Alien Territory: Romantic Resistance and National Identity in Films By
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Alien Territory: Romantic Resistance and National Identity in Films by Michael Powell and EmericPressburger Andrew Moor Thesis presented for the degree of Ph. D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne May,2000 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY LICRARV 200 10048 S ABSTRACT Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger' sfilms sit untidily within the dominant paradigm of 1940s British Cinema. This thesis examines how far their work partakes in a discourse of nation (and how far it can be referred to as 'British'). It also identifies 'sites of resistance'. In the context of the 1930s and 1940s, Section 1 briefly considers the terms 'nation' and 'national cinema' as hegemonic discursive strategies Section 2 sees Pressburger's immigrant status as introduces the running motif of 'alien territory'. Images of 'Home' are considered in terms of his exile; Powell's aestheticism is discussed, while 'magic spaces' in the films are taken as self-reflexive metaphors for cinema itself. Section 3 focuses on two wartime films, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Canterbury Tale. These 'narratives of aspiration' are considered in the light of Fredric Jameson's notion of ideology as utopia. Blimp charts the rejection of an old order and the emergence of a hegemonic state. Alluding to Korda's Imperial epics, its construction of masculine authority is examined. With A Canterbury Tale, the pastoral imagining of England is examined, referring to Kipling, while links are made to the British Documentary Movement (especially Humphrey Jennings). In Section 4, the focus shifts to foreignness and hybridity. German elements in 1930s British cinema are charted (and their Romantic/Expressionist credentials). A relatively international cinema is seen to be submerged as a realist cinematic aesthetic establishes itself. The Spy ill Black's gothic antecedents are looked at via the spy genre's engagement with the 'Other'; and Anton Walbrook is studied as an embodiment of a Germanic aesthetic in British cinema. In Section 5, the post-war Technicolor melodramas are examined in the light of the cultural retrenchment post-1945. The representation of women, and the role of spectacle is examined. CONTENTS 1: INTRODUCTION Film and Country - Some Appropriate Questions ..... 2: ROMANTIC ILLUSIONS 2.1 Andre Bazin & the Archers: Total Cinemas 11 2.2 The Place of the Artistic Voice 19 2.3 Press burger and Exile 23 2.4 Questions of Aesthetics 32 2.5 Magic Spaces and Alien Territories 37 2.6 Romanticism and the Establishment 42 3: CINEMA AND BLIGHTY Introduction 47 3.1 Playing with Soldiers: Sentiment and Satire in The Life and Death, of Colonel Blimp 3.1.1 Ambiguity or Inconsistency 56 3.1.2 The Emergent and the Residual 64 3.1.3 Re-Writing Genres: Quizzing the Epic of Empire 70 3.1.4 Proving Manhood: The Rules of the Game 86 31.5 Incorporating Otherness 97 3.2 Equivocal Arcadia: A Canterbury Tale and the Cultivation of England 3.2.1 Images of England 106 3.2.2 Nostalgia and the Pastoral 122 3.2.3 Connecting with Kipling 134 3.2.4 Marking Resistance: Anti-Realism I Realism I Documentary 142 3.2.5 We're off to see the Wizard 155 3.2.6 Conclusion 160 4: HYBRID CINEMA Introduction 163 4.1 'German' Traces and 'British Cinema': a Brief History 4.1.1 Germanic Traces in Pre-War British Film Culture 166 4.1.2 Cultural Antecedents: Nineteenth Century Germany 179 4.1.3 The German Stage 183 4.1.4 Expressionism and its part in Cinema 188 4.2 Two Case Studies: The Spy in Black and Anton Walbrook ..,.. '. 4.2.1 The Spy in Black: Nosferatu at Hoy ..199 4.2.2 Anton Walbrook 223 5: POST-WAR MELODRAMA Introduction The Historical context 239 A Transitional text: A Matter of Ufe and Death 256 5.1 The Post-WarTechnicolor Melodramas: Synthesis and Fragmentation: 5.1.1 Pre-Composition and Synaesthesia: Manufacturing Absolutes 266 5.1.2 The Melodramatic Form: Women, Hysteria, Music 287 5.1.3 Consuming Spectacles: a Cinema of Attractions 318 6: CONCLUSION Abandoned Consensus - The Post-War Position National Identities 334 Romantic Resistance 338 7 Filmography 348 8 Bibliography 354 1: INTRODUCTION film and country - some appropriate questions As I write, greater Scottish and Welsh autonomy within the British Isles is being pursued, peace initiatives in Northern Ireland, wrestling with conflicting forms of national and provincial identity, have recently been rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize, and trading in a single European currency has commenced, shifting the ongoing debate regarding the nature and degree of Britain's administrative and economic harmonisation with Europe into a new and more urgent phase Borne out of this set of realignments has been an awakening assessment of what it has meant, and will mean, to be English Of course, this specific form of identification has long been used, vaguely, inaccurately and with imperious assumption, to represent the United Kingdom at large Yet if the signifying function of 'Englishness' is indeed being re-settled, this need not necessarily invoke the clarion call of a muscular or bullish Nationalism. The debate has more to do with re- conceptualised forms of identity Although appeals to an assumed sense of Englishness often are bound up with a specifically right-ist agenda, there is nothing automatic in this association. The issue may rather be phrased to take into account what sorts of identity are imaginable, what badges of belonging are being tabled, and to whom these badges are offered In short, Englishness need not connote a 'Little Englander' mentality. If Englishness suggests an awareness of tradition, it can also suggest an acceptance of the modern. Neither need it invoke a sense of racial purity, for 'England' can be a wide and pluralistic idea, celebrated for its' incorningness'. allowing claims to tolerance, generosity 1: Introduction: Film and CountQ' and diversity, admitting its post-imperial circumstances, its multi-ethnic communities and its broadening integration within Europe. Such aspirations can be part of the idea. What the shifting parameters of this debate expose is that national identity is a process, ever in the making. It is not an 'essential' quality, however much it is wrapped (and thereby naturalised) in such a myth, The crucial dilemmas underpinning Britain's currently disputed sense of nationhood are these: how far can the psychic boundaries of what we mean by the nation be stretched; how far can restrictive definitions be overrun by an acceptance of difference; how far can the foreign be incorporated or the' alien- within' be granted a devolved self-determination, before the once-understood concept of the authentic nation state ceases to have any substantive meaning? At what stage does a national discourse, so 'diluted', lose its place within a culture determined by international or regional factors, and ultimately when does the idea of national discourse itself become redundant? Settling such questions is part of the process of negotiation and consent by which civil society holds together, Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, makes an important distinction between the "direct domination or command exercised through the State" and the "function of hegemony which the dominant group exercises throughout society") It is this hegemonic operation, defined by Gramsci as the "intellectual and moral leadership'" ofa social group, which aims to secure stability by winning and actively maintaining consensus, bringing the masses to identify socially with the interests of the governing group. The form of ideology conceived by Gramsci is dynamic, marked by I Antonio Gramsci .. Selectionsfrom the Prison Xotebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence & Wishart: London. 1971). p 12. Gramsci. p. 57. 2 I: Introduction: Film and Country consolidation, resistance and incorporation. Applying his theory to an analysis of leadership in the formation of the modern State of Italy, he argues that this is how power is won. The hegemonic, however much recourse it has to the use of force, engages in strategies of containment. Bolstered by its prestige, it ceaselessly monitors its borders, checking dissent and re-negotiating its encounters with Otherness Giving a generous reading to those inclusive strategies, it could be argued that the hegemonic strength of a modern state (it is particular so in liberal democracies) depends upon the degree to which it entertains diversity. Whether or not we care to see such containment as an entertaining or as a suppression, what remains constant within the Gramscian paradigm is that it at least acknowledges a constantly articulated interaction between dominant/authoritarian voices and the margins. This is a less monolithic view of the 'national'. It is de-essentialised, and is made ambivalent, conditional and double- voiced. In his consummate and subtle account of the discourse of nation, Homi K. Bhaba homes in on the critical question "What kind of cultural space is the nation with its transgressive boundaries and its 'interruptive' interior?":' The intrusion of the marginal into what he terms the "cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past" quizzes the hegemonic assumptions of the centre, and as a result, the boundaries of the nation are admitted to be "containing thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production.:" How far, then, does the idea of a 'national cinema' in Britain mirror this theorised dialogue? First, a snapshot of a moment which antedates by a few years what has often been seen as the high-water mark of 'British National Cinema.' Graham Greene, , Homi K .Bhaba (ed.). Xation and Xarrafiol1 (Routledge: London. 1990). p. 5 Bhaba makes the point that the nation. as an "articulation of clements" (p. 1). is an always unfinished discourse. As a cultural site crossed by conflicts it is a 'stage' on which Gramscis dynamics are to be witnessed.