The Conservative Side of the Heritage Film. "Chariots of Fire" (1981), "A Room with a View" (1985), and "Shakespeare in Love" (1998) (eBook)

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Nottingham Trent University, course: British Cinema, language: English, abstract: The term “heritage film” is not easily recognised, even among fans of historical films and costume dramas. That is because it does not describe a genre of films as such, but rather a critical concept that is associated with “a powerful undercurrent of nostalgia for the past conveyed by historical dramas, romantic costume films and literary adaptions”. Costume dramas were neither new nor confined to the UK, as films such as “Gone with the Wind” (1939, US) and “My Fair Lady” (1964, US) prove, however it was the British film studies that defined the term “heritage film” in the early 1980s in light of the National Heritage Act. The original cycle refers to films, almost all of them adapted from literature, from the 1980s and 1990s that depict pre-Wold-War-II England in a nostalgic fashion. The basic ideas and concepts of the plot and the setting tend to be very similar. Nostalgia, the image of the upper-middle class and rural white Englishness are used to define a supposed English national identity. Because of these features, the heritage films were quickly related to Thatcherism and the very conservative Thatcherite values. In this essay, I am going to look at three films that are considered “heritage”, two of them coming from the first stages of the heritage film in the 1980s and the third one coming from the late 1990s when the heritage film had already undergone a major shift due to changes in politics and it being criticised. In comparing the three films firstly to the Thatcherite values and secondly to each other, I will look at the conservative undertones and the shift they underwent.