Heritage Film AudiencesPeriod Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

Abstract

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 aims to break new ground in the scholarship on contemporary period films, and makes a new contribution to the growing field of film-audience studies, by presenting the first empirically based study of the audiences for quality period films. It engages directly with two highly contrasting sections of these film audiences, surveyed in the United Kingdom 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 unpredicted results.

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