Screening European Heritage: History on Film, the Heritage Industry and Cultural Policy

From 'La Reine Margot' (1994) to 'The King's Speech' (2010), historical dramas dominate mainstream European film production and often generate major national debates on the role of the past in contemporary national identity construction. Defined in the 1990s as 'heritage films', the makers of such films frequently work in partnership with the wider heritage industry in order to secure funding for their productions. And the films, along with the debates they generate, often shape the subsequent marketing and curatorial strategy of the heritage sites they foreground in their stories. However, there has been very little exploration of this relationship and how it reflects the complexity of contemporary public engagement with the past across Europe.

Led by the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, in collaboration with B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies, 'Screening European Heritage' responds to the AHRC's 'Care for the Future' theme in a variety of interconnected ways. Most obviously, the project explores questions of inter-generational communication, cultural transmission and exchange. It examines the representation of Europe's past on contemporary screens, what this says about contemporary cultural attitudes to the past and how this reflects, and can be shaped by, the policies and practice of cultural institutions now and in the future. In the process, it raises questions around the role and value of the past in cultural and societal change, investigating how history is re-imagined by the contemporary film and heritage industries and to what end, ultimately exploring the way contemporary heritage film, and its instrumentalisation of spectators' emotional engagement with the past, reflects broader trends in the heritage industry towards the visceral exploitation of the history and thus the way film can explore the relationship between emotions and change.

The aim of this exploratory project is to provide the foundation for a broader study that will map interactions between heritage filmmaking and the wider heritage industry from Dublin to Warsaw, from Helsinki to Madrid. Structured around a process of knowledge exchange between leading academics in the fields of film and heritage studies and film and heritage industry professionals, the exploratory phase of the project will build an international network with the necessary interdisciplinary range to undertake this ambitious future study. It will also undertake a pilot investigation of a small number of recent heritage films in order to develop an investigative model that can be used in the subsequent full project, tracing the production and consumption of its case-study films and how they reflect widespread trends in contemporary society's emotional and material engagement with history. Finally, the pilot study will also be used as the basis of a briefing paper designed to make a direct intervention in a series of national policy debates, the heritage and film industries being seen by national governments across Europe as a key generator of growth in the face of the present economic crisis. Through its public-facing collaboration with industry professionals, the project will focus explicitly on questions of direct relevance to these debates, which often ignore their common concern with the role of the past in contemporary cultural production. In the process, the project will share insights across industries as well as across national boundaries.

The key intellectual driver of this project is two-way knowledge exchange between the academic community and film and heritage industry professionals. The depth and breadth of this knowledge exchange will build over the project's duration.

The initial project workshop is organised around a set of conceptual and practical exchanges between academics and representatives from the film and heritage industries, in order to establish and develop a shared understanding of the research questions and their context. The workshop will raise awareness of the project across a range of relevant user communities and ensure that its research activities are shaped by issues of direct relevance to these communities.

Over the course of the project, the relationship with external user communities will be developed through their participation in the steering group and through the work of the RA, who will conduct interviews with relevant members of the film and heritage industry in order to increase the reach of the project's network. The project's findings will subsequently be disseminated to the film and heritage industries through a final project workshop. These findings will also be published as a briefing paper, again aimed at and disseminated to the film and heritage industries. In particular this paper will be designed to contribute to current debates on cultural policy, in order to provide organisations focused on intervening in these debates with accessible and relevant information. Such debates tend to focus on issues around contemporary film production, on the one hand, and the heritage industry on the other, and rarely acknowledge their shared concern with the communication of the past to contemporary audiences/visitors to heritage sites, and the place of history in the public consciousness. Nor do these debates acknowledge commonalities in national discussions across the region. The project will begin a process of sharing insights across industries and national boundaries.

Beyond the workshops, knowledge exchange will also be facilitated through the project's overall communication strategy. A project website will be used as a repository for all the research findings. This will be open access and maintained by Leeds Information Systems Services for at least two-years after the end of the project. Subsequent to this, the research findings will be freely available through White Rose Research Online (http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/) and the website of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. The project website will contain an interactive blog and a twitter feed, kept by the PI, Co-I and RA, and will also be used as a forum for discussion by all those interested in the project, acting as a central point of communication with external user groups as well as academic participants across Europe. Through the strategic use of social media connected to the project, along with the interviews to be conducted by the RA, it is expected that this international network of participants will grow over the lifetime of the project. Members of the network will be invited to form the core team and steering committee of a larger subsequent project that will build on the findings of this exploratory study.

A great variety of other pathways to impact could easily emerge from this project due to the nature of the non-HE participants with which this initial exploratory project will develop sustained and sustainable relationships. All ideas for further impact will be captured on the project's interactive blog. These could include public engagement lectures at heritage sites used in the production of recent heritage films, the curation of a series of film screenings at national and international film festivals or pedagogical material integrated with the project website and aimed at supporting national and international film-education initiatives.