British "heritage films" and rural landscapes

　　The landscape has played a vital role in the development of British cinema since its inception.

To a certain extent, in British cinema, a national identity is established by the presentation of particular places and the way they are presented.

　　If London represents the face of Britain, the countryside is the heart of Britain.

The "heritage film" genre is generally characterized by showing rural landscapes, which also makes a nostalgic image of a pastoral style a signifier of British nationality.

　　Since the late 19th century, the Pre-Raphaelites have used an idealized vision of the Middle Ages as a sketch of British nationality.

Such as the most representative Cotswolds region - a medieval village like an oil painting, the creek reverberates with church bells, honey-colored stone houses, thatched cottages, a population of less than a thousand and idyllic beauty can be called English A model of country life.

There, you can almost believe that time stands still.

　　At the beginning of the 20th century, the romantic concept of rural life was widely established in British culture. Although most British people live in towns and cities, the green of the countryside has been integrated into the blood of British people. People always associate the British with rural values. together.

British cinema is based extensively on landscapes, and the rural setting and national identity are unified in British silent films.

British rural life is more closely tied to the landscapes and traditions of the past, and the British rural landscape has always been a theme of tradition.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British New Wave "kitchen sink" films, such as "The Taste of Honey" (1961) and "Liar Ratio", were known for a realistic approach to the raw life of the working class. Leigh (1963), in which the camera places small figures in a vast hilly landscape, symbolizing the lost souls of Britain before the arrival of the "swinging sixties".

The rise of heritage cinema in the 1970s became the unique and most influential genre of British cinema, and representations of rural landscapes were seen as a common feature of heritage cinema.

　　Heritage films represent a traditional rural England, adapted from literary classics, and their portrayals of British identity and national history take on a traditional, idealized, nostalgic quality.

Among them, a series of films produced by Mochente-Avery are the most representative, such as those adapted from EM Foster's works describing the upper class of the British society in the early 20th century, showing the beautiful natural scenery and historical heritage of Britain, through the landscape , sets and costumes create an elegant British style and British image.

Howard Manor (1992) paints Britain as an idyllic place with a tasteful, subdued rendition of an English manor.

"A Room With a View" (1985) makes every frame of the film feel like a work of art with its idealized representation of the spectacular rural landscape and way of life.

　　In The Making of the English Landscape (1955), WG Hoskins examines the evolution of the English landscape over a thousand years, expressing nostalgia for the picturesque landscapes of pre-industrial England.

And the rolling green hills of A Room with a View also suggest that Foster's novel attempts to save the English countryside from bourgeois urbanization.

The prominence of the country, the manor in British cinema, proves that the aesthetics of the landscape on the screen can be fruitful.

The English countryside in the film takes viewers on a walk through the customs of another era, evoking a sense of nostalgia.

　　In a way, the heritage film's treatment of the landscape became a particular aesthetic approach - the "museum aesthetic", marked by the attention to historical detail and the use of magnificent landscapes.

Presenting heritage landscapes with "museum aesthetics" like we would go to a movie or go to a museum.

　　British heritage films were born in the era of Thatcherism, and the Thatcher government used heritage culture as a means to revive Britain.

At a time of British industrial decline, stagnant economic growth, political polarization and social unrest, the legacy film is popular as it presents a nostalgic image of Britain as a prosperous, strong and united nation.

Costumes in films also play a role in maintaining and strengthening national identity, such as the characters in A Room with a View, dressed in traditional Edwardian clothing, dressed and behaved in a restrained manner, Lucy's. The white lace-up gown underscored her innocence, a conservative mindset that reflected the values ​​of Thatcher's Britain - a cultural vision of a return to Victorian family values.

　　British heritage films construct a specific Britishness based on British traditions and etiquette, and privilege the background and imagery of an idyllic life for the British upper middle class.

To a certain extent, British heritage films are also an important response to national changes - the change in the racial composition brought about by immigration after World War II was the biggest change experienced by Britain in the 20th century, and the conservative ideals of heritage films have avoided dealing with a A changing and racially diverse British culture, which instead focuses on a highly restricted set of traditions, the British imagery in heritage films is only a fraction of the British population - those Anglo-Saxons living in lavish homes in rural England - a romanticized version of .

Criticisms of British heritage cinema have persisted because this elitist and over-the-top aesthetic is symptomatic of an identity crisis, emblematic of a conservative national identity construction.

　　Some heritage films have narratives built on more progressive themes, such as "Morris" (1987) which aesthetically meets audience expectations of a heritage film, showing a country house version of Britain, but also depicting London where the protagonist works.

Most of the people in the film belong to the upper class, and we can see how they talk about art, music and literature, but also see that the protagonist eventually falls in love with the servant who works at the country house and decides to give up his wealth, status and cause.

In contrast to its "conservative" reputation, many heritage films glorify and romanticize while also criticizing the oppressive constraints of British society and the superiority and arrogance of the ruling class, with some focusing on women's personal struggles, social status and rights , remains relevant to contemporary audiences.

　　The concept of "national cinema" is often used as a means of confrontation with Hollywood, but since the 1990s, British heritage films have been adopted by the Hollywood international system and have gained enormous global influence, such as Sense and Sensibility (1995), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Emma (2020), etc.

Heritage films not only restored British cultural identity, but reaffirmed an idealized image of the country before an international audience.

　　(Author: Wang Tian, ​​associate researcher at the School of Drama, Film and Television, Communication University of China)