Thomas Hardy, 'Heritage' Cinema and British Society 1967–2000
Introduction
What is British ‘heritage’ cinema? The term has been widely discussed throughout the 1990s, and since I have examined the debate in detail elsewhere (Kilpi 2003a, 64-71), I shall mention here only a few key contributions. An influential and controversial definition was offered by Andrew Higson in his early writings on the historical costume films and literary adaptations made in the 1980s and 1990s. Somewhat hesitantly, he described these films as a genre and a politically negative one at that. According to Higson, one of the central pleasures of the heritage film is the artful and spectacular projection of an elite conservative vision of the national past." He then listed the main representational strategies with which this vision is created: concentration on the Edwardian era, the country house, canonic literature, select landscapes, the middle and upper classes, significant moments of national history, nostalgia to name a few (see: Higson 1995, 26-8; Higson 1996, 232-4, 239-42). To some, this seemed too narrow and too stigmatising a definition and he was subsequently criticised for ignoring the subversive sides of the heritage boom. For instance, Julianne Pidduck has revealed the feminist and other subversive moments in the heritage proper, the Austen adaptations (Pidduck 1998, 388-98). Amy Sargeant has pointed out the way in which the heritage films democratise history by making it available to large audiences (Sargeant 2000, 302-5). The same argument was forwarded by the late Raphael Samuel in the historical context of the heritage industry in general (Samuel 1999, 160-4).
This is not to say that there are no suspicious ideological contents in these films; conservatism, nostalgia and an elite view of history are important, though not always as dominant, aspects of the genre as Higson maintained. In his later writing, especially in the new monograph English Heritage, English Cinema (2003), he has modified his stance and defined heritage film as a hybrid term, and concludes by complementing the analytically unavoidable genre terms with notions of smaller cycles and production trends (10-4). However, in addition to admitting the ambivalencies and subversive possibilities of the late 1990s heritage films he insists on the continuing relevance of social and economic politics to the heritage debate (261) - a position, which I share and which is the point of departure for this article. Consequently, what I want to concentrate on is the representation of class in the ‘heritage’ film by asking the following questions: have these films been thoroughly upper middle class or has there been moments when other social strata or subversion have been allowed to surface? How, if at all, are the working classes or lower classes and poverty depicted in these films? I also venture some suggestions as to the relations of these representations to the contemporary social contexts they were made in; historical or costume films are, of course, like any other film, rife with reworkings and mutations of the discourses of their contemporary societies. Higson has claimed that heritage films have been produced in Britain since at least the 1910s" (1995, 26; 2003, 13). I will, however, start my discussion of the heritage film from the late 1960s, when, according to Raphael Samuel, the veritable heritage industry as we know it today started to emerge and laid the foundation for prestige TV series in the 70s and costume and historical films in the 80s and 90s, which form the bulk of this article.
The timespan is long and the relevant films numerous, which is why I have decided to focus on three films: Far from the Madding Crowd, made in 1967 by John Schlesinger, Roman Polanski’s Tess from 1979 and Michael Winterbottom’s Jude released in 1996. I have chosen the adaptations of the novels of Thomas Hardy for several reasons. Hardy seems to fulfil the criteria for material, which good heritage films are made of: he is a classic, canonical author, his novels describe ‘select landscapes’, the country side and country houses, and the action is situated in the Victorian era; a very potent period for nostalgia, as Thatcherite rhetoric has shown us. However, he is also known for his candid representation of the rural working class, destitution and harshness of social and economic change and for his non-conformist transgressions of traditional gender and class boundaries. I shall explore how these aspects are carried out in the films, what kind of alternatives they provide for the upper middle class, nostalgic, rather ‘monoclass’ views of history and how they relate to the time of their making. Furthermore, these films have not received very much critical attention; my modest contribution is to suggest ways of looking at class and social distinction in heritage film during a longer timespan, in a historical context and using adaptations of Hardy as a kind of yardstick. Since I have been working on the basis of limited resources available in Finland, I present these findings as hypotheses and suggestions for more intense and documented research.
The 1960s and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)
In 1959, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared: The class war is over and we have won it." Things were, of course, a bit more complicated than that. Macmillan was talking from the rhetorical landscape of one nation toryism, which at the time still seemed ideologically credible and secure. Four years later his conservative administration was brought down in a series of crises, the Profumo scandal among them, which labelled the Tories as an elitist, anachronistic and corrupt party tainted with traditional upper class vices. Labour PM Harold Wilson in his turn cast his party as the unifying force with the ‘classless’ rhetoric of modernisation, professionalism and ‘white heat of technology’(Cannadine 1998, 150-1). On the one hand, affluence did bring about changes in the class structure, for instance, it lead to increased opportunities for social mobility and professionalism. On the other, the plastic facade of consumerism hid a number of problems: the opportunistic policies, which were weakening and stagnating the British economy, especially the heavy industries; increasing unemployment; the continuing lack of satisfaction in manual work (which was pointedly explored by Jean-Luc Godard in British Sounds); proletarianisation of the menial non-manual labour (Brown 1994, 119-20; Crompton 1994, 101-4; Marwick 1996, 145). All these problems had a class angle to them and it was clear that by the end of the 1960s despite all the talk to the contrary Britain was still a society riddled with class differences.
The British people still categorised themselves into three classes - working, middle and upper class - which were defined by wealth, power, status, genealogy, type of work, life styles and opportunities. Although the working class had gained prestige and power during the consensus era, the upward social mobility was still much lesser in volume than that between the middle and upper class. They were aware of their working class culture, but this did not amount to the Marxist notion of revolutionary class consciousness (Marwick 1996, 154-162). Class divisions found their way also to the pop and subcultures, which the media usually constructed under the classless heading of ‘youth.’ There was of course a lot of interaction between working and middle classes within the ranks of Teddies, mods and rockers, but the rapid diversification of the pop music and popular art market made distinctions inevitable; university radicals or the counter culture punters and progressive rock, or ‘college rock’ on one hand, and skinheads and the more straightforward ‘dole queue rock’ of the early seventies on the other can be cited as examples associated with different social strata (Osgerby 1998, 12-3, 27, 37, 64-9, 76-7, 88-93; Walker 1986, 234-5).
Nevertheless, the period witnessed rapid changes in attitudes towards old traditions, taboos, customs and parochialism which had characterised the 1940s and 1950s. The pace of change produced worried defences of the traditional forms of culture. Richard Hoggart for instance attacked the consumer society and Americanisation which he saw as eroding the working class culture and communities (Hoggart 1957, 169-171). This attitude was also witnessed in the New Wave films in which the consumption was considered feminine and a corrosive threat to working class masculinity (Eley 1995, 17-8). The latter part of the decade saw an increased interest in industrial archaeology, documentation of the working class culture and customs which were seen as disappearing or mutating into something altogether different. The History Workshop Movement started research projects in order to record history and experience special to working class people (Jordan and Weedon 1995, 120, 125-6). This call for the past, tradition, preservation and nostalgia was, however, a wider phenomenon. All kinds of retro and nostalgic fashions emerged during the late sixties: Art Deco and Nouveau revivals, day glo colours, neo-vernacular design trends, e.g Laura Ashley, Victoriana such as William Morris, recycling of ‘old’ fifties pop and rock (Samuel 1999, 59-61, 65, 89-97). The number of museums was on the rise and at the upper end of the social scale country houses and stately homes were increasingly commodified for tourist purposes and marketed as heritage experiences. Although they belonged mainly to the history of a tiny elite, that history was quickly assimilated and put on display as a prominent part of the national heritage (Hewison 1987, 53, 71, 88-9).
In the field of film the emphasis of representation shifted from the provincial, working class realism to the southern, urban middle class fantasies of Modern, Swinging London which at the end of the decade started to drift to nostalgia on the one hand and to violence and sexploitation on the other. We can trace these patterns by briefly laying out the career of one key director of the period, John Schlesinger. True to the times, he won his spurs in television before he moved on to make feature films. His debut was A Kind of Loving (1962), an archetypal Northern, working class slice of life representation. The next one, Billy Liar! (1963) was already a transitional film, recounting the story of a white collar worker lost in day dreams. He dares not to follow his girl friend, who takes the train to South. As if with that same train Schlesinger moved to London for Darling (1965), which became one of the key depictions of the age. Julie Christie’s liberated woman manipulates men casually but ends up emotionally drained and desperate. After the fully modern Zeitgeist film, Schlesinger seems to have caught the shifting mood again, by asking Isn’t it time we went back to something more romantic, and about another age when people were buttoned up to their necks? The answer was the adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic, Far from the Madding Crowd, which came to be in harmony with the rising tide of nostalgia, fascination with Victoriana, neo-vernacular and all things ‘retro,’ as can be heard in a comment made by Schlesinger:
We all thought it was high time we got away from swinging London and looked at these really beautiful people – these people sitting round singing their songs, their harvest suppers, and coping with what life meted out to them. (Schlesinger quoted in Spiers 1970, 10).
This is a rather accurate description of Far from the Madding Crowd. Although Hardy had already surpassed George Eliot as the recorder of the everyday experience of the rural working class, this early novel, published in 1874, still retains traces of Eliot’s fine old, dear old quiant talking, honest living, country characters." (Eliot quoted in Williams 1973, 170). On the other hand, Hardy the non-conformist was also emerging with force; female independence, illegitimate children, references to feminine desire, touches of religious satire and disrespectful anti-pastoral and all-around candour did not go unchecked with the Victorian establishment (Morgan 1996, xvii-xxix; Hardy 1996, 42, 69, 79, 82, 86-7, 113, 139, 179-80, 188, 268). These features made it attractive for adaptation in the apogee of the liberal sixties and offered a splendid vehicle for the iconic woman of the era, Julie Christie.
Schlesinger followed the original story faithfully. Bathsheba Everdene, played by Christie, is an independent landowner and a farmer in Hardy Country, Dorsetshire. Mr. Boldwood (Peter Finch), a rich farmer, loves her, but she turns him down and falls passionately for the careless womaniser Sgt. Troy (Terence Stamp). Her bailiff Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates) secretly loves her from afar. All kinds of misunderstandings and heart breaks follow one another and finally Boldwood goes to prison for killing his rival Troy and Bathsheba ends up marrying Oak.
Thus it would seem that the film mediates the view of history of the landed middle class only and concentrates on those who have the wealth, time and possibilities for indulging in melodramatic adventures. However, unlike the later Forster or Austen adaptations, the main characters are frequently seen to mingle with the labourers and even to work with them in quite consensual atmosphere. Furthermore, there are also three particular scenes in which the classes meet and the distinctions between the dominators and the dominated are spelled out in no uncertain terms.
The first one concerns the Casterbridge labour market. Due to an accident, Gabriel Oak has lost his whole sheep stock - a testament to the hazards of small capital in Hardy’s realistic portrayal of the Victorian countryside (Williams op. cit., 208-9.) - and reduced to the status of hired labourer. In the cobblestone uphill road (a metaphor for his upward struggle) he passes a migrating family of seasonally unemployed or of evictees - regular features of the countryside as depicted by Hardy elsewhere (Hardy 1994, 458). Tracking shots around the market and its people construct clear distinctions between the classes. To apply Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts (Bourdieu 1984, 101-114, 168-75, 184-96), the distance between different positions in the social field and the different volumes of capital are manifested in various ways, which produce taste differences and classifications: in food and eating (the meagre, functional eating of the workers vs. the gentlemen’s club); body and posture (uncouth, humble and hunched workers, vs. confident, well-fed, upright middle class), clothes (the tattered, practical outfit of the workers vs. neat, polished, leisurely suits and ties of middle class); and of course speech (the cautious dialect and slang of the workers vs. the confident RP of the middle class) - all of them categories that still applied to social differences in the 1960s.
A cut from an inspection of a worker to that of a horse is designed to put forward the insecure and humiliating status of a labourer as a mere tool for landowners. Another tracking shot along a row of shepherds cuts to the group of well-to-do farmers who haphazardly eye them; there is an oversupply of labour, and thus, the market is governed by the employer and his evaluating, classifying gaze. This economic situation is visible in the tender and hopeful manner of the shepherds, ‘the commodities’ and the rowdy manner of the farmers, ‘the buyers.’
Another scene of startling social contrast is the one involving Troy, his former girlfriend and the now destitute Fanny Robin and Bathsheba. Fanny is degraded into Lumpenproletariat: she is homeless, has no money, dresses in dirty rags and has hidden herself in the stable of the Everdene farm. Her desperate condition is immediately contrasted with the wealthy bourgeois life style of Bathsheba and Troy by cutting into a shot which pans around the living room full of shiny furniture, tingling clocks and kitchy objets d’art. Subjective use of the camera could be explained as conveying solely Troy’s guilt, but the juxtaposition of the scenes of aristocratic abandon - when Troy finds Fanny he has just returned from a gambling spree - and Fanny’s poverty, the wealth of the Everdene household and the pauper’s eventual destiny clearly inspects the gap between the haves and have-nots in Victorian rural England. Moreover, the scene connects with the plight of woman in the era: not marrying can spell economic and even fatal disaster and even in marriage one is constantly in danger of being taken advantage of - and Bathsheba’s example, it must be remembered, is from the more independent end of the social and gender spectrum.
Most of the multi-class scenes are not, however, as fierce as the ones described above. Schlesinger did not manage to mediate the metaphorical depth of Hardy’s landscapes or his numerous classical and biblical allusions, but substituted them, as the contemporary reviewers noticed, with stylistic allusions to Brueghel, Hogarth and Corot (Price 1968, 39). Paralleling the humorous and sometimes condescending, sometimes idealising manner of these artists Schlesinger ends up with the depiction of the rural working class, which is closer to idyllic pastoral, rural folklore and Arcadia than Hardy’s satirical vision (265-6). In the film, a chorus of quaint and very funny locals and yokels supply loamish, Shakespearian ground-notes on the action," as New Statesman put it (20 Oct 1967). Workers thus represented were bought by the nostalgia-hungry press (Daily Express 17 Oct 1967, 5) and public mainly as comical sidekicks, props in the tableaux of the paradise lost. The credibility of this Golden Age -ideology was boosted with the vinjets, which intervene into the painterly landscape and situations. A throwback to Schlesinger’s documentary days (Phillips 1981, 50, 82) is evident for instance in the depictions of the agricultural machines, which in their seemingly objective how-things-work discourse inject the idyllic nostalgia discourse with ‘realist’ credentials.
The sense of rural bliss is best mediated in the harvest supper scene, where the owner and the staff of the Everdene farm are gathered. Labourers are a collection of quaint facial portraits, while their mistress sits at end of the table framed in a painterly, Christ-like manner. In accordance with pastoral myth, Oak’s flute music unites the scene and its characters both as a hierarchy and consensual harmony. This was the main structure of feeling in the film, despite the bleaker moments, and one which was also emphasised in the promotional material.The press book claimed that
"[t]he social order was static. No man thought of rising above the station to which he assumed providence had assigned him.... [T]he novel and the movie point up the virtue in the old social order. These humble lives had a security unknown to us today. (Far from the Madding Crowd, Small Press book)
The press agreed and did not criticise or question the nostalgia of the film. The fact that the press took this bait and praised the‘brilliant’, ‘ravishing’, ‘stunning’,’beautiful’,’staggering’ ’rolling countryside of Dorset and Wiltshire,’ is explained by the contemporary trend, fashion or chic for nostalgia, ‘the return to nature.’ There emerged a longing for tradition and stability, a clear-cut social order and consensus in an era which was witnessing growing problems with ideas of modernism and the decline of post-war bi-partisan spirit into ‘managed dissensus.’(Hall 1988, 32-3). On the one hand, Far from the Madding Crowd included a substantial representation of workers, manual labour and some uncompromising scenes of poverty and social insecurity. On the other hand, the majority of the multi-class scenes opted for the myth of pastoral and the old traditional stereotype of the comical worker as their main representational strategies.
The 1970s and Tess (1979/1981)
The liberal image and legislation of the sixties on equal pay, abortion, censorship, homosexuality, divorce and voting age and other permissive claptrap" came under a conservative backlash in the seventies, which the Right later crystallised in the praise of alleged Victorian values of family and work ethics. Coupled with international economic recession the problems of consensus politics and Keynesian economics eroded the idea of one nation toryism and gave rise to the radical right and its creed of competition, individualism, law and order and free market capitalism. According to Stuart Hall, during the seventies these concepts came to be established as the new common sense while the consensus and collective approaches such as the politico-industrial action of the unions were blackpainted through the discourses of ‘conspiracy’ and of ‘holding the nation as a hostage’(ibid., 20-6, 33, 49, 55).
Although the affluence had brought about more opportunities for social mobility and more finely stratified class structure, the gap between the rich and the poor was widening as the alienation, unemployment and homelessness increased towards the turn of the decade. In this sense and seen in the context of culture of conflict - race riots, IRA, Angry Brigade, industrial disputes - the economic and social divisions grew sharper than in the two previous decades. At the same time, however, the old, communal structures of identification, for instance, working class towns and neighbourhoods were declining, feeding a sense of insecurity and a demand for and consequent boom of nostalgic entertainment. (Marwick 1990, 327-32, 346-59; Marwick 1999, 272-81, 751-7).
One of the most consistent observations of growing nostalgia was made from a conservative, Christian humanist angle by Christopher Booker. In his book, The Seventies. Portrait of a Decade, he finds longing for the past ubiquituous: it is evident in Kenneth Clarke’s famous TV series on art history, Civilization; in bricks-and-mortar community of Coronation Street; in the natural escapism of Watership Down (and The Lord of the Rings); and in all kinds of conservations projects, retrofitting and anti-modernism. In 1978 he connected the opposite parties of labour dispute in The Times newspapers to H.G. Wells’ ‘eloi’ and ‘the morlocks.’ He then deduced that the reason why the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs was so popular was that it represented the stable social order of the Edwardian England, where everyone knew his or her place. Images of stability were in demand in unstable and conflictual times (Booker 1980, 161-6).
Putting Booker’s right-wing pessimism aside, we can appreciate the point about the huge popularity of prestige and the heritage TV series of the seventies. Britain became one of the world’s leading exporters of TV series which also returned indirect income in the form of increased heritage tourism. In many productions a wide social spectrum was on display. In Upstairs, Downstairs, for instance, the aristocracy and their servants lived harmoniously side by side, the servants loyal, discreet and even servile to the masters; conflict and rebellion are rare and individual matters. Still, the working classes did have a weighty screen presence and round characterisation - a situation that was to change in the eighties (LeMahieu 1990, 244-5, 247-8, 252).
The film industry fared a lot worse. On the heritage front, the ailing financial situation led to the production of TV films, some of which later ended up in theatres and to the international market. Their quality was not always on the level of the TV series, as can be seen in Joseph Hardy’s Great Expectations, released in 1974. The past is as plastic and shiny as in the retrospirited commercials of the time, the acting mannered, literary and stuck-up. The conservative moral it conveys concentrates on the features of class distinction and the hardships of social mobility.
Quality or ‘artistic’ productions, which had considerable presentist concerns, usually had bad box office records because of their avant garde features. Ken Russell’s historical films are a case in point (Walker 1986, 20, 81-5). Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley, a film about seventeenth century dissidents and communards, a potentially very appealing topic in 1973, failed financially because of its eccentric, anti-traditional representation of the past (ibid., 223-4; Tibbetts 2000, 227, 237-46).
Directors with a foreign background managed to create some memorable historical films. Joseph Losey extended his sharp analysis of the English class system to the Edwardian period in The Go-Between (1970). Starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, it tells a story of an illegitimate loveaffair between an upper middle class lady and a farm worker. Class antagonisms, stereotypes and prejudices are laid bare, but the fantasy of the vitalist working class male is still kept in check by making him a complex character often seen at work. Thus, the representation is similar to Far from the Madding Crowd but clearly different from, say, Maurice (1987), (of which more a bit later). Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) carries on the critical angle in discussing the class-ridden past. Through the social climber Barry, the codes, distinctions and hypocrisies of class are revealed: lowly social origin is an anathema to the aristocracy (Klein 1981, 96, 104). In The Elephant Man (1980) David Lynch created a mythopoeic tale situated in the midst of the poverty and squalor of Dickensian London. Although its class representation, as Raphael Samuel has pointed out, is schematic and denigrating towards the lower end of the social scale (Samuel, op. cit., 382, 385-6), we still have to acknowledge that different classes at least exist in the film. One of the last historical films in this line before it petered out was Roman Polanski’s Tess to which I now turn for a more detailed look.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, published in 1891, is arguably Hardy’s greatest work. In this novel he presents the Wessex countryside as a wide social and cultural panorama, which cannot be reduced to the mythic, static timelessness, rustic and nostalgic charm of peasant life. There is a backdrop of fading, ancient traditions and customs, but they are strongly interlaced with ‘the ache[s] of modernism’(Hardy 1994, 160): the rapidly changing dynamics of work, inheritance, rents, trade, class, separation, insecurity and, on a wider scale, the fluctuations of capitalism (Williams, op. cit., 203, 208, 210). On a couple of occasions, Hardy switches into almost documentary mode in his description of the social history and change in rural Western England (Hardy 1994, 449-50).
Yet his characters always develop and retain full and credible personal histories. The people are at the mercy of the dire social and other circumstances but are not reducible to them - a theme which can be found in Roman Polanski’s films, for example in Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966) and Chinatown (1974). Furthermore, both Polanski’s film narratives and his own life story were closely connected to violence and sexuality, which also figured strongly, albeit in more implicit and structural form in Hardy’s novel. This analogy can be seen as the foundation of what was to become a well-balanced and also rather presentist film. Polanski himself described the film plainly as a story of a simple girl and her quite ordinary tribulations in a rather cruel and rigid society. (Polanski quoted in Costanzo 1981, 74). It is this society, its representation, distinctions and their impact on the individuals that I will focus on.
Cutting a long story ruthlessly short, this a story about Tess, played by Nastassja Kinski, who is a rural labourer from a poor family. To earn more money she goes to work in the wealthy household of her presumed relatives. She is seduced and raped by her ‘cousin’ Alec (Leigh Lawson) after which she goes back home and gives birth to a baby which soon dies. Tess then departs for a dairy farm further away, where she meets and falls in love with the owner of the farm, Angel (Peter Firth). They get married; Tess tells him of her past and is instantly disowned by him. She plunges back into poverty and harsh labour. Alec reappears and manipulates her into marrying him. At the end the repentant Angel returns, Tess kills Alec and elopes with Angel. The escape is short-lived; she is caught by the police at Stonehenge and escorted away.
As in the novel, Tess in the film is constantly connected to labour and seen working. Temporary assignments and all kinds of external pressures enabled by the lack of job security, drive her to change jobs and locales. This brings her into contact with different classes. Distinctions are represented by contrasting Tess’ humble and quiet habitus (in which her poor social origins are implicated) with the colour, light, clothes, arrogance, accent, posture of upper middle class Alec and his manorial surroundings. The work at the dairy farm introduces her to a radical intellectual variant of the middle class, Angel, and an almost communal, a kind of Owenite atmosphere, a softer version of capitalism. The hardships of the swede field, however, relocate her to the bottom of the social scale, to the world of wanton exploitation.
As in Far from the Madding Crowd, the leading female encounters the fatal moral and real economy of the failure of marriage: because of her low social origin and non-existent financial capital, Tess, unlike most Austen or Forster heroines, has no safety nets, and is thus seen to decline from a jewelled bride, from a wealthy bourgeois lady-to-be to a homeless pauper and finally to the lowly status of a hired field labourer. We do not only see that Groby’s threat has a sexual, male chauvinist cause, but also that it uses the economic leverage: his power over her job. The mise-en-scene and montage of the scene serve to highlight this tense class relation: cuts are made between the upright, clean Groby in leisurely clothes and the hunched, dirty, tired Tess and Retty in ragged functional clothes. Groby’s off screen voice frames Tess and emphasises the implicit structural pressure, which is larger than his persona. Laughter saves the scene from falling into melodrama and conjoins it with the next shot, which is of Tess holding a pretty shoe. A relic from another time and social stratum, the shoe becomes, in the echo of the swede field, a metonymy for a sense of loss of position, of downward social mobility.
Angel is a middle class radical, parson’s son turned farmer. This classification arises despite the fact that he works at the dairy farm like everybody else. The distinction remains: he is addressed as ‘sir’, he has the accent and phraseology of an educated man and he eats separated from others. This education and his economic position allow him the sole privilege of reading and art: it is Angel’s flute that now charms (and also commands) the farm into harmonious unity. Hardy presents Angel as nominally communist (Hardy 1994, 178); an attitude which Polanski, to my mind rightly, interprets as theoretical and supplemental to the practice rather than actual by placing The Capital at his bedside. In any case, his socially superior position and its advantages are revealed, when, after dismissing Tess for failing his high (and rather hypocritical) ideals, he has the safety net of either being helped by his family background or of leaving for Brazil.
In the end, Tess was, as New Statesman put it, as ravishing a spectacle as the Schlesinger with the further benefit of life’s warts - mud, wrinkles, sweat, smoke, stains, bruises." (10 Apr 1981, 28). Of course, Polanski did not fail to exploit the documentary, painterly and pastoral possibilities of Hardy (Costanzo op. cit., 76), and the press praised the film for its ‘luminous’ and ‘gold-lit photography’, and connected its visual splendour to French and Victorian landscape painters and ‘the poems of Theocritus.’ (The Times, 10 Apr 1981; Spectator, 18 Apr 1981, 25; Observer, 12 Apr 1981, 31). However, because of the recurring imagery of the downsides of rural life, the film did not end up endorsing the mythical or idealised version of the rural past. Moreover, unlike most of the period pictures, it placed the point of view firmly at a low social location: that of the woman tied to manual labour. There is a good case for claiming that Polanski fetisises Nastassja Kinski’s Tess by pitying her and making her a mere object of male control and voyeurism (Fierz 1999, 104-5, 108). Still, we must observe with J.B. Bullen, that "[e]verywhere the passive presence of the heroine is foregrounded in the context of the carefully chosen sociological, fiscal, and sexual economy of the narrative" (Bullen 1990, 53).
The contexts seen in Tess were about to be replaced by other ones. Polanski’s film was released in England in April 1981, a week after the premiere of Chariots of Fire, which heralded the coming of the heritage film proper and its different social emphases. While Tess laid bare the class-ridden Victorian countryside and the plight of the women and the poor, Chariots of Fire centred on the experience of the upper-middle class in Cambridge and in sport, telling a success story with noticeable Thatcherite underpinnings (Quart 1993, 25-7; Hill 1999, 20-8). In 1981, Tess earned a bit more than Chariots, both films won Oscars, but next year Polanski’s film returned only under a tenth of its rival’s income (see: BFI Yearbook of Film and Television 1983, 200). In 1985, Tess still made it to British Film Year’s list of films chosen to represent the years of ‘British Revival.’ However, other period films on the list, such as Another Country, Chariots of Fire, The Draughtsman’s Contract, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Raj revival films such as Gandhi and Heat and Dust had already established the framework for the new kind of heritage cinema (Walker 1986, 270). Class-wise it meant that the social vision narrowed to cover almost exclusively the upper or upper-middle echelons of society.
The 1980s and 90s and Jude (1996)
This development was preceded by the pomp and circumstance of the Royal wedding in 1981 and that anachronistic, romantic, imperial adventure, the Falkland’s war, or the war as heritage, in 1982 (ibid., 179; Morgan 1990, 4; Hall, op. cit., 68-75). Behind these events lay the deeper ideological currents of Thatcherism. The Government focused on services, money supply, zero-inflation, state deregulation, law and order, decreasing taxation and integrating Britain into the global financial market. These programmes had a profound effect on the society and especially the lower classes. They made social mobility a bit easier, but worsened problems elsewhere. Controlling inflation was more important than that of unemployment, which soared near three million in 1983. The manufacturing sector was abandoned to decline. Deregulation, anti-unionism and flexible labour markets, which were popular reforms at the time, resulted, in the long run, in the culture of insecurity, temporary jobs, part time work and long term unemployment (Hill op. cit., 6-11; Hewison 1997, 210-4).
In the face of the hard, post-industrial economic revolution, Thatcher, rather paradoxically, called for a return to tradition, to Victorian times, to family values and repudiated the permissive sixties for destroying Britain’s morale and self-respect. At the same time the neo-liberal reforms made family and working life much more unstable. She revived patriotism, and constructed national myths out of the bric-a-brac of history, xenophobia and paranoia" (Elsaesser 1993, 57). Nostalgia for past values together with the marketing and consumption approach resonated well with the already thriving heritage industry. There were ‘parallel cults’ of working-class oriented industrial heritage and the upper-class castle and country house mythology (Hewison 1997, 265), but the case could easily be made that the upper-class ended up much more visible. For instance, in 1974, the heritage lobby used the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was itself later to become a more consumer oriented, Harrod’s of the museum world," (ibid., 190-3, 269-70) as an arena for pleading their case. The abolishment of death duties at the end of the seventies secured the upper class country house for good and struck a chord with Thatcher’s policy of cutting the tax burden of the highest incomes and properties.
In the 1980s historical and costume film was to follow and enforce this branch of heritage. The heritage films portrayed culture, values and property of a particular class, the upper-middle class and projected them as national heritage (Higson 1993, 114). There is nothing unusual or wrong in sharing the splendour of the olden days in visual form, but in many of the present cases the history was totally purged from meagre living conditions and poverty rife in the periods depicted, and still presented as national history or heritage - and that is interesting. In the 1980s, the social realism, which was found in films with a contemporary setting, was in its turn attacked by apologists of the past. Daily Express derided Lindsay Anderson for his Britannia Hospital (1982) saying that in the thick of Falklands conflict - and in the face of our nation’s rekindled unity - he is marching into cinematic battle with a film that MOCKS us" (Quoted in Hill, op. cit., 140, 141. Emphasis is in Hill’s quotation) Although Anderson’s film can be seen forwarding covert 1970s conservative discontent, it acknowledges the existence of a number of classes, social divisions and distinctions - a vision, which was, perhaps less ferociously, connected with the past in Tess.
Between the premieres of Chariots of Fire and Tess, the first of the numerous riots erupted in Brixton. In this kind of rekindled unity," reassuring and nostalgic illusions were in demand, which is probably why the upbeat line of Chariots of Fire rather than that of Tess and the more complex and inclusive 1970s costume drama tradition rose to prominence in the 1980s. Furthermore, Chariots of Fire and the subsequent heritage films could be seen to inhabit more precisely the location and the tone of the Thacherite ideology. Many critics have pointed out that the films strive to be critical or ironic of the rituals, mannerisms, vested interests and repressive codes of the aristocracy and the upper-middle class. However, this effort is subverted by sumptuous, fetisising, visual spectacle of the very same property and rituals the narrative tries to criticise (ibid., 76, 86-7, 100-1; Higson 1993, 117-8; Church-Gibson 2000, 116; Macnab, MacArthur, Kemp and Pidduck in 2001, 160, 186, 195, 134, respectively). Could it not be possible to see here the Thatcherite ethos of individuality and self-help attacking and criticising the old, rigid and unfair class system, while, at the same time celebrating its other, central theme: private property, wealth creation and culture of consumption? Furthermore, like commercials, these films visualise the top slot, the top products and life styles, the ultimate goals of a neo-liberal enterprise culture; there is no need to depict other, less well-off classes. Let us look at some examples.
Arguably the first heritage cycle was the trio of star-studded Agatha Christie adaptations during the latter half of the seventies (Walker 1986, 129-32; J. Walker 1985, 32.), but since their action was located outside England, I will skip them and start with Brideshead Revisited, a prestige TV series launched in October 1981. Unlike Upstairs, Downstairs, the action is almost totally confined to the upper class characters relieved from the burden of work; when servants appear, they are more like props than persons. In Tess, her parents’ drinking habits had dire financial and social consequences; here, Sebastian’s well-funded dipsomania goes on and on, exposing the decadent side of the aristocracy to criticism. As regards the spectacle, this sumptuous version of [Evelyn] Waugh’s gluttony" (Sight & Sound, Winter 1981/82, 58) contributed, like its predecessors, to the creation of set piece[s] for the tourist trade" (American Film, Oct 1982, 40) and commercial good will" (Elsaesser 1993, 59). for other British retro and heritage products.
Another Country, released in 1984, is all about Cambridge, its students, power struggles and consequently the upper-middle class. Marxism, which was for Angel a theoretical interest along the softer capitalist practice, is now 100 per cent theoretical, rhetorical and probably meant to appear rather ridiculous as a part of the criticism of the university as institution. Then again, the rural landscapes of Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess have changed into landscape gardens; cottages and farm buildings have changed into splendours of Cambridge architecture for conspicuous visual consumption." The absence of work, of production in the welter of commodities is familiar from our own consumer culture; the distance to Tess and the milk train scene, in which the alienation of the consumer is made explicit, is remarkable (Craig 2001, 3-5; Hardy 1994, 239-40).
In Maurice, released in 1987, the point of view is firmly in the upper-middle class. The working class is seen from this perspective only, unlike in Go-Between, which brings out both view points, and Tess, which is located in the rural working-class experience. In placing issues of sexuality above those of class Maurice joins a larger trend more and more geared towards the questions of individuality (Eagleton 1997, 194-8).
But perhaps the history in Maurice and other Forster adaptations reflected a present that was by the early nineties becoming more equal, more middle class and consumerist across the social classes? According to The Report of The Commission on Social Justice, published in 1994, the trickle-down effect of free-market economics had not happened: the gap between rich and poor is greater than at any time since the 1930s," while for the more well-off insecurity and anxiety are rife." While the top twenty per cent got richer, one quarter of the population was reduced to poverty, 40 per cent of the unemployed were long term ones, the homelessness was at the European top level and the crime rose spectacularly throughout the eighties. On the one hand a superclass, on the other, an underclass had emerged, while the belief in the existence of class struggle, according to a Gallup poll, had gone up to 81 per cent of the population (Social Justice. Strategies for National Renewal. The Report of The Commission on Social Justice, 1994, 27-9, 32, 35, 48, 49;The Economist, 27 Sep 1997, 4).
Social realist, Brit Grit films continued to address these issues, while heritage films remained largely in the upper middle class zone and offered a historical solace without conflict filled with commodities and cultural allusions invested with symbolic capital. There were occasional whiffs of social criticism of class such as Leonard Bast’s characterisation in Howard’s End, but even that concerned the distinctions within the middle classes. The early Austen adaptations Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, were, because of their source material, focused on the propertied class of the Regency period exclusively. Servants and peasants, when they appear, are more or less like props, not characters (Williams, op. cit., 166-8; Medhurst 2001, 11-14, esp. 13). In fairness it must be noted that most of these films mounted praiseworthy feminist critiques of the periods they portray through the restrictions and possibilities of female desire for marriage, inheritance, property, social mobility and freedom. But that was the limit and the problem remains: if the feminist issues could be updated or modernised why not class issues (Pidduck 1998, 393; Craig 2001, 5)?
The appearance of another, parallel, more sombre approach was seen in Persuasion, adaptation of Austen’s last novel, released in 1995. It deployed clothes, not costumes and represented the bric-a-brac of the heritage property as an appendix to idleness, snobbery and pretension" (Church Gibson 2000, 117). In the search of wider audiences, the heritage codes were given a more playful, post-modern and grand guignol twists in Orlando, The Wings of the Dove, Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, which represented history as a game and a palimpsest of interlacing periods and pop cultural references. With these two new trends, dark or post-heritage" (ibid., 122-3; Pidduck 2001, 130-2; Higson 2003, 194-8), the context of Michael Winterbottom’s Jude, had arrived.
In Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, Hardy moved from the countryside to the townscape and from farming to the craftsmanship of masonry. Being his bleakest novel, Jude depicts the oppressive and hypocritical moral codes of sexuality, class-biased education and their combined, tragic effects on a low income couple and later family. The reception of the novel, which made Hardy end his prose writing for good, was deeply mixed, ranging from Athenaeum, which saw Mr. Hardy running mad in right royal fashion," to W.D. Howells in Harper’s Weekly, according to whom one can only praise [Thomas Hardy] for his truth." Saturday Review expressed an opinion on the class angle of the novel which is interesting to us:
"For the first time in English literature the almost intolerable difficulties that beset an ambitious man of the working class - the snares, the obstacles, the countless rejections and humiliations by which our society eludes the services of these volunteers - receive adequate treatment." (All quotes in Cox (ed.), 1970, 241, 254, 280 respectively)
Michael Winterbottom had tackled bleak problems in his contemporary films - multiple sclerosis in Go Now, madness and violence in Butterfly Kiss, IRA themes in Love Lies Bleeding - in light of which the turn to history, especially through Hardy becomes understandable. His 1996 adaptation Jude has left out much of the novel, but retains its central themes. Working-class topics and issues of sexual morality are hinted at already in the black-and-white prologue, which alludes to the style and ambience of both Ken Loach and Ingmar Bergman and their respective fortes of class and sexuality. Allusions are not, however, meaningful only in themselves, or as a part of post-modern play; they are a part of an approach, which, according to the scriptwriter Hossein Amini, tries to destroy the heritage film from within" (Church Gibson, op. cit., 119). As regards the representation of working class and poverty, did this strategy succeed?
Jude, played by Christopher Eccleston, is a village orphan, who early on catches an interest in the city and the university education it provides. He works as a mason but also reads classics. While still in countryside he marries Arabella (Rachel Griffiths), but she soon leaves him. He decides to fulfil his dream of enlisting at the college and moves into the city. He is bluntly refused access, despite his learning. Jude continues as a mason and meets his cousin Sue (Kate Winslet), who tries to become a teacher. They fall in love and then out again due to other men entering into Sue’s life. In the search of work, they both lead a mobile life and meet again and have children. Arabella reappears and hands to him their illegitimate child. The suspicious marital status of Jude and Sue makes it almost impossible for them to find work or lodgings and they are reduced to poverty. The eldest child feels guilty and kills his siblings and himself in an act of horrific atonement. Sue blames herself and the lovers drift apart for the final time.
As in Tess, work is continually represented. Teaching, decorative painting as well as roof repairing, stone quarrying and pig killing construct an ever-present reality and a force affecting the characters and their identities. The idyllic shampoo commercial atmosphere of a sunny river in the woods is pushed off balance by the girls washing pig innards - a strong contrast to A Room with a View and its nude bathing scenes. The main emphasis is on the skilled manual labour of the masonry. There are artistic rewards and a close, guild-like bond between the workers, but it is still hard work. The marks of the years of work are captured in a brief close-up of Jude’s hands. Sue holds them and says: You’re hands are rough, Jude." So would yours be if they handled mallet and chisel all day", he answers. As in Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes or in Tina Modotti’s Hands Resting on a Tool, a whole lifetime in a particular work, class, lifestyle and taste dictated by necessity are present in this powerful metonymy (Bourdieu, op. cit., 175-7; Hardy 1998, 133. See also: Heidegger 1995, 32-5; Place (ed.) 2000, 78-9).
Class differences are spelled out in the topography of the city. The university is represented with walls and gates, standing for exclusion and privileged access while the quarters, lodgings and markets of the common folk are represented as dense, noisy and without the luxuries of private property - country walks, space and solitude - so often depicted in the heritage films. On a conceptual level, Jude’s indisputable merits and idealistic enthusiasm are run down by the university, which refuses his application on the grounds of his working-class occupation and background. Winterbottom catches Hardy’s irony in several scenes where Jude is seen building and repairing the university which has shunned him and admitted less competent applicants. These class-afflicted positions are summed up in the Remembrance Day procession.
In medium and full tracking shots, Jude, the tutor of Saint Slums College", is seen as a part of the crowd uniform in dirty, dishevelled clothing. Then the film cuts to a concluding, all-embracing high angle long shot of the university procession with a crescendo in the music. Next, there is a cut to a full shot, which represents the academy as a crowd totally distinct in clothing and posture from that of the common folk - a social situation guarded by the police. Then follows a medium shot with two layers: a static crowd in which Jude, a passive on-looker, ends up standing still, and the university world, which moves without his reach behind the invisible wall of biased distinction and class (TLS, 11 Oct 1996, 22). This polarity is emphasised by cutting to and fro between different angles of the procession and Jude in the crowd.
This is the outside view of the campus, which is literally a world away from the insider’s view seen in Another Country and Maurice. The Remembrance Day ritual, summed up in that high angle long shot, reproduces two worlds or two nations, which are structurally quite close to the divisions emerging in 1980s’ and 1990s’ Britain between the rich and the poor, the service class and the peripheral workers and the unemployed (Hill, op. cit., 7).
Another feature, that might be familiar to the 1990s audience, is Jude’s temping in changing jobs. There is no security: he is dismissed on moral grounds that are irrelevant to his performance in work. This leads to declining income and near-poverty, and as moral outcasts they have difficulties in getting lodgings. The codes of class and sexuality press on them with a vengeance that is a lot more thorough-going than in the upper echelons seen in heritage cinema where mobility means tourism, education or relieving escape from trouble. Angel could escape, unlike Tess or Jude.
Furthermore, there are no horses and carriages in Jude, but a lot of walking with heavy burdens. The railways are not picturesque period signifiers, but sudden, loud shocks bursting to the screen. Philip French wrote in the Observer review, that the visual motif is of the trains taking Jude on journeys he believes are acts of free will, though in fact he is being carried by a machine over which he has no control, on rigid lines laid down by society. How different from a man on horseback" (Observer, 6 Oct 1996, 11). In mainstream heritage film horses and carriages imply wealth, which enables mobility and freedom; Jude, who lacks the former, cannot possess the latter and is forced to make virtue out of necessity - according to Bourdieu, a condition typical of the working classes (op. cit, 177).
Michael Winterbottom wanted to avoid fetisisation of the past and highlight its relevance. In the light of my content analysis this seems to be the result. As might be expected, Kate Winslet, who played Sue, claimed that the language is so contemporary and what happens is so today that you could have put us on jeans and T-shirts and it would have been exactly the same" (Kate Winslet quoted in Cameron-Wilson (ed.), 1996, 158). Reviews in the quality press also point to this conclusion. The Guardian states that Jude honours Hardy chiefly by making him very much a figure of his time yet still relevant to ours" (Guardian Screen, 4 Oct 1996, 8). The Times acknowledged the dismissal of regular heritage features and noted the forceful contemporary-sounding tale of dashed hopes and love fighting against the odds" (The Times, 3 Oct 1996, 35). Lizzie Francke made the connection by pointing out that Jude’s
"passionate testament - poignantly retained by the film adaptation - stands firm today, when education policies pretend the gates are open, leaving impoverished students to find later that the inner portals can only be prised open with money" (Sight and Sound, Oct 1996, 6).
General tuition fees were introduced to British universities in 1997, making higher education more exclusive. It would seem that buying power has at least to some extent replaced traditional class markers as the measuring stick for discrimination. Jude, a historical film, but an extraordinary heritage film, addressed these issues through its analogous, presentist character and class positions.
When seen side by side with Thatcher’s Victorian rhetoric and John Major’s Orwellian romanticism (see: Hewison 1997, 298), films such as Jude remind us of the negative aspects of the past. If the 1980s saw a partial return to the free-market economy of the 19th-century model, increasing poverty and tuition fees could be seen as similar to the squalor and disempowerment and disenfranchisement rife in the same, much admired period. With its contemporary language and stars, Jude, as Far from the Madding Crowd before it, bridges the gap between the past and present and constructs a history that becomes a comment on the present. It showed Two Nations, which were remarkably like one-third have-nots and two-thirds haves of the ’Brasialianized,’