CONTEMPORARY COSTUME FILM

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2007 by Eleftheriotis, Dimitris

CONTEMPORARY COSTUME FILM Jullanne Pidduck London: British Film Institute, 2004, 224 pp.

Reviewed by Dimitris Eleftheriotis

Contemporary Costume Film is an absorbing, often exquisite book that rewards the reader with a plethora of detailed and nuanced observations. By the same token it is a particularly challenging book to review because the real success and value of Contemporary Costume Film lies less in an overarching argument or arguments (although several do exist) than in the complex and sophisticated investigation of textual, intertextual, cultural, socio-political, spatial, and temporal relationships that are pursued through close, meticulous and insightful readings of dozens of key films. A reviewer attempting to summarise Pidduck's work will almost certainly miss the point. The trees are far more important than the woods in this book, and attention to detail elegantly presented is what makes Contemporary Costume Film such an exemplary film studies text.

Contemporary Costume Film indulges the reader with generous doses of exemplary textual analysis offering highly original and insightful perspectives on films that have attracted considerable scholarship in the past (The Piano, The Age of Innocence), and on less "popular" texts (Elizabeth, Gosford Park]. Equally successful is the identification of contemporaneous discourses and political contexts that infuse the films' aesthetics. For example, an "invented sub-plot" concerning the prosecution of Risley in Maurice is linked to political struggles against Thatcher's Clause 28 legislation, while Derek Jarman's Caravaggio and Edward II are read against concerns around AIDS (on autobiographical as well as political levels).

Motivated by the desire to move the critical debate on costume drama beyond notions of nostalgia, Pidduck opens up a number of temporal tensions informing the critical function of contemporary costume dramas. These tensions are located in the texts themselves, in the setting of so many stories in a transitional era (the "microcosms" of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries when processes of modernisation challenge previous socio-cultural formations), and beyond the texts, in the encounters between the "then" of the fictions and the "now" of their moment of production. Such a move renders doubly problematic the critical emphasis on a nostalgic return to the past as the sole function of costume drama. The revisited settings are not sanitised islands referencing untroubled moments of the past, but dynamic fields riddled with conflict, repression and desire. Furthermore, the cinematic act of revisiting adds layers of contemporary discursive and aesthetic concerns and practices to the representations of the past.

Contemporary Costume Film's line of enquiry involves, on the one hand, the examination of specific configurations of space-time informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "chronotope," and on the other hand, a dynamic understanding of some of the most pervasive visual themes of the films that is informed by Deleuze's theorisation of the "movement-image." As with almost everything in this book, the use of theory is exemplary. It is introduced as needed, and it is there to enable critical analysis but not to dictate it. Pidduck has a great sense not only of the substance of an argument but also of its form and style, an ability subtly demonstrated in her identification of a possible stylistic tension in the use of the two "grand theories" informing her work: Bakhtin's emphasis on the "heaviness" of determination and "slowness" of history is contrasted with Deleuze's preoccupation with movement and change. Importantly, this is fully embraced in terms of its resonance with the textuality of the films analysed: "This tension echoes recursively between costume drama's own intransigent stasis (and imputed conservatism), and its tremendous quiet energy."

Embracing complexity and contradiction is a main feature of Contemporary Costume Film, as analysis of film after film opens up and explores multiple possible readings, making continuous connections with other films and critical discourses, and pointing to gaps and omissions. Organised in two parts, the book first explores key "movement-images" of costume dramas such as the figure at the writing desk, the ball, the country walk, the sightseeing trip, the train station, and the woman at the window. The second part analyses some of the ways in which these themes are re-assembled in films with more radical and explicit aesthetic and/or political agendas. Throughout the book due attention is given to the ways in which questions of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality arise in relation to the films examined; such discussions are not limited to issues of representation but also are applied to specific absences, the "out-of-field" of the fictions.

It is the persistent and insightful pursuit of what lies beyond the limits (of texts as well as of critical discourses) that offers some of the best moments in the book. Two examples (one from each part) are in my view particularly pertinent in demonstrating Pidduck's ceaseless and brilliant search for complicating details and overlooked alternatives. The second chapter opens with an examination of the "woman at the window," establishing through that particular movement-image a key tension between inside/outside, private/public, status and desire which encapsulates, from a "liberal feminist" perspective, "the historical feminine condition as one of genteel social constraint." However, this is further complicated by the extension of the enquiry into other movement-images. Pidduck identifies "marginal" details in shots and scenes: for example, the country-walk in Sense and Sensibility momentarily disturbed by the chance encounter with a flock of sheep, or in Persuasion, the slowness of a seaside walk ruptured by the running of a boy that the camera briefly follows. Such details become central to the chapter's argument when they are read as registering other desires in operation: "an acquisitive desire for property and the wealth and rights it imparts; and a desire for physical and sexual freedoms."