Julianne Pidduck,
Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past.
London: BFI, 2004.
ISBN: 1 84457 054 1
188pp
US$27.50 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing)

Costume film is sometimes called “costume drama”, “(British) heritage cinema”, “period film” or “quality cinema.” On one hand, its emphasis on visual spectacle, frequent use of beautiful painterly mise–en–scènes and adaptation of much-loved literature as narrative contribute to its appeal. On the other hand, its attention to detail and slow pace, exploitation of likeable and dislikeable characters in overwhelmingly frustrating situations and recurrent affirmation of villainous male dominance inflame audiences and critics. Pidduck’s study of contemporary costume film considers English language films and television series dating mainly from the 1990s. Focusing on their spatial aspects, she explores their many paradoxes. Throughout film history, traditional costume films have been criticized for reinforcing conservative morals and values. Contemporary costume films (sometimes referred to as “post–heritage cinema”) have also experienced this kind of negative reception; however Pidduck shows that many of these films actually challenge traditional costume film conventions and confront history and the present. Hollywood (i.e., America’s most aggressive capitalist ideals) is behind the logic of marketing costume films, but many of these films feature complete casts of British actors.

Pidduck explores these films through ideas about space and movement (14). Contemporary costume films are special because they offer microcosms (complex little worlds) that are self-conscious:

Stylistically, temporally, and spatially separate from the present, these microcosms of nineteenth– and early twentieth–century England and Europe, or Renaissance England, resonate in complex ways with contemporary experience (2).

These films turn inward, aware of the interplay between narrative, camera techniques, historical and sociological contexts and their production, consumption and relationship with an ideal audience (5).

Costume film tropes are identified and discussed throughout the book: a nation; ambivalence to a new century (the notions that industry interrupts the pastoral and modernity disturbs a previous period); a woman at the window (or at the door); a door that is open, closed, or halfway open; someone writing (usually at a desk); a ball (which can be replaced by an opera, a dance or some kind of social event involving dancing, music and social/societal expectations); a country walk; a sightseeing trip; and a train station (2–3). Pidduck’s primary analytical tools include Gilles Deleuze’s action–image, movement–image and ideas about the form of different kinds of costume films and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope, dialogic relationships and heteroglossia. Pidduck favors spatial concepts over temporal ones in addressing the cinematic past. Towards the end of the book she admits to ignoring the time vector or temporal aspects of these films (176). According to Pidduck, Deleuze is interested mostly in two kinds of forms of costume films: the epic form (the large form) consists of a situation section, followed by an action section, and concludes with another situation (SAS’); the intimate costume form (the small form) begins with an action section, followed by a situation (a kind stasis), and concludes with another action (ASA’). The latter form is the one that interests Pidduck the most of all. Within these film forms filmmakers employ Deleuze’s time–, action–, movement–, affective– and other images. Pidduck describes most of Deleuze’s terminology clearly, but readers with a previous knowledge of Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement–Image and Cinema 2: The Time–Image (English translations published in 1986 and 1989, respectively) would still be most at ease with her use of Deleuze. Pidduck’s unique use of the spatial vector, reducing time and history to space and movement, enables her to avoid reiterating previous observations in the literature (including the British heritage cinema debates) and to use other kinds of tools for her analysis. Films, like culture, language and literature, are dialogic in nature. This idea leads to the perception that films are open and capable of Bakhtin’s “deep generating series,” a series of complex dialogues between the filmic aspects themselves as well as between filmic and extrafilmic ones. According to Pidduck:

A dialogic approach to costume drama moves beyond a monolithic “closed” reading (heritage spectacle as bourgeois nostalgia) to a polyphonic reading, where the bounded microcosm of costume drama becomes a site of struggle (12).

The chronotope itself may be a process of exchange between the real world and the world of the film, between time, plot, and history or between the film’s adaptation of the literature and the literary work (12–13). This review returns to heteroglossia later.

In Part 1, “The Spaces of Costume Drama”, Pidduck explains the topography of conventional costume drama by examining contemporary film and television adaptations of Austen, James and Wharton. Chapter 1, “The Woman at the Window,” discusses how popular adaptations of Austen have led to a deluge of Austen–brand films (27). Sense and Sensibility (UK/US, 1995) opens with a woman framed at a writing desk. The house of fiction, the inability of the female characters to own property and the slow pace of the film contribute to its interiority. The pace speeds up momentarily when protagonists Elinor and Edward go outside for a country walk (32). Pidduck adds that the music represents a juxtaposition of the film’s interiority and exteriority:

Set against the precise dialogue and intricate human interaction condensed into Austen’s parlours, libraries and balls, exterior sequences (often leavened by swelling orchestral scores) tend to create a sense of spatial and emotional expansiveness, not unlike the role of dance numbers in the musical (26).

Marianne’s piano follows the pair as they leave. Pidduck pays attention to gender roles in these adaptations as well as to their rewritings by “liberal feminists”. The woman at the window may represent her desiring gaze as much as she represents sexual repression and desire or confinement of interiors (29).

Chapter 2, “Houses of Fiction,” explores the importance of the mise–en–scène and thwarted desires of male protagonists in films like Dangerous Liaisons (US, 1988), Valmont (France/UK, 1989), The Age of Innocence (US, 1993) and The Remains of the Day (UK/US, 1993). In some of these films the female narrator interprets masculine consciousness (50). Pidduck explains how music in The Age of Innocence is used to evoke the inner state of Newland, the male protagonist of the film. In this chapter she also identifies how the dynamics between actors and the characters they portray in contemporary costume film are mapped onto contemporary films of other genres in order to appeal to contemporary audiences:

Male love interests in the Austen films (notably Colin Firth’s Darcy [Pride and Prejudice, UK/US, 1995]) present perhaps the best example. The later Bridget Jones’s Diary (UK/US, 2001) trades on a virtually identical performance by Firth; the successful repetition of his smouldering and inexpressive masculinity within a contemporary romantic comedy implies a concomitant projection of contemporary ideals of romance and masculinity onto period dress. Similarly, the ubiquitous Hugh Grant moves effortlessly between frequent period roles, in Maurice [UK, 1997] and Sense, for instance, and [identical] bumbling male leads in Four Weddings and a Funeral [UK, 1994] and Notting Hill [UK, 1999] (52).

Letter writing and the function of the ball are discussed in further detail in this chapter. Letter writing, which reveals desires of characters in many costume films and biopics, may also be used as a device for flashbacks (54–55). The ball within the house of fiction creates tension between characters and their social allegiances as well as “barriers that both produce and impede romance” (58). Tension and desire are set to music:

Within costume drama’s spatio–temporal economy of interiors, the tension between social regulation and renegade desire is played out in spectacle of costume, music and dance in the set pieces of the ball, the society party, or a public spectacle such as the opera or the theatre. These sites of courting rituals manifest the underlying sexual and economic dynamics essential to domestic fiction (58).

In Chapter 3, “For Love or Money,” the author mentions Nancy Armstrong’s distinctions between Austen and James (citing Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987)). Whereas sex (or the sexual contract) and social differences are emphasized in the former, power and money and property are stressed in the latter. According to Pidduck, Wharton’s novels are similar to James in this respect. The chapter explores Victorian culture in The Portrait of a Lady (UK, 1996), Washington Square (Holland/US, 1997) and The House of Mirth (UK/US, 2000). A common trope in James’ and Wharton’s adaptations is the repressive house of fiction used to cage and confine their female protagonists.

Chapter 4, “The Idea of Europe,” focuses on James and Forster adaptations as well as biopics. Retrotourism is a postmodern recollection of nineteenth–century tourism and the Romantic vision or of seventeenth– and eighteenth– century grand tours of Europe (especially Italy). Pidduck explores the retrotourist gaze, mise–en–scène (desire) and high–art traditions in The Portrait of a Lady, Age of Innocence, A Room with a View (UK, 1985) and Maurice. These travels create sightseeing and value systems and cross–cultural encounters and reveal the desires of male protagonists and the experiences of female ones (87). The biopics, which also reinforce the idea of Europe (its “oldness” and high–culture traditions assist in breeding genius), include Amadeus (US, 1984) and Topsy–Turvy (UK, 1999) (83). In these films the trope of letter writing is expanded to composing music.

The second part, “Costume Drama Reassembled,” pays special attention to revisionist adaptations. Chapter 5, “Radical Form, Radical Pasts,” examines “problems of narrative movement in relation to the gendered and colonial space” in films like Orlando (UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands, 1992) and Daughters of the Dust (US, 1991). The latter analysis is especially fascinating since Daughters of the Dust, unlike the others discussed in this book, was made by Black independent filmmaker Julie Dash, intended for a Black audience and casts so many of the previously mentioned tropes in newly imagined ways (for instance, the affective–images are close–ups of labouring hands rather than of faces and there are many shots outside creating what bell hooks calls a “homeplace” rather than a house of fiction) (116). This analysis relates to Pidduck’s observations of normative and critical accounts of class in films like Gosford Park (UK/US, 2001) and The Remains of the Day in Chapter 6, “Upstairs/Downstairs.” This chapter introduces Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (she cites Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981):

“heteroglossia” posits that power and difference are conveyed aurally through accent, intonation, dialogue and voice. The novel is seen as a dialogic medium characterized by “centripetal forces in socio–linguistic and ideological life” such as the “unitary language” of the nineteenth–century English novel. Such a “unitary language” is not monolithic, but comprises an element of heteroglossia – a multiplicity of accents and discourses that operate as “centrifugal, stratifying forces” (127).

So often costume film places the working class and the middle class outside the frame and the story. These films, clearly inspired by Upstairs/Downstairs, offer class critiques as well as importance and depth to the working–class characters. Films like Angels and Insects (UK/US, 1996) demonstrate how Downstairs may take over a house of fiction.

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with queer trajectories (including New Queer Cinema and gay male authorship) and discourses of sexuality and the body (18). In Chapter 7, “Queer Costume Drama,” Pidduck explains that there are “very different aesthetic and political strategies for lesbian, gay, and queer representation” (139). She contrasts popular gay works of the Thatcher Period like Maurice and A Rooom with a View to Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (UK, 1986) and Edward II (UK, 1991). Jarman’s films work directly against the hysteria and homophobia caused by Thatcher’s New Right by rejecting positive images and resisting historical detail. Pidduck believes that most homosexual characters in these films are men and that the lesbian characters are still within the male gaze (154). Chapter 8, “The Queen’s Bodies”, examine historical treatments of sexuality and the body in The Piano (Australia/New Zealand, 1993), Elizabeth (UK, 1998), The Madness of King George (UK, 1994) and Shakespeare in Love (US/UK, 1998). Madness is a parody of monarchy biopics and has a fast pace that is unusual for a costume film. Shakespeare in Love exploits raw sexual energy (as opposed to costume film’s British coldness) and is full of Tom Stoppard’s shtick: self–conscious and aware of the work’s re–play potential (172).

This book offers an excellent introduction to contemporary costume films. Readers, including those who prefer other kinds of films (or who may not comprehend contemporary costume film’s appeal), will find Pidduck’s discussions most thought–provoking.

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
Louisiana State University
Created on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 | Last Updated: 20-Jul-05