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This chapter analyses Michael Winterbottom’s With or Without You (1999), Jude (1996), The Claim (2000), A Cock and Bull Story (2005), and 24 Hour Party People (2002), focusing on the relationship between nation and cinematic genre. These films are reworkings of heritage films or costume films. Although this genre does not have the significance of a foundation myth for British popular culture, it has nevertheless been the object of debates about national identity, the relationship between the present and the past, and the position of cinema in relation to a national culture. Through a distinctive treatment of visual style, setting and iconography, and narrative organisation, the films prompt the viewer to reflect on the stories told by filmmakers about national cultures and identities, and also the ways in which the accumulation of such stories and images contributes to the formation of national cultures.

This chapter examines the historical place of cinematic tartanry and the deployment of tartan in cinema more broadly, identifying both variety and continuity in the way in which tartan has functioned in film costume and narrative. It argues that from tartan kilts in an historical epic to tartan skirts in Japanese horror, the meaning of tartan in film is not always exhausted by its narrative function. It notes that in classic realist cinema the audience is supposed to look through the costumes to the personality of the characters underneath, because looking at the costumes in and for themselves would interrupt narrative progression and disturb narrative continuity.

This chapter examines the contemporary costume film's unique interrelationship of femininity and privacy by focusing on how the historical constraints of privacy force the post-feminist heroine to make herself anew as a feminine subject. It uses the two poles of privacy and publicness to organize relationships between gender, feeling, time, aesthetics, and identity, worked through and re-envisioned by costume films for present-day viewers. By these means, the values of privacy and publicness are recalibrated to accommodate a mutable femininity that uses aesthetics and feeling as creative methods of adaptation. The heroine's process of identity construction consists of tests, experiments, and play with self-presentation to find and utilize the sanctioned meanings and covert privileges afforded by femininity. In reassembling elements of gender and galvanizing their force to new ends, spaces for covert resistance and pressure-release emerge. This course is one of “tactical aesthetics,” or the deployment of style to access power which makes use of gendered acts, expressions, dress, and etiquette to design new advantages. To explore this concept, the chapter analyzes two films, Elizabeth (1997) and Marie Antoinette (2006), as divergent visions of femininity.