Film/Fiction volume 6 Retrovisions Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction Edited by Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter and Imelda Whelehan 2001 The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1583 6 hbk ISBN 0 7453 1578 X pbk Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, England Contents Notes on Contributors vii 1. Introduction: Retrovisions: Historical Makeovers in Film and Literature 1 Deborah Cartmell and I.Q. Hunter 2. ‘No Man’s Elizabeth’: The Virgin Queen in Recent Films 8 Renée Pigeon 3. Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History 25 Elizabeth Klett 4. Reflections on Sex, Shakespeare and Nostalgia in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night 41 Maria F. Magro and Mark Douglas 5. Black Rams Tupping White Ewes: Race vs. Gender in the Final Scene of Six Othellos 59 Pascale Aebischer 6. Cool Intentions: The Literary Classic, the Teenpic and the ‘Chick Flick’ 74 Sarah Neely 7. Peter Watkins’s Culloden and the Alternative Form in Historical Filmmaking 87 Nicholas J. Cull 8. Mrs Brown’s Mourning and Mr King’s Madness: Royal Crisis on Screen 102 Kara McKechnie vi Retrovisions 9. The Grandfathers’ War: Re-imagining World War I in British Novels and Films of the 1990s 120 Barbara Korte 10. ‘Charm, Bowler, Umbrella, Leather Boots’: Remaking The Avengers 135 Stephen Longstaffe 11. Forbidden Planet and the Retrospective Attribution of Intentions 148 Judith Buchanan Index 163 Notes on Contributors Pascale Aebischer is a Research Fellow in English at Darwin College, Cambridge. She has published on Shakespeare and performance theory and is currently working on a book on violence and suffering in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Judith Buchanan is film lecturer in the English Department at the University of York. She works on both Shakespeare and the cinema, separately and in combination. She has written on a number of Shake- spearean cinematic adaptations (including the 1899 Beerbohm Tree King John, Michael Powell’s unmade Tempest, Oliver Parker’s Othello and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books), and wrote the introductions to three of the Wordsworth Classics composite volumes of Shakespeare’s plays: the comedies, classical plays and late plays. Her book Shakespeare on Film is forthcoming from Longman in 2002. She also has a book in preparation on Shakespeare on silent film. Deborah Cartmell is Principal Lecturer in English at De Montfort University. She is co-editor of the Film/Fiction series, co-editor of Adaptations from Text to Screen, Screen to Text (Routledge, 1999), Talking Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2001) and author of Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen (Macmillan, 2000). Nicholas J. Cull is Professor in American Studies at the University of Leicester, England. He was educated at the University of Leeds and Princeton University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship. He has written widely on issues of film and history, and is the author of Selling War: British Propaganda and American ‘Neutrality’ in World War Two(Oxford, 1995). His current project is a history of the United States Information Agency, 1953–99. Mark Douglas is lecturer in Cultural Studies at Falmouth College of Arts with research interests in contemporary British and North American culture and media. I.Q. Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at De Montfort University. He is joint editor of Routledge’s British Popular Cinema series, for which he edited British Science Fiction Cinema(1999), and co-editor of the Film/Fiction series. He is currently finishing a book on Hammer’s SF and fantasy films, and preparing one on Paul Verhoeven. Elizabeth Klett is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an MA in Shakespeare vii viii Retrovisions Studies from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is currently writing her dissertation on contemporary women’s performances of male Shakespearean roles. Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature at Tübingen University, Germany. Her recent book publications include Body Language in Literature (University of Toronto Press, 1997); English Travel Writing(Macmillan, 2000), and, as editor, Many Voices – Many Cultures: Multicultural British Short Stories (Reclam, 1997), Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s (Narr, 1998) and Anthologies of British Poetry: Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies(Rodopi, 2000). Stephen Longstaffe lectures in the English and Drama department at St Martin’s College, Lancaster, specialising in the drama of the early modern period and twentieth-century popular fiction. Maria F. Magro is a lecturer in English with Media Studies at Falmouth College of Arts. She specialises in early modern cultural studies and contem- porary film. She is completing her doctoral dissertation on early modern authorial subjectivities at Carnegie Mellon University. Kara McKechnie is a Lecturer in Dramaturgy (Theatre Studies) at Bretton Hall College in West Yorkshire. She has worked at Heidelberg University, Germany and at De Montfort University, Leicester, where she is also completing a PhD on the works of Alan Bennett. Sarah Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television and the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow researching the adaptation of contemporary Scottish and Irish literature to film. Originally from the United States, she received a BA from the University of Iowa and an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Renée Pigeon is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. She has written on Sidney, Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and recently edited a seventeenth-century romance, Theophania (Dovehouse Editions). In addition to early modern literature, her research interests include film and detective fiction. Imelda Whelehan is Principal Lecturer in English at De Montfort University. She is co-editor of the Film/Fiction series, co-editor of Adaptations from Text to Screen, Screen to Text (Routledge, 1999), author of Modern Feminist Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 1995), and Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (Women’s Press, 2000). 1 Introduction: Retrovisions: Historical Makeovers in Film and Literature Deborah Cartmell and I.Q. Hunter How can we ever know and accurately represent the past? Laurence Lerner has pointed out that ‘it has become a commonplace to argue that history cannot give us direct access to objective facts, since the ideology and the verbal strategies of the historian will determine what he chooses to notice and how he describes it, to say nothing of the connections between events that he then establishes’.1 This is true of course. Aesthetics and ideology shape our perception of the past, and transform raw facts into stories with causation and meaning. Historians, and historically minded critics, have little choice but to draw more or less consciously on the methods of fiction as well as science. At the same time, the understanding of the past by non-historians – ‘ordinary people’ if you like – is predeter- mined by its representation in film and fiction: the French Revolution is inextricable from A Tale of Two Cities, the Vietnam War from Apocalypse Now (1979). Oscar Wilde remarked that there was no fog in London till the Impressionists painted it. In the same spirit we might say that history is the invention of creative artists as much as an objective record of true events. The postmodern emphasis on history’s construction and textuality is, in many respects, unsurprising. On the one hand, it acknowledges that numerous incommensurable stories can be made up about the past, stories whose truth may be judged according to political usefulness rather than coincidence with reality. On the other hand, postmodern history reflects the general drift nowadays towards cultural and epistemological relativism. Indeed such is the prestige of relativism, and the moral force of the politics of difference, that not only history but truth and, for enthusiastic post- modernists, even reality itself, are declared ideological constructions. ‘True perception’, we are told, is strictly contingent on the perceiver’s 1