. Through a reading of the film, I suggest that intimacy is not broken by the accommodation of past and present racial injury within its plane of desire. Instead, queer desire defers interracial resolution but does not deny the possibility of intimacy, of something yet to come.

Review of Kelley Harness. 2006. Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence . Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

In Stephen Frears's recent film The Queen (2006), Elizabeth II, played by Helen Mirren, is deeply concerned about the boundary between private family life and public persona in the period immediately following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In seeking to protect the privacy of her family and especially that of her grandsons, to allow them to grieve in private, she inadvertently projects an uncaring public persona. It falls to the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in collaboration with the Queen's long-suffering secretary, to persuade Her Majesty to pursue a different course of action and thus placate the mass public. Whatever the fairness of this representation, the Queen, while clearly in command of her role as head of state, is portrayed as a leader no longer in command of her public image and even unable to comprehend its importance. I'm tempted to recommend that Frears's Queen acquaint herself with the sophisticated communication tactics of other female rulers by reading Kelley Harness's Echoes of Women's Voices. Whether wives, widows, or nuns, early modern Italian noblewomen were adept at using patronage to shape their public image. Of course, sometimes they too had to practice damage control-a topic to which I shall return. Echoes of Women's Voices is an absorbing study of female self- fashioning in early modern Florence that documents successes and mishaps in the pa­ tronage strategies of women regents and women religious. The main focus is on Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria, widow of Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, during her joint regency of Florence (1621-30) with Christine of Lorraine, but there are also two chapters on the institutional patronage of the convent of Santa Croce (known as La Crocetta), home to Princess Maria Maddalena, Christine of Lorraine's daughter and therefore Archduchess Maria Magdalena's sister-in-law. The concept of patronage as a means of fashioning a public identity is familiar, but aside from William Prizer's articles on Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia (e.g., 1982; 1985; 1999), and studies of convents by Robert Kendrick (1996), Craig Monson (1995), and Colleen Reardon (1996; 2002), there is little substantial work on women's musical patronage in Italy. Harness draws upon research into early modern women's patronage of the visual arts, particularly highlighting the idea from Roger Crum (2001) that, regardless of who commissioned a work,

Istanbul 2014

ISTANBUL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Turkey's most prestigious film event, the Istanbul International Film festival (5-20 April 2014) raised the curtain this year with the presentations of Honorary Awards to several Turkish artists: scriptwriter Umur Bugay, actors Sevda Ferdağ and Eref Kolçak, producer Abdurrahman Keskiner, musician Attila Özdemiroğlu and director, screenwriter, and producer İrfan Tözüm. The opening film was Stephen Frears' Philomena (2013), starring Judi Dench in the main role. The international competition jury presided over by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi included Turkish theatre actor, Defne Halman; French writer-director Philippe Le Guay; former director of Edinburgh Film Festival, Lynda Myles and screenwriter-director from Rumania, Rāzvan Rādulescu. Twelve films on art and the artist competed in the Golden Tulip International Competition. One of Iceland's most stimulating filmmakers Ragnar Bragason, who is known for successfully blending comedy with tragedy, participated with his latest film Málmhaus (Metalhead, 2013). A sentimental comedy,...

HEART OF THE MATTER

:In this essay I will look at four recent films that have organ transplantations “at their heart”: 21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003), L'Intrus (Claire Denis, 2001), Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) and Heart of Jenin (Leon Geller and Markus Vetter, 2008). Each film in its own way shows how Nancy's concept of the intruder balances in a different dynamics between biopolitical and biophilosophical concerns and proposes in various ways a changed concept of sacrifice, transforming sacrifice from religious offering into political or ethical resistance and allowing a-religious strivings to persist.

Sensations of the Past: Identity, Empowerment, and the British Monarchy Films

Abstract Royal bio-pics have always enjoyed a high priority among cinematic representations of British history and taken a lion’s share in defining Britishness to audiences at home and abroad. These historical narratives never render national identity by capturing the past of historians, instead reconstruct the past as a mirror of contemporary reality and in a way as to satisfy their audience’s demand for both romantic qualities and antiquarian nostalgia, for sensations they regard their own. The author’s basic assumption is that such cinema does not represent history but exploits spectatorial desire for a mediated reality one inhabits through the experience of an empowered identity. The first part of the article examines how private-life films (a subgenre of royal bio-pics) mythologized and idealized Tudor monarchs in the 1930s, while in the second part, contemporary representatives of the subgenre are analysed as they portray the challenges of the Monarchy in its search for a place within modern British identity politics. Analysed films include The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939), Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997), The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006), and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010).1

Screening strangers in Fortress Europe and beyond

Abstract This article, responding to the current crisis of European cultural identity, goes beyond the specific national context of film production in Europe, and discusses how the issues of migration and diaspora are challenging the conflicting, and sometimes conflating, ideas of post-Europe, Fortress Europe, post-Holocaust Europe, New Europe, post-nation Europe and transnational Europe. It asks how the films dealing with migration and diaspora challenge European identity, particularly traditional notions of Europeanness, and how they subvert or/and reinforce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic attempts to construct and deconstruct European identity. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, the article determines cultural and political patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Code 46 (2003) and The Road to Guantanamo (2006).

Poder das formações: o artista, o rei, a rainha, o quadro, o filme...

Exposition of the polar theory of formations, presented by New Psychoanalysis, and its imbrications with the theory of knowledge named Gnomics, with the communication theory named Transformatics, and with the proposal of a general theory of power (power considered bottom-up and as a verb). Case studies on: Velazquez in the seventeenth century Spanish court of King Phillip IV; Francis Bacon in 1945’s England; Lucian Freud painting the Queen’s portrait in 2001; and the movie The Queen, by Stephen Frears, in 2006. The objective is to research the theory of formations’ utility to the communication studies.

Philomena by Stephen Frears

Philomena by Stephen Frears

Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen

In the midst of Princess Margaret's 1950s romance with Royal Air Force group captain Peter Townsend, Malcolm Muggeridge warned that the new celebrity coverage of the royal family would end in tears. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen proved that tears could enhance the popularity of the British monarchy, creating what one film critic hailed as the most sophisticated public relations boost for the queen in 20 years. In this depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, docudrama—the fictionalized representation of real people and events—is trumped by melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition and its highly expressive mise en scène. The former (represented by actual news footage) is the genre of the film's ‘queen of hearts’, Diana. The latter (represented by the dramatic fiction of screenwriter Peter Morgan) is that of its ‘queen of a nation’, Elizabeth II. In its opposition of two ambitious queens—one romantic, one worldly—the film echoes Friedrich Schiller's 1800 proto-melodrama Mary Stuart. More than two centuries later, the older genre triumphs, rendering The Queen's fictional world more vivid and affecting than the actual images of the real-life Diana. Much of this triumph can be attributed to Helen Mirren, who brings the prestige of her star persona to a monarch in danger of being overshadowed by the celebrity of her rival. In an unusually forthright discussion of royalty and celebrity, The Queen draws the two regimes of power together in a single figure, who finishes the film with a declamation on ‘glamour and tears’.

Making Mischief: Peter Kosminsky, Stephen Frears and British Television Docudrama

This article compares and contrasts the ways in which two British television drama directors, Stephen Frears and Peter Kosminsky, critique political power in films screened as part of the BFI's 2009 ‘Radical Television Drama’ season. Frears’ The Deal (2003) and Kosminsky's The Government Inspector (2005) are films concerned with New Labour and its politics, and both take a provocative line towards its culture and policies. The Deal examines the party's rise to power in the 1990s, focusing on the relationship and rivalry for the party leadership between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The Government Inspector dramatises New Labour's behaviour during the critical historical period following the September 11 attack on New York, focusing in particular on the controversial case of the arms inspector, the late Dr David Kelly. The article analyses the films as docudrama, arguing that the form has raised its cultural profile over the past 20 years. Contemporary reviewing of the two films is used to throw light on wider debates about docudrama, including the notion of ‘blurred boundaries’ between drama and documentary. The analysis of key scenes from the two films contends that there are more similarities than differences in the approaches taken by the two directors. Docudramas like these, the article concludes, have an active role to play in oppositional politics.