Heritage Film Audiences

Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

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by Claire Monk

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Historical films
Keywords: historical films, sociology
Publishing date: 2011
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 248 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-7486-3824-6

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Book Presentation:
The concept of 'heritage cinema' is now firmly established as an influential - as well as much-debated and contested - critical framework for the discussion of period or historical representation in film, most prominently with reference to British heritage and 'post-heritage' film successes since the 1980s, but also to comparable examples from Europe, North America and beyond. These successes have ranged from Merchant Ivory's A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End and The Remains of the Day, via Jane Austen adaptations such as Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility to post-heritage adaptations such as Sally Potter's Orlando. Yet the very idea of the heritage film has rested on untested assumptions about its audiences.

This book breaks significant new ground in the scholarship on contemporary period films, and makes a distinctive new contribution to the growing field of film-audience studies, by presenting the first empirically based study of the audiences for quality period films. Monk engages directly with two highly contrasting sections of these audiences, surveyed in the UK in the late 1990s, to explore their identities, their wider patterns of film taste, and above all their attitudes and pleasures - in relation to the period films they enjoy, and on issues central to debates around the heritage film, literary adaptation and cultural value - with illuminating and unpredicted results.

About the Author:
Claire Monk is Reader in Film and Film Culture at the De Montfort University

Press Reviews:
This book is clearly a major resource and provides solid empirical evidence about the social function of films and in particular about how real people felt about films in a specific time and space. As such, Monk’s book plays an important role in the ongoing debates about the determinants of the reception of images of the past.– Christine Etherington-Wright, University of Portsmouth, Journal of British Cinema and Television

Claire Monk’s excellent new book, based on research conducted in the late 1990s, offers new evidence as to how people from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the United Kingdom react to the so-called "heritage film" and/or period drama. Monk’s research tells us a lot about the ways in which individuals consume period films.– Lawrence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Literature/Film Quarterly

Claire Monk’s excellent new book, based on research conducted in the late 1990s, offers new evidence as to how people from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the United Kingdom react to the so-called 'heritage film' and/or period drama. Monk’s research tells us a lot about the ways in which individuals consume period films.– Lawrence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara, Literature/Film Quarterly

In what is usually called 'the heritage debate' - and which has involved many of us within film and cultural studies over a long period of time - we have all made endless suppositions about the audiences who watch the films about which we wrangle. A book which actually conducts a proper analysis of these audiences is long overdue. It is doubly pleasing that when this book appears, it should be written by one of the leading proponents within that debate, and written with all Claire Monk's rigourous scholarship, in her inimitable and elegant style.– Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London

In what is usually called 'the heritage debate' - and which has involved many of us within film and cultural studies over a long period of time - we have all made endless suppositions about the audiences who watch the films about which we wrangle. A book which actually conducts a proper analysis of these audiences is long overdue. It is doubly pleasing that when this book appears, it should be written by one of the leading proponents within that debate, and written with all Claire Monk's rigourous scholarship, in her inimitable and elegant style.– Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London

See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press

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