Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic(Film Culture in Transition)

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Table of Contents:
Figuring the Past, Acknowledgements, Introduction, Period Film and the Mannerist Moment, 1 Chapter 1, A Poetics of Figuration, Chapter 2, Present in the Past: The House, Chapter 3, Time and the Image: The Tableau, Chapter 4, The Scene of Writing: The Letter, Conclusion, Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present, Notes, Bibliography, Index of Film Titles, Index of Names and Subjects

About the Author :
Belén Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

Review :
Figuring the Past gives us a fresh look at the period film. This is not a typical genre study for fans of Jane Austen, or an auteurist concern with the work of James Ivory or Jane Campion, however. Rather, Belen Vidal lifts recent period films from both their national and generic confines. They become travelling cultural forms that weave an international pattern of -film formats,� a -cinema of quality� that is appropriated locally in a convergent global environment. In the process, the modern period film's preoccupation with the past turns into a -post� phenomenon: post-national, post-quality, post-heritage and postmodern. Vidal shows with clarity and sophistication that the shared mannerist aesthetic of this international cluster of films, far from simply evading politics in the present, is an eminently contemporary platform for conjuring up the present-in-the-past, with wide implications for cultural analysis. --Aniko Imre, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California"Bel�n Vidal's elegant and sophisticated book reinvigorates the study of period films, using the idea of mannerism to situate the genre in a rich visual field. Film studies has increasingly engaged the intersections of cinema with painting, photography and literature, and Figuring the Past makes an original contribution to this interdisciplinary debate. Vidal mobilises an impressive array of theoretical figures that confidently cross disciplines. Reading a broad range of films through art historical concepts such as the tableau and the portrait and literary questions of writing and the letter, as well as film theoretical debates on postclassicism, affect and the status of the image, Figuring the Past deftly elaborates a new, textural aesthetics of the period film."-- Rosalind Galt, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sussex