University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/35838 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Voices of Inheritance: Aspects of British Film and Television in the 1980s and 1990s Ian Goode PhD Film and Television Studies University of Warwick Department of Film and Television Studies February 2000 · ~..' PAGE NUMBERING \. AS ORIGINAL 'r , --:--... ; " Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction page 1 1. The Coupling of Heritage and British Cinema 10 2. Inheritance and Mortality: The Last of England and The Garden 28 3. Inheritance and Nostalgia: Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes 61 4. Black British History and the Boundaries of Inheritance: Handsworth Songs and Touch of the Tarbrush 86 5. Exile and Modernism: London and Robinson in Space 119 6. Defending the Inheritance: Alan Bennett and the BBC 158 7. Negotiating the Lowryscape: Making Out, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Sex, Chips and Rock 'n' Roll 192 Conclusion 238 Footnotes 247 Bibliography 264 Filmography 279 .. , t • .1.' , \ '. < .... " 'tl . ',*,. ... ., ~ ..... ~ Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Charlotte Brunsdon for her patience, support and encouragement over the course of the thesis. I am also grateful to my parents for providing me with both space and comfortable conditions to work within and also for helping me to retain a sense of perspective. Abstract Voices of Inheritance: Aspects of British Film and Television in the 1980s and 1990s During the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to what is passed on from the past and endures in the present. The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s. Introduction This thesis is an exploration of the articulation of inheritance across British film and television produced in the 1980s and early 1990s (1). In the written text that accompanies The Last of England (1987) Derek Jarman makes an explicit claim to the cultural inheritance he recognizes against the inheritance represented by family, property and wealth. It is the latter meaning that Jarman endeavours to isolate from his cultural inheritance that is commonly associated with inheritance. Jarman states: 'I need a very firm anchor in that hurricane, the anchor is my inheritance, not my family inheritance, but a cultural one, which locates the film IN HOME' (2). The idea of home is the ground where the overlap between the meanings of inheritance occur. This conflict between the understanding of home that is inherited and the idea of home Jarman wants to inherit is articulated in The Last of England. Jarman's personal films give voice to the conflict that he feels between the inheritance of home and family which is inseparable from the idea of England personified by his patriotic RAF officer father, and the cultural inheritance which is comprised of those chosen aspects of a past England that inform Jarman's mode of expression. This conflict is expressed against the larger context of England in the 1980s and within Jarman's terms it is also a conflict over the medium of film. Jarman claims his preferred inheritance through the form of the home movie. The inheritance that Jarman wishes to isolate from the dominant understanding of inheritance is not necessarily unique to him, but it is an expressive means through which Jarman identifies himself and his disposition towards the condition of England under Thatcherism. The conflicts in The Last of England are given a specific focus through the home movies taken and passed on by Jarman's father and grandfather. These home movies refer to Jarman's childhood and his father's investment in the British Empire and are expressive of the connection between personal memory and national cultural identity. The idea of inheritance incorporates the relation of past to present and between the particular (personal) and the general (national), and the given and the desired. The expression of this relation is formed out of the conflict between Jarman's attachment to, and distance from, the meanings he attributes to inheritance. Against the background set out by Jarman in The Last of England I wish to investigate a set of related voices situated across British film and television of the 1980s and 1990s, that following the terms set out by Jarman, articulate the meaning and value of inheritance in formally contrasting styles. It is the shared theme of inheritance rather than a singular formal or narrative unity which brings together the different strands of my corpus. The articulation of inheritance is a significant constituent of the relation between the condition of the national culture and British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s. The voices I have selected for my corpus incorporate, in differing proportions - a personal mode of address and a state of the nation mode of address. The voices range from the distinctly personal and non-fictional voices of the apparently radical Derek Jarman and the apparently conservative Alan Bennett, through to the less individual and more collective voices of Black Audio and to a lesser extent Patrick Keiller. The presence of Beeban Kidron's adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit together with the less personally marked fictional television drama of Making Out and Sex, Chips and Rock In' Roll written by Debbie Horsfield require an investigation of the cultural terms in which inheritance is expressed. These texts are brought together in the same chapter in order to show how the relation of women to the articulation of inheritance is negotiated. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is clearly addressing a personal inheritance that appears to resemble that expressed by Davies and Bennett but it is primarily an assertion of sexual difference. Making Out and Sex, Chips and Rock In' Roll demonstrate a greater degree of engagment with the themes established by the previous chapters. The corpus is otherwise structured by directors and writers because my research is motivated by the desire to investigate the expression of the relation between personal and national inheritance. The VOIces of inheritance occupy relatively marginal and dissenting speaking positions with Bennett occupying the location closest to the centre. From these speaking positions there are dissenting views of the nation which also engage with inherited conditions of belonging. These conditions are predicated upon culturally instituted ties of attachment that are passed on across generations and cross private and public spheres. Formative experiences are remembered through family, marriage, community, arriving at the mother country, the gallery and the abbey. The different articulations of inheritance in the film and television that I have studied reveal different formal combinations of sound and image. These can be formally summarized as: i) use of voice over as descriptive and poetic insight ii) the reworking of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction iii) re-construction of a past life iv) self-reflexivity and modernism. The voice of personal experience is clearly inscribed through these formal characteristics. There are suggestions of autobiography spread across these formal features and this is most apparent in the films of Terence Davies, but the narrative impulse of autobiography as the story of a life, is largely resisted and my corpus cannot be generically designated as autobiography, and does not account adequately for the value of the relation I wish to explore. Inheritance is voiced primarily through an internalized relation with the past. This past is not the distant periodic past that is consecrated within the adaptation of classic literary texts such as Orlando (Sally Potter, GB, 1993), or the aberrant royal personage of Edward II (Derek Jarman, GB, 1991), but a more recent past that is passed on and resonates across generations. The engagement with the inherited past involves a more self-conscious relation with time and occurs not in isolation from, but in connection with, the present, and the wider context of the condition of England in the 1980s and early 1990s.