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CHAPTER 1
"Let Us Praise Famous Men"
Creating Myth and Memory in Chariots of Fire
But in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman! He remains an Englishman!
— Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire (1981)
And thank you for reminding me that I am and will be whilst I breathe, a Scot.
— Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire (1981)
Few sports films have enjoyed the critical and popular success of Chariots of Fire, the story about two rival runners competing at the 1924 Olympics that captured the British nation's imagination in 1981 and continues to do so. As with every Olympic Summer Games, the lead-up to the London 2012 Olympics (and subsequent analysis of the opening ceremony) provided ample opportunity to reanimate the sporting heroes of the 1924 Olympics made famous by the film. Occupying a central spot in the opening ceremony, a skit by comedian Rowan Atkinson not only brought back the iconic shots of the runners on the beach at Dover but did so with the help of Vangelis's famous score, and as the Daily Mail put it, "Bumbling Mr Bean brings down the house as he leads orchestra in hilarious rendition of Chariots of Fire." One stage adaptation, Chariots of Fire, opened at London's Hampstead Theatre in May 2012 to rousing success, while the British Film Institute, with the help of the Lottery Fund, re-released a digitally remastered version of the film in cinemas two weeks before the London Olympics. More recently, in the lead-up to the Rio Olympics 2016 a new biography on Eric Liddell attracted some interest, while the University of Edinburgh, Liddell's alma mater, launched the "Eric Liddell High Performance Sports Scholarship" for elite student athletes.
The two athletes at the center of the film, Jewish student Harold Abrahams and Scottish protestant missionary Eric Liddell, must overcome various obstacles — class and religious prejudice for Abrahams and shaky devotion to his faith for Liddell — to compete at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Starting out as fierce rivals, they eventually compete together for the British Olympics team under the Union Jack. This chapter argues that the film lifts these runners out of historical obscurity and presents them retrospectively as mythic heroes, as part of a process of national identity transformation that was taking place in Britain during the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. In doing so, it creates a nation-building myth — indeed, the film itself became emblematic of the imminent (although ultimately unfulfilled) rise of the British film industry, epitomized by screen writer Colin Welland's assertion at the following year's Oscar ceremony: "The British are coming!" Yet despite the film's attempts to affirm a united British national identity, I argue that these attempts are only partially successful and that the film instead presents national identity as multifaceted and frayed — and in this heralds the tensions in British society at the cusp of the Thatcherite era.
In making this argument, I build on David Martin-Jones's application of Gilles Deleuze's concepts of the "time-image" and "movement-image" to the representation of national identity, to demonstrate how the film's aim to unify British national identity as a singular and monolithic formation is in fact formally disrupted at various points. I argue that the purpose of such ruptures is to highlight — consciously or otherwise — the constructedness and complexity of national identity, even as at the level of narrative the film works to unite competing versions of British identity. I conclude that in this sports film, myths of national unity ultimately prevail over other motifs or structures that signify disunity.
The main frameworks to date for discussions of national identity in relation to Chariots of Fire have been Thatcherism and the heritage film debate, with the emphasis on the binary oppositions of progressive/conservative, and spectacle/history. Heritage films, as Sheldon Hall argues in his analysis of the heritage debate, "ha[ve] come to signal not just a particular group, or cluster of interrelated groups, of films, but a particular attitude to those films, and indeed to the audiences presumed to enjoy them." They are often seen to be politically conservative (e.g., favoring Thatcherism), incorporate stunning visual displays of the past, and are often labeled "quality films," with the effect of being attractive to overseas audiences and film awards committees. Within this context Chariots of Fire is considered to be the starting point of a new wave of heritage films, especially those of the 1980s and 1990s, which include a number of Merchant Ivory literary adaptations of authors such as Henry James and E. M. Forster. As a heritage film Chariots — despite, as I show, its ambiguous portrayal of national identity — has usually been "construed as the embodiment of Thatcherite patriotic rhetoric." More generally, heritage films have been critiqued as inherently conservative, despite often presenting conflicting ideals in form and narrative. As Andrew Higson argued in his seminal 1993 article "Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film": "the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively." A connected criticism of heritage films in general, but of Chariots of Fire in particular, is that of misrepresenting the past or, to put it differently, quietly accepting a plethora of historical inaccuracies in the name of "artistic license." In this chapter I interrogate this criticism in depth by exploring the construction of emotional authenticity in the film.
While aspects of earlier discussions surrounding the heritage film as a genre and critical category inform my argument in productive ways, the following analysis comes from a perspective that highlights the film's role in myth creation and the complex construction of national identity(ies), which I argue defies any straightforward notion of a unified national identity in the British context. In order to shift the debate about Chariots of Fire in a new direction, I explore the ways in which the film first constructs a new set of mythical British heroes from figures who had been largely lost to cultural memory and subsequently reclaims these national heroes in the name of contemporary national identity. These two strands of mythmaking combine to produce a complex film that at one level presents the idea of British national identity as fractured, multifaceted, and difficult to contain (not least through the disruptive elements of the time-image) but that ultimately seeks to affirm the possibility of a unified national consciousness.
Most of Chariots of Fire is set between 1919 and 1924. The major aim of the narrative is to demonstrate Harold Abrahams's and Eric Liddell's athletic progress and the obstacles they must overcome in order to achieve their (shared) goal of a gold medal at the Paris Olympics. The central part of the narrative is bracketed by the opening and closing scenes showing Abrahams's funeral in 1978. I discuss this awkward flashback time structure (1978–1924–1919–1924–1978) below; for now, it is most important to note that the film is mainly set in the fairly recent and lavishly re-created past. Harold Abrahams, son of a Lithuanian Jew, is a high-achieving student and star athlete at Caius College, Cambridge, while Eric Liddell is a Scottish student, born in China to missionary parents, who is conflicted by the possibilities of his earthly talents and his devotion to his faith. When Liddell takes up serious training in order to make the Olympic team, his sister Jennie (Cheryl Campbell) increasingly worries that his running ambitions will interfere with his goal to become a missionary in China. Meanwhile, Abrahams battles anti-Semitism in the form of pervasive but subtle racism. In his determination to work with a professional coach, Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), he faces opposition from the Caius College master, who adheres to a strict view of sports as an amateur leisure pursuit and therefore considers the hiring of a professional trainer a violation of this amateur code.
Despite these hurdles, both runners are chosen for the Olympic team, along with Abrahams's Caius College friends, Lord Lindsay (Nigel Havers), Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell), and Henry Stallard (Daniel Gerroll). On the way to Paris, Liddell learns that the heats for the 100-meter race are scheduled on a Sunday, and because of his faith, he refuses to take part in the heats, therefore eliminating his chances for a medal. Having arrived in Paris, he continues to refuse "to run on the Sabbath," despite the pressure put on him by the British Olympic Committee and the Prince of Wales. Lord Lindsay, having scored a medal already, gives up his place in the 400 meters so that Liddell can run that race instead of the 100-meter race. This way Liddell and Abrahams do not meet in the 100 meters as expected, and the film finishes with a happy ending, resulting in a gold medal for both runners.
Saturated with lavish sets and steeped in nostalgia, the film covers many diverse issues that are not confined to the interwar years, such as class struggle, latent anti-Semitism, the increasing professionalization of modern sports, muscular Christianity, and questions of national loyalty. The following analysis examines these larger themes as they become incorporated into the mythmaking processes in the film. In order to argue that the film engages in active myth- (and history-) making to construct a contemporary representation of national identity, I begin by demonstrating how the film creates a framework of authenticity that gives greater credence to the overall narrative and veracity to the vision of national identity that underlies it. I then analyze how the nostalgic style in the mise-en-scène contributes to the building of this myth of a unified national identity, and finally I examine how the film both supports and undermines this national identity through its formal and narrative structures.
Emotional Authenticity in Chariots of Fire
Chariots of Fire builds a framework of authenticity on many levels. First, the film puts real people and events at the center of its narrative. However, while these are real, the actual audience's level of familiarity with the sporting events, athletes, and outcome of their Olympic quest was quite limited at the time of the film's release, particularly when compared to events such as Germany's Miracle of Bern, examined in chapter 2. While Abrahams went on to become a well-known sports commentator and administrator, Liddell died in relative obscurity in China during the Second World War. Constructing a framework of authenticity depends partly on audience familiarity: naturally the more familiar the events and persons depicted, the more difficult it is to convincingly establish verisimilitude. For example, while even nonsports fans would be familiar with more recent sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo or Usain Bolt due to their enduring presence in a variety of media, the same could not be said of Abrahams and Liddell and their performances at the Paris Olympics among 1980s audiences. This is, of course, in part due to the rapid development of television broadcasting — and the media in general — since the beginning of sports broadcasting in the early 1950s and the lack of such reportage in the 1920s. In 1920s Britain, athletic meets were reported mostly through newspapers and newsreels in cinemas and were otherwise, quite literally, live events that required the interested spectator to be at the event.
This lower level of audience familiarity with the actual events left room for the filmmakers of Chariots of Fire to alter history, sometimes significantly, in favor of a dramatic storyline. For example, in the film Eric Liddell hears for the first time that the heats are scheduled on a Sunday while already en route to Paris. Liddell then gratefully accepts Lord Lindsay's place in a different race, although he supposedly has not trained for the event. Not only is Lord Lindsay a fictional character, but by all reports Liddell knew well in advance that he would run the 400 meters and trained accordingly. What distracts audience attention from this use of "dramatic license" is the well-developed sense of visual historic accuracy in the mise-en-scène: the set design (e.g., the separation of the running tracks by thin cords instead of lines on a synthetic ground), the costumes (e.g., the dinner suits at Abrahams's dinner with the headmasters of Caius College, the running outfits), and the props (e.g., the cars, the running shoes, the spades to dig the holes in the track for the runners starting positions at the race).
Typical for sports films set in the past, Chariots of Fire also "rings true" on the narrative level. The film captures its 1920s setting perfectly through characters' use of language, references to contemporary issues (such as the appearance of disabled war veterans), the modes of reportage depicted, and so on. For example, Harold Abrahams's rise to sporting prowess is visualized through a swirl of black-and-white newspaper cuttings. This helps to build a technical and visual framework for emotional authenticity: "the care with detail and atmosphere ... lends historical accuracy," as Ed Carter observes, despite the many historical inaccuracies in the story of the runners. In sharp contrast to the historical faultfinding of scholars such as Carter stands screenwriter Colin Welland's account: "I did endless research for the film. I went to the National Film Archives and said 'What have you got on the 1924 Olympics? Abrahams and Liddell, who won the gold medals.' And I sat there looking at these two young men on silent film, and said 'Don't worry boys, I'll make a good job of it.' And that's when I committed myself to them. ... I interviewed everybody who was still alive."
For Welland, a sense of emotional "truth" to the characters wins out here over the "endless research." Similarly, my emphasis here is on exploring how the film creates an atmosphere perceived by audiences as historically truthful, embedded in the mise-en-scène, and prioritizes this over the accuracy of (hi)story. It is, I argue, the former that functions as the framework that supports the film's emotional authenticity and thus ultimately strengthens the story's impact on the audience.
This impact is further strengthened by the film's aforementioned unusual and complex timeline, which begins in 1978 with Harold Abrahams's funeral, then moves to 1924 in a brief flashback introduced by Lord Lindsay, but which is subsequently told from the point of view of — and thus narrated by — Aubrey Montague and begins with the now iconic shots of the athletes running along the beach to Vangelis's anachronistic, yet stirring, electronic score. The second flashback to 1919 shortly after shifts the perspective more obviously to that of Montague's character, whose point-of-view narrator then slowly and subtly changes to an omniscient narrator until it shifts back toward Montague's perspective just before the end, giving the story a personal touch, not unlike a memoir. The opening late 1970s funeral scene functions as a vehicle to connect the then (nearly) contemporary early 1980s audience to the events in the past, as David Puttnam explains: "We were very keen that the film shouldn't be seen as just a period piece. We wanted to place those men in — as close as we could — into a contemporary context. And that was echoed in both the first and the last lines in the movie. These men really did live — they lived in our lifetime."
The effect of the first flashback is thus to make this exceptional sports story matter to a 1980s audience and add a sense of realism to the unfolding events. Combining the technical and atmospheric framework of authenticity with not only a personal link through Aubrey Montague's memoir-like voice-over but also the creation of a tangible connection between the historic athletes and the contemporary audience served to produce a powerful sense of emotional authenticity in the film.
Mythmaking and Visual Style
Rather than having been considered a sports film, Chariots of Fire has often, as noted above, been included in the group of films that have collectively been called "British heritage films," from A Room with a View (Ivory, 1985) to Howards End (Ivory, 1992), and it does indeed share that group's lavish visual style. My goal here is not to tread down the now well-worn paths on either side of the heritage film debate — are they essentially conservative or progressive, superficial or socially critical cultural products? Instead, my concern is with extending the aspects of this debate concerning visual style and to ask how this style contributes to producing the myths of the runners and enhancing their impact as part of a contemporary nation-building project.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "National Pastimes"
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