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64 3 Heritage and Its Discontents: Memory, History, and the Expanding Space of the Past In her study of nostalgia in French cinema, Naomi Greene asserts that contemporary France has been shaped by “a pre-occupation with the national past and the way it has been remembered” (1999, 191). In Greene’s analysis, French cinema in general and the contemporary heritage film in particular have been characterized by a “landscape of absence and loss” that creates and sustains a nostalgic longing for the past. Greene’s reading of the heritage film is close to the dominant interpretation, which holds that the authentic nation resides in the past and that heritage films tend to reinforce conservative notions that France is under attack by immigration and globalization . This reading of the heritage film, as argued in chapter 2, is somewhat problematic, particularly since French heritage films tend to engage with the past in ways that are fairly ambiguous. They are frequently ambivalent about the reliability of history and memory, and they often function as expressions of unease regarding past-oriented, nostalgic models of identity, both individual and collective. As the heritage film evolved, this tendency to destabilize the past or at least existing narratives of the past became heightened. This is evident in such films as Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994), Yves Angelo’s Le Colonel Chabert (1994), and Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Le Hussard sur le toit (1995). Like first-wave heritage films, these works tend to feature well-known, high-profile actors 2VFKHUZLW]&KLQGG $0 HERITAGE AND ITS DISCONTENTS / 65 and to rely on high production values. However, unlike earlier heritage films, they tend not to use a flashback structure, loosening the suture effect inherent in the earlier films. The cinematography in these later films also relies much more on the use of close-ups than on the postcard-like panoramas and long shots seen in earlier films. They tend to function more as individual histories than as depictions of a collective past. Perhaps more important, these films do not seem to glorify the past but, rather, to encode it as dark and unstable. Despite divergences from the heritage paradigm, most critics and scholars have regarded these later films as merely new and different expressions of the nostalgia and nationalism that characterized the first-wave films of the 1980s. Ginette Vincendeau suggests, for example, that the visual and thematic darkness of such films reflects pessimism about the state of France and of French national identity at the time they were made (1995). Julianne Pidduck argues that these 1990s heritage films are, like their 1980s counterparts, an expression of nostalgia and a certain type of nationalism, an attempt to reinforce existing cultural myths that have been active since the nineteenth century (2005, 32–37). This interpretation would seem to suggest that these later films are informed by the same regret and sense of loss as the first-wave heritage films, despite the absence of any overt nostalgia in the films themselves. Pidduck also observes that many of these later films, including Rappeneau ’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Chéreau’s La Reine Margot, reproduce the ancien régime through the filter of the nineteenth century by adapting Romantic literary works (2005, 14–15). This is not unusual for heritage films, which are often literary adaptations. However, many of these later films are also remakes of films that were themselves adaptations of Romantic works. These late heritage films, therefore, are doubly removed from the stories they depict. As a result, they reference not only the original work and the historical period it recreated but also previous recreations of that period, both literary and filmic. The embedded nature of the meditation on the past inherent in such films suggests a relationship between past and present that is decidedly nonlinear. The past imagined and represented by such films is not the direct predecessor of the present. It cannot, for example, be directly recalled from the present. Rather, it can only be recalled through previous recollections and representations. The past that is recalled, therefore, is not really the past but a specular image of it, an image that can only be accessed and interpreted through previous and sometimes-competing representations of itself. Chéreau’s La Reine Margot, for example, re-creates the life of Marguerite de Valois through an engagement with particular interpretations of her life that were produced during various historical periods. Chéreau’s film, therefore, not only...

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