Movies SHOW… and Then TELL
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Chapter 6 Consensual pleasures: Amazing Grace, oratory and the middlebrow biopic Tom Brown [TYPESCRIPT NEAR FINAL DRAFT] Movies SHOW… and then TELL. A true movie is likely to be 60% to 80% comprehensible if the dialogue is in a foreign language. —Alexander Mackendrick, On Film-Making1 In accounts of popular genres, it is understandable and fitting that scholars might focus on case studies that are innovative, experimental or on films that marshal wider generic conventions to offer a progressive message or meanings; the limit cases of a genre or the most aesthetically successful exemplars bring to light the potentialities of a popular form. As discussed in the Introduction to the present volume, this is close to the approach taken by Dennis Bingham in his account of the biopic.2 My emphasis in this chapter is approximately the opposite of Bingham’s. I will discuss a film that is neither experimental nor innovative; a film that might rather be judged as representative of the biopic at its most “middlebrow.”3 This chapter participates in an ongoing reevaluation of the middlebrow within film studies. However, rather than focus, as is often the case, on the middlebrow in relation to the constitution of the audience, my analysis of the aesthetics of oration finds middlebrowness to be a textual operation, locatable within the biopic. Amazing Grace (2006), a British biopic of late-eighteenth century abolitionist William Wilberforce, is a “talky” film both in its emphasis on parliamentary oratory and in its decision to tell us about rather than show us the horrors of the slave trade. This chapter will examine this as a concrete aspect of Amazing Grace’s style but also consider journalistic critiques of the film as a mise en abyme of wider attitudes towards talky films and the notions 159 of medium specificity they veil. The quotation that opens this chapter, for example, taken from a well-known book on filmmaking, underlines the idea that the “cinematic” is defined by its relative independence from verbal discourse. A critical reevaluation of the “talky” and its place within broader middlebrow aesthetics does not, however, negate important aesthetic- political problems with Amazing Grace. I shall also consider the historiographical issues attendant upon dramatizing a discourse against the slave trade via the oration of Great White Men. This ideological “failure” goes hand in hand with what can be judged as a more aesthetic one: the film being out of step with modern cinema and museum spaces in terms of the phenomenological rendering of the experience of slavery. The middlebrow biopic The discourses of cinephilia and the academic study of film have both often been characterized by a rejection of the middlebrow. As Adrian Martin has written, “Critics who are truly cinephiles… often champion extremes. They go for the highest and the lowest …. What such critics usually do not like, on principle, is a certain middle-of-the road, middlebrow cinema.”4 Similarly, academic film scholarship first validated its object of study through attention to the formally experimental highbrow and then by attention to the mass lowbrow commercial cinema (Hollywood genre movies primarily). The latter became a respectable object of study when the subtleties of expressive mise-en-scène were uncovered or when scholars began to focus upon the complex ideological operations the films revealed unconsciously (the search for which was a major function of psychoanalysis within 1970s- 80s film writing) or through disguise. The middlebrow, comprising many genres of historical films, social problem pictures and, certainly, biopics, has been less fashionable due partly to a conventionality of technique and seriousness of subject matter that is conscious and overt. 160 The middlebrow falls through the cracks in the aesthetic biases of film scholarship, yet the category has also often posed problems for locating texts historically. This is in some ways paradoxical as many contemporary commentators on the middlebrow seem to agree that it more appropriately describes a given culture of reception (which needs to be located within specific national and historical parameters) rather than any particular aesthetic of production.5 Yet, as the term “middlebrow” has generally been employed in journalistic discourses in an amorphous way (and may often be employed as a synonym for “average” or “middle-of-the- road,” as appears to be the case in the Adrian Martin quotation above), the category becomes too large to deal with in precise terms. More complex layers of historical relations and developments potentially become folded in on each other. This is a present danger in this chapter. However, the more pressing problem here is the question of to what extent “middlebrow” is an appropriate prism through which to conduct a stylistic analysis. The recognition of middlebrow as a designation of relative cultural capital6 (relative to high- and lowbrow) makes it hard to locate it with the text. Both in order to narrow the range of apposite historical reference points and to consider the middlebrow stylistically, this chapter will focus primarily on the aesthetics of oration in Amazing Grace. Oration, in its association in the modern period with the privileged sphere of parliamentary politics, carries middlebrow cultural capital. Yet it is also something that is analyzable stylistically. Mark Eaton’s intervention into debates on the middlebrow in the cinema suggests that it is a category term “less and less applicable to the current [as of 2006] film industry,”7 offering “nobrow” as a more apt term for the American context of film reception and marketing. Citing the work of Lawrence Napper, he does concede, however, that “middlebrow may have more heuristic value when applied to Great Britain.”8 Indeed, Napper’s work, by locating the middlebrow within precise historical and national parameters (primarily interwar Britain), succeeds in offering a definition that is more susceptible to a 161 style-based analysis and, ironically perhaps, one then more identifiable and applicable outside of this timeframe: Unlike Modernism with its interest in formal purity and experimentation, middlebrow culture was engaged in blurring the boundaries of its media. Traditional modes of representation – realism, pictorialism, theatricality and literary narration – were transferred to new media, and deemed to carry their meanings (and also their cultural status) intact across the adaptation process.9 Napper’s notion of the middlebrow seeks to rescue the category from the disparagement that is inevitable when adopting highbrow evaluative criteria. Napper finds in British middlebrow productions (he considers theatre and literature, especially, alongside the cinema) a cultural dynamism lacking in the purist discourses of the highbrow. British middlebrow culture was linked to the rapidly evolving middle classes who adapted with ease to “living in new spaces, doing new jobs, consuming new forms of culture”10 in the interwar years. Highbrow vitriol directed at middlebrow culture “reveal[s] a concern and an anxiety over issues of purity, authenticity and origin that do not appear to have bothered [the] middlebrow residents [of the ‘Tudorbethan’ style of suburban housing that emerged in the interwar period].”11 The styles of middle class homes can be read as middlebrow texts characterized by heterogeneity and the blurring of boundaries; “Tudorbethan” housing combined the architectural features of the Tudor and Elizabethan periods in contexts in which it did not “belong” (i.e. 1930s suburbia). Such architecture can be discussed through the language of “adaptation,” a term of central importance to middlebrow cinema—importantly, Napper’s core case studies had their origins outside of the cinema. Napper’s definition of the middlebrow enables us to consider the, I hesitate to say, “natural” pull of the biopic genre towards the middlebrow. The biopic is innately a form of 162 adaptation; its heterogeneity is guaranteed by its attempts to translate imagery (of a famous person, of famous events in which that person was involved) from other media (classical portraiture or statuary, photographs or newsreels, for example) into film. Similarly, a famous speech or a musical recording might be recreated on screen: in the role of the king, Colin Firth performs George VI’s address to the nation in The King’s Speech (2010); we see what me might imagine to hear in Johnny Cash’s 1968 album At Folsom Prison in Walk the Line (2005). The more “conventional” biopics (“conventional” being a term which, rather problematically, seems often to stand in for “middlebrow”) might seek to try to carry the meanings of this biographical, real/historical material “and also their cultural status intact across the adaptation process.”12 Napper also points towards more specific aesthetic traditions (“realism, pictorialism, theatricality and literary narration”13) that a middlebrow film might participate in. Amazing Grace, intersecting as it does with another predominantly middlebrow film tradition, the heritage film,14 certainly relies a great deal on pictorialism and on theatricality. To the latter broader category, we might add the more specific aesthetic of the Great British Actor’s oratory—a rousing speech performed by veteran stage and film actor Michael Gambon will feature in my analysis below. One can find the conflict between high- and middlebrow evaluative criteria operating quite clearly in some journalistic responses to Amazing Grace. A particularly