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This chapter discusses the key arguments around ‘heritage cinema’ in the United Kingdom. It begins by situating the heritage-film critique historically, charting its origins and emergence in relation to the context and mood of late-1980s Thatcherite Britain — origins which raise questions about the critique's continuing applicability to a constantly evolving field of period films and the profoundly changed political, cultural and globalised industrial conditions in which they are produced and circulated in the 1990s and 2000s. The chapter then outlines the central claims, arguments and assumptions which solidified in the early 1990s into what has become the dominant academic critique of heritage cinema. It examines the problems of this critique — with particular reference to the question of film audiences, together with related questions of gender and identity politics — and the criticisms and responses it prompted from a broad range of critics and scholars, generating a body of revisionist critical work on heritage films which has pluralised as well as expanded the field.

The critique of heritage cinema has demarcated ‘heritage films’ as institutionally and culturally distinct from the mainstream in particular ways that mark enjoyment of them as a taste, and a sphere of consumption, characterised by a degree of (self-conscious) separation from commercial popular film/culture. This chapter examines the general contours of Heritage Audience Survey respondents' cinemagoing and film viewing habits — or more precisely, their film habitus, focusing on period films. It discusses respondents' frequency of cinemagoing and viewing of films in other media, the relative place of commercial and art cinema venues within their habitus — and, indeed, whether they saw films at the cinema at all (which a significant contingent of older respondents in the National Trust subsample did not).

This chapter examines the most well known of all the popular genres associated with Scotland, the costume drama (sometimes referred to as the period drama, heritage or historical film). Initially, the debate surrounding costume drama is introduced — in particular the contested term ‘heritage cinema’ — and the role that costume dramas made and set in Scotland increasingly play in this debate. Because of the popularity of this particular genre, however, the chapter look at example featuring a female protagonist, The Governess (1998). In The Governess, the wilderness of Scotland is represented as a fantasyland, but its mythical resonance as a place somehow ‘before history’ actually facilitates the construction of a diasporic history, or ‘heritage’, that stands apart from concerns of British or Scottish identity. Thus, the setting of Scotland is integral to the film's deployment of its feminist reworking of history (a process typical of the contemporary costume drama), in this case to explore a diasporic Jewish identity that does not belong to the same historical traditions as those normally encountered in the wilds of cinematic Scotland.

This chapter draws together the most significant points to emerge from an analysis of the ‘heritage film audiences’ — as represented by the two groups who participated in the Heritage Audience Survey — and considers their implications for the debate around heritage cinema. These implications are centred around questions of the coherence and distinct(ive)ness of the ‘heritage film audience’ (or audiences); the related question of how far respondents exhibited a self-identity as period-film viewers; the question of respondents' levels of consciousness or self-consciousness in relation to the heritage-film debate itself; and the question of audience autonomy (that is, how far respondents were able to produce their own distinct audience discourses around period films). This book turns from a sociological focus on the composition and identities of period film audiences, via questions of cultural (pre-)disposition, film consumption practices, and film tastes, to a more interpretative reading of the ‘texts’ presented by ‘respondents’ views and attitudes and, ultimately, their cultural-political positioning in relation to period films.

This chapter explores the relationship between performance and identity in ‘Spanish heritage films’, a type of national cinema that operates from within intermedial, intertextual, and transnational networks. It discusses the particular cases of El perro del hortelano/The Dog in the Manger (Pilar Miró, 1997) and Alatriste/Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2006), and describes their domestic popularity and international failure. It argues that these successes and failures ultimately produce a national cultural discourse that (despite the adoption of foreign cinematic aesthetics) fails to be legible to foreign audiences familiar with those very aesthetics. In studying the foreign-influenced performance style of the actors of these two films, the chapter tracks their attempts to reach local and foreign audiences. The history of these particular acting styles—and in spite of the transnational aesthetics that guide these films—are haunted by earlier performances and roles that ultimately provide a national opportunity for Spanish audiences to experience history, cinema, and mourning.

The cusp of the 1980s and 1990s saw the crystallisation in the United Kingdom of a debate — or, more precisely, a critique — which rapidly came to dominate academic discussion of recent cinematic representations of the past, particularly but not solely in the British context: the critique of so-called ‘heritage films’ or ‘heritage cinema’. This book explores, by empirical means, the scholarly lacuna around the audiences who watch and enjoy heritage films. The book's primary source for this purpose is the Heritage Audience Survey, a questionnaire-based study conducted in the late 1990s to generate an analysis of the demographic characteristics and social identities, film viewing habits, film tastes, and wider attitudes and pleasures of 92 members of the UK film audiences for period films.

The question of memorializing France's colonial past has been a prominent and contested issue in French politics and the media in the 2000s. This chapter considers how Maghrebi-French filmmakers have chosen to represent the Franco-Maghrebi colonial past and in particular the Algerian War and the history of North African immigration to France. Through case studies of four key films – Inch'allah dimanche, Cartouches Gauloises, Indigènes and Hors-la-loi – the chapter argues for the emergence of a postcolonial ‘counter-heritage’ cinema to challenge the Eurocentric representations of French colonial history offered by the middlebrow heritage film in French cinema of the 1990s and 2000s.

This chapter considers how the landscape is depicted in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. In examining the depiction of the rural landscape, the film’s pre-credits and opening sequences receive particular scrutiny. The chapter explores the countryside within the film through a number of different lenses: as a worked, agricultural landscape that is markedly different from those seen in Hammer’s gothic horror films; as a pastoral landscape that appreciates the beauty inherent in a stark and unsentimentalised topography as a variant on the richer and more sumptuous landscapes of heritage cinema; as an uncanny landscape that diminishes human presence and in doing so becomes an unfamiliar, disquieting environment; as a malign landscape that is actively hostile to those who dwell within it; and as a landscape that resists occupation altogether. This chapter will also consider how the film mediates cultural understandings of the local and localism.