Overview

The concept of 'heritage cinema' is now firmly established as an influential - as well as much-debated and contested - critical framework for the discussion of period or historical representation in film, most prominently with reference to British heritage and post-heritage film successes since the 1980s, but also to comparable examples from Europe, North America and beyond. These successes have ranged from Merchant Ivory's A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End and The Remains of the Day, via Jane Austen adaptations such as Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility to post-heritage adaptations such as Sally Potter's Orlando. Yet the very idea of the heritage film has rested on untested assumptions about its audiences. This book breaks significant new ground in the scholarship on contemporary period films, and makes a distinctive new contribution to the growing field of film-audience studies, by presenting the first empirically based study of the audiences for quality period films. Monk engages directly with two highly contrasting sections of these audiences, surveyed in the UK in the late 1990s, to explore their identities, their wider patterns of film taste, and above all their attitudes and pleasures - in relation to the period films they enjoy and on issues central to debates around the heritage film, literary adaptation and cultural value - with illuminating and unpredicted results.

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9780748638246

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In what is usually called 'the heritage debate' - and which has involved many of us within film and cultural studies over a long period of time - we have all made endless suppositions about the audiences who watch the films about which we wrangle. A book which actually conducts a proper analysis of these audiences is long overdue. It is doubly pleasing that when this book appears, it should be written by one of the leading proponents within that debate, and written with all Claire Monk's rigourous scholarship, in her inimitable and elegant style. -- Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London In what is usually called 'the heritage debate' - and which has involved many of us within film and cultural studies over a long period of time - we have all made endless suppositions about the audiences who watch the films about which we wrangle. A book which actually conducts a proper analysis of these audiences is long overdue. It is doubly pleasing that when this book appears, it should be written by one of the leading proponents within that debate, and written with all Claire Monk's rigourous scholarship, in her inimitable and elegant style.

Author Information

Claire Monk is Reader in Film and Film Culture at De Montfort University. CShe has published widely on the heritage film, post-1970 British cinema and the cultural politics of both, and is co-editor of 'British Historical Cinema' (Routledge, 2002).

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