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Rule, Britannia! The Biopic and
British National Identity
Edited by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer
SUNY
Series –
Horizons of Cinema Albany
(New York): SUNY Press, 2019 Paperback.
xxix + 329 p. ISBN 978-1438471129. $26.95
Reviewed by Nicole Cloarec Université Rennes
1
A commonplace in academic studies about biopics is to start recalling
how much the genre has long been neglected by scholars as it was deemed “of
very low repute” [Bingham : 3], too popular and formulaic. Biopics may be a relatively recent field of study, they
nonetheless have been the subject of a significant number of challenging scholarly
works, reflecting the recent ongoing popular and commercial success of the
genre since the 1990s as well as the “biographical turn” in historiography and
literature. After George Custen’s seminal analysis (1992) that focused on the
classical Hollywood form, academic studies have highlighted the key role that biopics
play in building up representations of the past. And while many have stressed
the fluidity and hybridity of the genre, they also all strive to offer some
original angles, focusing on thematic groupings and issues of representation
along perspectives of gender, socio-professional categories or national history
and national identity. In this regard, Tom Brown & Belen Vidal aptly stated
that “the biopic feeds fantasies of
national identity” [2]. As its title clearly indicates, Rule, Britannia! The Biopic and British National Identity follows
this latest trend. Rule, Britannia! comprises
essays of scholars from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. It is composed of
a preface and 14 articles, organised in an introduction and three thematic
parts. As the editors explain in the preface, the volume was actually conceived
as a sequel to a previous collection of essays about biopics and the American
national identity, also published by SUNY press and edited by William H.
Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, the latter also co-editor of the present volume. In
the introduction of this former book entitled Invented Lives, Imagined Communities : The Biopic and American
National Identity, William H. Epstein engaged in theoretical issues involved
in defining national identity, following the founding figures of Benedict
Anderson (1983) and Anthony D. Smith (1991). He also outlined questions related
to life writing studies and biopics, expanding on Custen’s and Bingham’s work. It may therefore be understandable that for their preface the editors of
Rule, Britannia! chose not to focus again
on the theoretical aspects of life writing studies in general or of biopics in
particular. Instead, the preface mainly deals with the thorny issue of what a
British national identity could mean.
Drawing on political theorists and historians like Tom Nairn (1977), Krishan
Kumar (2003) or Michael Kenny (2014), it thus purports “to acknowledge and
briefly outline, the difficulties of long-standing about the peculiar status of
the UK and what identity is now offered to its citizens, topics that British
filmmakers would hardly escape negotiating in biographical pictures devoted to
figures of cultural importance and worthiness” [xii]. It also rightly stresses
that there is no resolution to defining such vexing key notions as ‘nation’ and
‘identity’ and clearly states that any type of definition of a British national
identity must not only be pluralistic but also ever-evolving, driven by
competing cultural strands. Hence the warning right at the beginning of the
preface that the book’s title is meant to be an ironical comment on the main
subject tackled in the volume, namely “how screen portraits of the country’s
great and notable might be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the
shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity” [xi]. In view of such a compelling conclusion, it is a little disconcerting to
find some overlapping use of terms between English and British, as testifies a
sentence like “this collection also demonstrates and celebrates the
multiplicities of identities that continue to define England” [16] while the
paragraph discusses British national identity. One can also be surprised to
read that “rapid change has meant that much of the not considerable literature
devoted to the British biopic has been in the last few years rendered out of date”,
citing Jeffrey Richards’s Films and
British National Identity (1997) as a case in point since Richards’s book
does not deal with biopics, or to find that Northern Ireland is comprised of “three
(sic) Northern counties” [xx]. More importantly the reader may find it frustrating that the preface does
not delve further into issues more closely related to the specificity of the
biopic genre in British cinema. The reason for this becomes apparent with the
editorial choice of a first article that is also meant to function as an
introduction and provide “an example of bio-cinematicization that challenges
the customary Progressiveness of the screen memorialization of national
figures” [xxviii]. Homer B. Pettey’s “Introduction : The Kray Twins and
Biographical Media” focuses on three biopics of the notorious Kray brothers. The
article is extremely informative and well-argued, comparing the facts and events
that are selected in the different biopics. Most interestingly, it also
examines the twins’ biographies and biopics within the context of British
national identity as they saw it. Still, one can wonder in what way a pair of
psychopathic criminals can be idiosyncratic as regards British identity – apart
from being closely associated to a specific time, the 1960s, and a place,
London. However odd the choice may seem, Pettey’s claim is that the Kray
biopics do reflect pervasive issues of British national identity. In particular,
his conclusion raises a number of thematic and formal issues that will be
tackled in the other articles, issues pertaining to the biopic genre in general
but are given a British inflection. These include: -the biographees’ relationships to the media that may also determine the
intermedial use of other media in the film; -the exploration of the disparities between public figure and private individual; -the sense of one’s destiny being tied to national history; -the use of marital conflicts or sexuality to allegorise political and
social problems; -the questioning of consensual discourses of national identity through
transgressive behaviour which can be conveyed on a thematic as well as a formal
level, thus challenging the staid “middlebrow” reputation of the genre. While dealing with a wide range of production periods – from 1912 (Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth) to
2016 (Riper Street) – and of genres –
from mainstream to art cinema, including some television fictions and series –
all articles provide revealing case studies that investigate various aspects of
life writing on screen in relation to British history, culture and national
identity. Unsurprisingly the first part of the volume is devoted to “Royalty and Politicians”.
Since “the very idea of monarchy […] is deeply embedded in the stories Britain
tells about itself” [Sandbrook: 192], three articles appropriately focus on
figures of monarchs. The first article, though, may be a little puzzling since it is only
loosely related to the heading and puts the emphasis on the marginal over the
typical. Marcia Landy’s “The Biopic, the Nation, and Counter-History in the
Films of Derek Jarman” actually deals with Derek Jarman’s three biopics, about
the painter Caravaggio, King Edward II through the adaptation of Marlowe’s play
and the philosopher Wittgenstein. The article discusses “Jarman’s uses of self
that intertwine biography and autobiography” [23] through which Jarman’s
biographical films “present a heritage that is oppositional in form and
content” [25] and clearly demonstrates how Derek Jarman appropriates and
subverts the genre to construct a counter-history that can inscribe his own personal
marginality and political agenda. One can only deplore the poor editorial work
(typos, omissions of words) that prevents a smooth reading and mars the quality
of the article. Fortunately it is not at all representative of the high
editorial quality of the other articles. Homer B. Pettey’s “Elizabeth I and the Life of Visual Culture” starts
with a comprehensive historiography of Elisabeth’s biopics through the ages
both in British and American cinema. Pettey then focuses on the political use
that Elisabeth I made of her portraits. Using both contextual and formal
analysis, his intermedial study of these portraits shows how they determine the
queen’s representation in films, in particular how they dramatise Elisabeth’s
dual body (personal and regal). Interestingly, the next article is again devoted to a female sovereign
and takes up the same gendered question of a dichotomy between femininity and
sovereignty. In “Gender and Authority in Queen Victoria Films” Jeffrey Richards
first looks into the reasons of the public’s fascination for royalty in
biopics. He detects two simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, processes
at work, which are mythologisation and humanisation [67-68]. The case of Queen Victoria
is then studied as the first “media monarch” [68], namely living at the advent
of modern mass media, and from a gender perspective, arguing that “during her
reign she moved successively through the various phases of approved
nineteenth-century models of womanhood”. Richards’s article is certainly one of
the most comprehensive overviews of Victoria biopics, starting with a genealogy
of the selection of incidents that will set a pattern to her life on screen,
then detailing each film that is analysed in their context of production. Giselle Bastin in “The Re-Centering of the Monarch in the Royal Biopic: The Queen
and The King’s Speech” focuses on two
films that deal with a constitutional crisis. Her contention is that they
follow a long tradition of films that “favor storylines that stress the
enduring continuity of the Crown in times of social and political upheaval”
[86]. The reader will find interesting echoes with the former two articles
through the notion of the “King’s Two Bodies” and the critical use of the media
to communicate the symbolic function of the monarchy. She therefore concludes
that “both films continue to utilize the structuring conceits of early biopics
in their enlisting of audience identification with the sovereigns’ mediated selves
as they are portrayed through portraiture and photographs, but they further the
thesis that for the monarch to be truly royal then he or she must embody
royalness beyond imagery” [101]. The last article in this first part, Linda Ruth Williams’s “The Iron Lady : Politics and/in
Performance,” switches to the controversial figure of Margaret Thatcher. Drawing
on the artistic team’s comments and promotional discourse that testify to the
unease of making a biopic about such a divisive political figure, Williams
takes up one of the main questions that has been recurring in reviews and
academic papers, namely whether it is possible or appropriate to make a feminist film about a woman
overtly hostile to women’s rights, but who used her femininity as much as some
traditionally “male” qualities. Williams thus contends that the film
nevertheless “foregrounds gender politics, particularly through an
investigation of ageing”, so that this “narrative decision to read female power
through frailty is what makes it most interesting and most vulnerable, an
uneasily feminist film in a contested political visual field” [109]. More
specifically, Williams compellingly relates the question of female leadership
to the question of authorship both in filmmaking and actor’s performance. Part II “Artistic Biography” examines biopics about or around the lives
of the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the writers Charles Dickens and Iris
Murdoch and the painters Dora Carrington and Francis Bacon. Deborah Cartmell’s “Casting the British Biopic: The Barretts of Wimpole Street 1934-1957” actually shifts focus on
“the creation of a Hollywood British identity, simultaneously fetishising and
demonizing the British, while covertly valorizing American values” [129]. Her
article highlights the key role of casting in so far as “biographical films
were soon to be identified as “actors’ pictures” [130]. Throughout a comparative
study of the two films adapted from the same play, it offers an enlightening
case of a remake that turned out to be a commercial and critical failure while
the original was successful. Cartmell proposes a number of explanations that throw
light on the evolution of the subgenre of the female artistic biopic and the
American perception of “British-ness”. While setting her analysis as part of her research in “theorizing the
literary biopic in relation to wider discourses of history and identity” [145],
Hila Shachar’s “The Muse’s Tale : Rewriting the English Author in The Invisible Woman” focuses on Ralph
Fiennes’s film based on Claire Tomalin’s biography of Nelly Ternan, Charles
Dickens’s mistress during the last years of his career. Shachar identifies a
number of “signs” or symbols from the Victorian era that have become “shorthand
for ‘Britishness’” [147], although the national exclusivity of the corset for
example may be debatable. Her contention is that “The Invisible Woman’s visual language utilizes the sea to project a
counter narrative to the dominant nineteenth-century ideals of individuality,
nationality and authority (in both sense of the word)” [151]. Shachar’s demonstration
then aptly focuses on the trope of the “mysterious silenced woman” that suggests
the potential of an oppositional tale while “not seeking to create newly triumphant
[stories]” [160]. In “A Matter of Life and Art : Artist Biopics in Post-Thatcher
Britain”, Jim Leach offers a compelling overview of the common tropes and conventional
emplotment that characterise the subgenre of artist biopics. His choice to
study two films as different as Christopher Hampton’s Carrington (1995) and John Maybury’s Love is the Devil (1998) may at first sight seem surprising but is given
justification by the scarcity of biopics on British painters. Leach also
demonstrates that despite the significant differences in the films’ aesthetic
approaches as well as in the biographees’ artistic style, both films “share an
interest in artists who […] refused to separate their art from their lives,
creating personas that contested and interacted with established discourses of
national identity” [164]. In the concluding article of the second part Mark Luprecht takes up
Bingham’s definition of women’s biography as a subgenre to show how Richard
Eyre’s biopic about Iris Murdoch challenges his conclusions. “Closer and Closer
Apart : Questioning Identities in Richard Eyre’s Iris” purports to demonstrate why “Iris is a fine work of cinematic art, but rather fails as
biography” [184]. As a specialist of Iris Murdoch’s work, Luprecht proceeds to review
the objections that were made to the film, listing the discrepancies between
facts and fiction. His own analysis actually shifts focus on how Iris Murdoch
problematised the notions of identity and of self, using the film, alongside
other biographical documents such as her husband’s memoir and her own letters
and books, to illustrate this point. The third and last part entitled “Crimes and Warfare” comprises some
intriguing case-studies that probably raise the most original theoretical
questions in the volume. In “Carving the National Body : Jack the Ripper”, Dominic Lennard scrutinises
the stereotypes of Jack the Ripper in several popular films. He relates the enduring
appeal of the Ripper films to the cultural significance of the character
insofar as it questions the British social class structure. “With their focus
on a corrupt nobility” Lennard argues, “Ripper narratives typically react to
the anachronism of the aristocracy, while legitimizing bourgeois status and
control” [210]. Ripper films thus reflect contemporary concerns about social
fragmentation while also contributing to the cinematic construction of the East
End of London. R. Barton Palmer’s “Leslie Howard’s The
First of the Few (1942) : The Patriotic Biopic as Star Vehicle” starts
with an apposite reflection on the frequent slippage between the notion of
British and English. The article offers a fascinating case of convergence between
the lead actor’s persona and the biographee’s life, each resonating with each
other. Indeed Howard’s biopic of R.J. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, perfectly
illustrates the crucial role of casting in biopics, which here is “unusually
significant” [227] because of Howard’s many contributions to the war effort.
The film thus becomes a “stealth biopic of sorts, whose subject in part is its
principal actor” (who was also the director and producer of the film) [228]. Palmer
rightly explains that the film is a striking exception to the common rule of
self-effacing impersonation since Leslie Howard “does NOT disappear into his impersonification
of Mitchell, who was in any case not known enough in life” [229]. Palmer then
evokes Mitchell’s life to examine how the film distorted historical facts. Murray Pomerance’s “Who the Man Who Never Was, Was” offers another case
of historical distortion. Ronald Neame’s film The Man Who Never Was (1956), based on Ewen Montagu’s book of the
same name, also provides another challenge to “the long-lived convention
underlying biopics” of “a simple and direct compatibility between the identity
of the subject and a widespread public familiarity”
[245]. Not only have the story’s two central figures, the organiser of the spy
project Ewen Montagu and its main figure known as “Major William Martin”,
hardly been heard of, but the film’s subject is precisely a curious case of
hidden identity, questioning the boundaries of the biopic genre while focusing
on the question of characterisation. Pomerance gives a detailed account of the
history of the 1943 espionage project itself before examining the story of the
production of the film and how it rewrote history. In particular Pomerance
highlights how the film obliterated the Jewish heritage of its principal
protagonist, the erasure of which, for the author, “remains the most intriguing
and disturbing silence in the darkest void” [262]. Last, Erica Sheen’s “Secrecy and Exposure : The Cambridge Spies” again
points out the paradox of making “films that tell the truth about liars” [267]
and making biopics about people whose identify is supposed to remain secret. Sheen’s
focus, however, is on a famous case in the history of British espionage, which
has come to be known as the Cambridge Spies. Her article examines a group of
films about the Cambridge Spies through both contextual analysis and as part of
a continuum of texts that connects film, television, journalism, theatre and
literature. Sheen thus highlights the seminal influence of Graham Greene and
Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949),
which initiated a “dynamic of serialization” [273] through the very idea of a
“Third Man”. She then analyses each work’s context of production to understand
the contested social and political values that underpin the story but also to
examine the different narrative and technical means through which it is
conveyed. If the reader may feel a little frustrated by the partly inconclusive
theoretical framework of the preface and introduction, the articles of Rule, Britannia! offer
thought-challenging case studies that discuss a wide range of theoretical
questions, opening up a large spectrum of valuable leads for research on both the
biopic genre in general and its specificity in British film. Whether they focus
on famous figures like monarchs or much lesser-known individuals such as the designer
of the Spitfire, the studies clearly demonstrate how biopics tap into the
collective representations of the nation, either to consolidate or to challenge
them. It is noteworthy that most of the cases examined in this volume provide
some types of counter-history or counter-models to a normative idea of what
Englishness or Britishness should be. In this respect, both editors have
successfully met their challenge in contributing to the ongoing debating and
defining “a British national identity” as an ever-evolving cultural construct. _ Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined
Communities : Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983). Revised edition. London: Verso,
2016. Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as
Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick (New Jersey): Rutgers University
Press, 2010. Brown, Tom and Belen, Vidal (eds).
The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. New York & Abingdon:
Routledge, 2014. Custen, George. Bio/Pics : How Hollywood Constructed
History.
New Brunswick (New Jersey): Rutgers University Press, 1992. Epstein, William H. and Palmer, R. Barton (eds). Invented Lives, Imagined Communities : The Biopic and American
National Identity. Albany (New York): Suny Press, 2016. Kenny, Michael. The Politics of
English Nationhood. Oxford: University Press, 2014. Kumar, Krishan. The Making of
English National Identity. Cambridge: University Press, 2003. Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of
Britain : Crisis and Neo-nationalism (1977). 3rd edition. Champaign
(Illinois): Common Ground, 2015. Sandbrook, Dominic. The Great
British Dream Factory (2015). London: Penguin, 2016. Smith, Anthony D. National
Identity (1991). New Edition. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993.
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