Heritage film information

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Heritage film is a critical term to refer to a cluster or cycle of late 20th-century British films that were argued to depict the United Kingdom of the pre-World War II decades in a nostalgic fashion.^[1][2] Although this term was originally used to discuss the film genre polemically, its use has broadened out, and it is now also used more loosely to refer to period films with high-quality visual production values, including those produced in France, other European countries and beyond.^[1]

Many – but not all – heritage films were adapted from classic literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries.^[3] For its critics on the political Left, however, the heritage film was defined more centrally by:

• A particular aesthetic approach (the "heritage" or "museum" aesthetic), marked by scrupulous attention to period detail and the use of splendid scenes of the English landscape, which was argued to have conservative ideological effects.^[4][5][6]
• A perceived relationship to the rise since the 1970s of the heritage industry and the discovery of heritage (stately homes, etc.) as a marketable commodity.^[7]
• The official promotion of a politically conservative, pro–free enterprise and upper-class-biased notion of the British heritage by successive 1980s British Conservative Governments under the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher.^[8][9]

At a time of British industrial decline, stagnant economic growth, political polarisation and social unrest, heritage films were appealing to many because they projected a nostalgic image of Britain as a prosperous, powerful and socially cohesive nation.^[10][11] Many cinematic and televised films focused on the British Empire, particularly the British Raj in India.^[12][13] However, while these films glorify and romanticize the past, they also provide a critique of the oppressive restrictions of British society and the superiority, arrogance, and controlled manner of the ruling classes.^[12] Maurice (1987) and Another Country (1984) were concerned with sexual repression and the intolerance of English society in the early 20th century, while Heat and Dust (1983) and A Passage to India (1984) criticized the ignorance of British authorities in India and the inequities of colonialism. Other critics point out that the representations, themes and perspectives presented in heritage films are varied, not homogeneous, and many of them are romance narratives, suggesting that the pleasures they offer to audiences are more diverse and less necessarily conservative than those assumed by their original critics.^[1]