Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader

Period costume dramas are major box-office commodities, exploiting the lucrative gap between blockbusters and art films with their mixture of rich visuals, popular sensibility, and literary association. “Heritage cinema” is all too often discussed from literary (not cinematic) perspectives, and criticism of the films has long been overshadowed by the question of a film’s fidelity (or lack of) to the original text. This volume of essays redresses the balance by examining the relationship between literature and film, representing both the view–and the critics of the view–that heritage cinema’s elaborate aesthetics owe more to nostalgia than to historical accuracy. In her introduction to the volume, Ginette Vincendeau makes a case for the genre as an important and critically neglected form of popular cinema. Film / Literature / Heritage includes discussions of a wide selection of adaptations from Shakespeare to William Burroughs, as well as interviews with the screenwriters and adaptors of major films from Elizabeth to LA Confidential , and directors from Martin Scorsese to Peter Greenaway. Contributors are drawn from the best industry, academic, literary, and journalistic commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.