Combating the monotony of costume drama
The national past, as seen through the silver screen, seems rather a dull place. It's a quaint, green and pleasant land of kind-hearted noblemen and humble, god-fearing peasants, all of them surprisingly healthy and clean looking. It's a place of lavish, well-lit manor houses and gentle society, where any sort of peril is ultimately subverted and any sort of politics trivialised. It's a rose-tinted spirit of '45, a Jane Austen novel with all the wit and sting taken out of it. Through its limited range, it creates a shallow historicity which peddles tired, often overtly conservative cliches about national identity. That being said, the primary purpose of period dramas today aren't to propagandise conservatism, but to be sold abroad. They're an exported commodity, just like the royal family and Harry Potter, and maintain that quaint image of an England entrenched in merriment, as seen on US television, a land of drawling upper class toffs and "guv'na" spewing cockneys. This is fair enough, but the period drama is still hugely popular here as well, clogging up television schedules alongside the likes of cash-for-antiques programmes which use history as a kind of wallpaper to shroud the underlying hunger for money.
However,
amongst the genre, there exists a small number of films which
genuinely do innovate. Films which don't fetishise the past, and tell
stories with weight and cultural value. The only problem is, though,
that the uninformed could easily mistake these films as containing
the same banal drudgery as their factory-assembled neighbours. As a
result; there's little incentive to watch these films by the likes of
those outside the heritage audience. This shouldn't be the case, the
medium has enormous potential to bring history to life, to not just
educate and entertain but to possess the same profundity and depth as
art. The following are three films which achieve this, and subvert
the genre's dullness. Canonised history in the sphere of capitalism
becomes a commodity, and therefore is some sort of cultural threat.
Resistance comes in the form of diversity and innovation, subverting
the mantras of the canonical past. We are constantly remaking the
past to fit the present. As such, it follows that a fixed notion of
the past becomes a present with no forward momentum, no future. Or,
at least, the future becomes a nostalgic pursuit of the past, like a
dog forever chasing its own tail. It's the money-making institutions
of history that facilitate this, as Jonathan Meades writes on English
Heritage
This
preposterous quango – composed, apparently, of the blind and the
bland – has the temerity to oppose, say, Renzo Piano's London
Bridge Tower yet sanctions the debasement of marine archaeology,
naval history and the magnificent dockyard itself by encouraging the
sale of crass souvenirs which are no doubt 'accesible'. It is all too
evident what sort of England English Heritage wishes to preserve (or
create): an England fit for beige cardigans and Country Casuals, an
England that is ancient, deferential and dreary. ('fuck e**lish*
*erit*ge' from Museum without Walls)
The
organs of power, of taste making, are driven by a need for profit and
this results in low risk commercialisation, appealing to the lowest
common denominator of plebeian society.
The
Draughtsman's Contract (1982, dir. Peter Greenaway)
Peter
Greenaway's first feature film is a rubik's cube of a murder mystery,
posing as a costumed country house drama. Its static, painterly shots
and elevated artifice help to establish a sense of altogether
otherwordly weirdness. Yet, despite this, it feels a hundred miles
away from the sterile, contrived atmosphere of other costume dramas
and, therefore, a lot truer to both its historical setting and human
nature. Landscape, intrigue and eroticism combine to create a
narrative further enriched by its cultural references, more valuable
as history than the deluge of other tedious costumed manor house
affair.
A
Field in England (2013, dir. Ben Wheatley)
The minuscule budget and black-and-white cinematography only serve to
enhance the looming sense of chaos in Ben Wheatley's period horror.
Set during the Civil War, a group of battle-deserters in search of an
ale house become instead entangled in the search for buried treasure.
After they ingest a batch of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the film takes
a turn for the even weirder. Murky, textured, close, terrifying,
philosophical, wondrous and ferocious, the film is by turns
claustrophobic and agoraphobic, chaotic and calm. The jumbling of
psychoactive alchemy, magic, religion and reality convey a strange
wilderness of the mind almost never seen in period films. The banal
field becomes the wild west, a stage for the dark, writhing toils of
humankind. That we never leave the field is in itself a rejection of
the miniature toy-sets of other period dramas.
Mr
Turner (2014, dir. Mike Leigh)
Mike
Leigh's tragicomic realism makes for an awesome mode of historical
storytelling. The autonomy of his cast and richness of dialogue
creates characters that are pointed but nuanced, hilarious without
ever feeling caricature. This attention to detail extends to settings
and space, creating an experience of the past much more authentic
than other contemporary work that fills historical characters and
places to fit into modernised cliches. Furthermore, the fragmented
narrative leaves more room for speculation, the audience's
imaginative participation, and less for manipulative, inaccurate
filler. This open-endedness is a lot truer not just to history, but
to life itself.
