engleski

Orientalist Ideology in Heritage Cinema

Acknowledging that ‘heritage film’ remains both a problematic category and genre despite, in Claire Monk’s words, ‘disciplinary institutionalization and wide usage’ (2011: 3), this paper willl nevertheless approach ‘heritage cinema’ as a useful label for a discussion of those quality costume dramas that commodify national cultural heritage for consumption on the global market. By focusing on film adaptations of British nineteenth-century classics and neo-Victorian novels on the one hand, and the costume dramas adapting the period mise en scene for their narrative purposes on the other, this paper will examine facets of Orientalist ideology present in these contemporary renditions of the past. Furthermore, the paper will analyse the implications of Marie-Luise Kohlke’s proposition that ‘the Victorian age that once imagined the Orient as seductive free zone of libidinous excess in its literature, architecture, and arts, [now] itself becomes Western culture’s mysterious eroticised and exotic other’ with neo-Victorianism ‘as a literary genre and aesthetic critique … [becoming] the new Orientalism’ (2008: 352). The paper will tackle the possible implications of this claim when applied to the study of Orientalist ideology at work in heritage cinema, comparing and contrasting the politics of such ‘new Orientalism’ to Orientalism proper in contemporary film adaptations of the past.

heritage cinema; costume drama; Orientalism; neo-Victorian

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