British heritage movies

The genre of British Heritage and Literary Movies becomes first popular in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s when a large amount of British movies about either well-known personalities from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, for example about William Shakespeare via Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998), Oscar Wilde via Wilde (dir. Brian Gilbert, 1997), Jane Austen via Becoming Jane (dir. Julian Jarrold, 2007), or their well-known pieces of literature like Austen's Pride and Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright, 2005) or Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (dir. Baz Luhrmann 1996) are released (Buchanan 106).

These British Heritage Movies all work in the same way: they nostalgically depict the lives of personalities who are a part of British culture and enables the audience to go beyond the author's death (Higson 208). Furthermore, the British movies mirror a time when this country was at least one of the most powerful and richest countries of the world. These "middlebrow dramas“ (Buchanan 107) evoke the idea of a more sophisticated and educated cinema, created for an erudite audience.

In addition to that, these romantic costume dramas show pictures of beautiful and typical British landscapes and deal with the positive aspects of the time they are set in, mostly in combination with a love story of the protagonist, played by well-known British actors, and thereby appeal to a female audience (Buchanan 106).

Works Cited

Buchanan, Judith. The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Higson, Andrew. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. London: Oxford University Press, 2003.