Table Of ContentFilm/Fiction volume 6
Retrovisions
Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction
Edited by
Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter,
and Imelda Whelehan
P
Pluto Press
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First published 2001 by Pluto Press
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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.
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ISBN 0 7453 1583 6 hbk
ISBN 0 7453 1578 X pbk
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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
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