This book explores the history of Cornwall‘s picturing on screen, from the earliest days of the moving image to the recent BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark books. Drawing on art history to illuminate the construction of Cornwall in films and television programmes, the book looks at amateur film, newsreels and contemporary film practice as well as drama.
It argues that Cornwall‘s screen identity has been dominated by the romantic coastal edge, leaving the regional interior absent from representation. In turn, the emphasis on the coast in Cornwall‘s screen history has had a significant and ongoing economic impact on the area.New research with an innovative approach, looking at amateur film and newsreels alongside mainstream film and television. Will appeal to both the academic and the more general reader.
This book explores the history of Cornwall‘s picturing on screen, from the earliest days of the moving image to the recent BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark books. Drawing on art history to illuminate the construction of Cornwall in films and television programmes, the book looks at amateur film, newsreels and contemporary film practice as well as drama.
It argues that Cornwall‘s screen identity has been dominated by the romantic coastal edge, leaving the regional interior absent from representation. In turn, the emphasis on the coast in Cornwall‘s screen history has had a significant and ongoing economic impact on the area.New research with an innovative approach, looking at amateur film and newsreels alongside mainstream film and television. Will appeal to both the academic and the more general reader.
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Overview
This book explores the history of Cornwall‘s picturing on screen, from the earliest days of the moving image to the recent BBC adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark books. Drawing on art history to illuminate the construction of Cornwall in films and television programmes, the book looks at amateur film, newsreels and contemporary film practice as well as drama.
It argues that Cornwall‘s screen identity has been dominated by the romantic coastal edge, leaving the regional interior absent from representation. In turn, the emphasis on the coast in Cornwall‘s screen history has had a significant and ongoing economic impact on the area.New research with an innovative approach, looking at amateur film and newsreels alongside mainstream film and television. Will appeal to both the academic and the more general reader.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780859890885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 261 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Rachel Moseley is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she is presently Head of Department and Director of the Centre for Television History, Heritage and Memory Research. She has published widely on questions of identity in film and television.
Rachel Moseley is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she is Head of Department and Director of the Centre for Television History, Heritage and Memory Research. She has published widely on questions of identity in film and television.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Landscape, Region and the Moving Image
Cornwall is a peripheral region physically, culturally and economically, and in general terms has been constructed through an ongoing discourse of Romantic tourism as a 'pastoral' site, a discourse, as Gifford notes, which constructs a space of 'retreat' in juxtaposition to the supposed complexities of the city and the present (1999: 46). In the course of this construction, Cornwall's industrial history and post-industrial economic position are appropriated as 'traditional', 'Romantic' and 'tragic'. The significance of the past in the present is persistent in the Cornish landscape, in the form of granite tors, standing stones and the ruins of Cornwall's tin- and copper-mining industrial history visible on moor-top and cliff edge. As Ian Bell has noted in his work on travel narratives and national identity, this has been a particularly consistent production of rural Englishness:
The comic postcard England of rural tranquility, village bobbies and red-faced councilors seems curiously intact to the urban traveller, and its persistence is an ironised reminder of an alternative ideological fantasy, a version of the pastoral still identifiable in the remote periphery, one of Virgil's Georgics still available in the remote southwest of England (1995: 21).
The ideological fantasy of pastness and simplicity at the periphery noted here has also been a profoundly white one, and Cornwall's construction on screen attests to and perpetuates this 'retreat' from contemporary urban diversity. Bell writes of Devon, here, as 'the remote southwest of England' — the 'southwest' a 'region' within which Cornwall is usually included — and within a national frame, in relation to constructions of 'Englishness'. How, though, has Cornwall been understood in its specificity, outside of its relation to England?
Cornish Studies
Most scholarship on Cornwall has either come out of the Institute of Cornish Studies (University of Exeter) at Penryn, or has been published in the Institute's series Cornish Studies (University of Exeter Press). Deacon and Payton (1993) offer an excellent analysis of the development of Cornish culture, beginning with the construction of Cornishness as 'mining and Methodism' following industrialization in the eighteenth century. At this moment, they argue, when Cornwall was acknowledged as the world leader in deep metal-mining (63-64), this new discourse overlaid 'an older, vernacular Cornish culture'. The Cornish Celtic revival of the late nineteenth century, which focused on Cornwall's Celticity, Catholicism and links to Brittany, looked back to a moment of heightened political power in the Middle Ages and would underpin the establishment of the pressure group and language society Tyrha Tavas in 1933 and Old Cornwall Societies across the region. For Deacon and Payton Cornwall has, above all, been produced for and by the south-east of England as:
a place of retreat, simplicity and innocence, peopled by bucolic, smiling villagers. It is a place to be 'discovered', to 'fall in love with' and then to cherish — preferably in the state it was when first found. It is essentially a tamed countryside that is nevertheless 'deep rural England' (72).
This, they suggest, is linked to idealized ideas of the past as 'heritage', and thus as a museum of potentially saleable heritage artefacts. Similarly, Deacon has argued that 'Cornwall is a product of the gaze of artists and tourists, anthropologists and novelists ... the Cornish are constructed; they have little role in the construction' (1997: 7), linking this construction of region directly to the uneven relationship between Anglicized centre and Celtic periphery in which 'travel writers, visitors, painters, novelists and poets ... have "discovered" Cornwall' and then reproduced it through their own images (8). Deacon is concerned to challenge this by looking at insider voices, and I continue this project in the final chapter of the book, which attends to amateur film of the 1930s and contemporary film practice in Cornwall.
Deacon describes the evolution of Cornish Studies, in the context of a turn away from grand narratives, from a narrow but important focus on local history and culture, an interest in revivalist Celticity in the 1970s, and in nationalism in the 1990s, to a more cultural approach which looks to questions of representation, for example in literature and tourism discourses, and to post-colonial theory (2002). Noting the importance of Cornish Studies in the context of calls for a devolved Cornish assembly and European Objective One funding (31), the importance of looking outwards, Deacon argues that:
the politics and economics of exclusion and division, the promotion of 'difference' in political, cultural and economic terms, and the search for identity in a consumerist society — are broad cultural issues and ones that are equally important in studies of contemporary Cornwall. For example, the commodification of Cornishness is an area that desperately requires more interdisciplinary attention (37).
Picturing Cornwall responds to that call, hopes to be 'alert to the multiple representations of Cornwall that exist both now and in the past' (38), and addresses the need for work in Cornish Studies to appear in wider arenas, reaching larger audiences.
James Vernon provided one of the earliest scholarly engagements with the cultural positioning of Cornwall in the national frame (1988), and explored the ambivalence of Cornwall's relationship with England, noting that it 'had always existed on the margins of Englishness, both a county of England and a foreign country' (153). Interestingly for my project here, Vernon notes the imperial dimension to England's positioning of Cornwall as a dark, foreign land, linking the work of the Newlyn painters, who came from outside Cornwall to establish an artist 'colony' in the fishing village, as echoing this discourse (159). Kennedy and Kingcome also note the focus of the Newlyn artists at the edge, while de-industrialization and china-clay mining increased in the interior: '[e]verything was cosy on the Riviera' (1998: 51-52). In addition, a number of scholars have examined the growth of tourism in Cornwall following the decline of the mining industry, drawing out the repeated deployment of discourses of foreignness, romanticization and commodification which have disguised the region's poverty and erased its industrial heritage. Vernon invokes Spivak's work on the post-colonial to discuss the internalization of the discourse of Cornwall as a land of myth and romance, arguing that 'the continual traffic in the tropes and narratives of the Cornish and English national imaginations perpetually undercut[s] the attempt to map Cornwall and England as discrete nations' (154). Accordingly, this book could be considered as an exploration of the ways in which film, and more latterly television as a 'window on the world', can be understood as apparatus of colonization (see Wheatley 2013).
While Trezise's The West Country as a Literary Invention (2000) approached Cornwall from a wider regional perspective, which, as he acknowledged, is threatened by a more general notion of 'the West' of England (14), his discussion of the meanings of 'moving westwards' and the tradition of romanticizing it (15) remains important to understanding the picturing of Cornwall, even as a distinct region within it. Westland's Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (1997) was an important development in the field, identifying the conventional terms in which the region has been imagined, reproduced and understood: 'inbred, savage Cornwall, the bumbling country Cornwall, the "foreign", exotic and potentially dangerous Cornwall' and remote, romantic Cornwall (1). Within this collection, Deacon's work on outsider and insider views of Cornwall and the centrality of mining and Methodism to the region's self-construction after industrialization and the divergence of representations between 'West Barbary' and 'Delectable Duchy' have been formative to my work (1997). Westland's own work on Cornwall as a 'passionate periphery' in romantic literature (1995) and Helen Hughes's work on Cornwall in du Maurier's Jamaica Inn consider the relationship between regional Romantic landscape and gender (1997). Gemma Goodman and I have explored the ways in which recent television dramas located at the Celtic periphery have shifted focus from an alignment of landscape with the female body, to the body of the romantic male hero as a post-colonial site (forthcoming 2018). This multidisciplinary work has begun to build a picture of Cornwall's wider cultural construction, but at its centre remains a void: there has been little attention to moving images of Cornwall, despite the centrality of screens large and small to the envisioning of Cornwall. Picturing Cornwall addresses this absence, and complicates work on landscape and place in the moving image in order to build a politically informed framework for the analysis of region in the moving image.
Theorizing Landscape in Film (and Television)
Lefebvre, drawing on P. Adams Sitney, offers the now canonical account of the use of landscape in film, drawing a distinction between narrative and spectacular modes of landscape in the cinema (2006a). Sitney had previously identified the elision of landscape from scholarly discussion, describing it as 'virtually an unconscious issue of film theory' (1993: 103). Sitney points out that 'the moving camera and the panoramic sweep' had since the 1890s 'reflected in a stylised manner the movement of human eyes over the field of vision' (107), and that the long shot (already present in painting and photography and, by 1908, including the aerial shot) would, with the development of editing, become an establishing shot (108). He also indicated the importance, since the 1950s, of the zoom lens for cinematic landscapes, making smooth transitions and trajectories from long to close shot in one camera setting, and across enormous distances (111). Sitney's identification of the Western as a genre 'predicated upon dramatizing the situation of individuals in a distinctive landscape' is crucial, and will emerge as significant for the analysis of landscape in moving images of Cornwall (109).
Lefebvre's theorization of the role of landscape in the cinema hinges upon its relationship with narrative. He draws on Eisenstein's notion that landscape is 'the most flexible in conveying moods, emotional states and spiritual experiences' (1987: 217, quoted in Lefebvre 2006b: xii) to argue that in order to function in this way, landscape 'must obviously distinguish itself from mere background space or subservient setting where action and events take place' (xii). Lefebvre argues that the spectator can operate either a narrative or spectacular mode of viewing, in which 'contemplation of the setting frees it briefly from its narrative function (but perhaps, in some cases, only for the length of a thought)' (2006a: 29). Landscape, then, can be made the focus of the image by the spectator, even where its primary function is narrative setting. This he describes as 'impure landscape'. In contrast, landscape can be 'intentional', deliberately drawn attention to, for example by the deliberate citations of paintings, or by the repeated use of long shots, or by montage (30-33). The visual indication of point of view, followed by a subjective/long shot also encourages attention to setting. He gives the example of transition shots:
that indicate in the narrative a spatio-temporal change in the action; they are sometimes accompanied by an optical effect (fade in, lap dissolve, etc.) but can be made just as well with a straight cut. They can occur at various points in the film, including at the beginning and at the end where they serve to indicate the spatial boundaries of the diegesis (33-34).
This observation is — ironically, given his neglect of it — especially interesting in relation to television, with its characteristic series and serial forms, repeated opening sequences and segmentation. As I have previously argued of Poldark (BBC, 1975; 1977) it is in precisely these moments that the Cornish landscape is emphasized on television. In the short serials Echo Beach (Channel 4, 2008) and Delicious (Sky, 2016), Cornwall functions symbolically as pathetic fallacy, drawing on a place-myth which renders it a site appropriate to romantic melodrama, with landscape used as narrative setting and 'spectacular' scene transitions (though Delicious, which bears a significant narrative similarity to Echo Beach, was significant as the first television drama of Cornwall to be set exclusively inland, in which views of viaduct, river and field constituted a notable shift in the television representation of the region).
In contemporary comedy-drama films such as Blue Juice (Prechezer, 1995) and Saving Grace (Cole, 2000), Cornwall functions as a site of alternative lifestyles and mysticism, and the moments of personal epiphany in these films speak to the intensity of connection between selfhood and regional landscape. The long-running dramas Wycliffe (ITV, 1994-98) and Doc Martin (ITV, 2004-) also use the Cornish landscape as narrative setting, making significant use of it as spectacle in title sequences and scene transitions. While these moments offer spectacles of regional landscape, thinking about them as television is suggestive for exploring the application of Lefebvre's theory to this adjacent medium. In both programmes, the title sequence remains the same over several series and years; landscape here surely operates quite differently for the regular television viewer than it does for the viewer of a film. Each episode of detective drama Wycliffe opens and closes with the same sequence of iconic shots of the Cornish landscape, focused around mine, cliff and moor. Over a repetitive, dramatic string melody, the camera pulls back from a shot of a rock at sea to frame it through a cave opening, an image which dissolves to the eponymous detective in profile with the sea behind him as he turns towards the camera. A thumbprint becomes the contour lines on a map, an aerial shot swoops round a cliff, the detective drives across a lonely moor and the sequence ends on a shot of him on the phone in front of an engine house, towards which he walks. The final shot of each episode finds the hero in a classic 'prospect' pose on a clifftop promontory at sunset.
Similarly, the unchanging titles of Doc Martin are based upon a 360 degree time-lapse pan around the cove of Port Wenn and across standing stones, cows and a beach, as if all of Cornwall were visible and encapsulable from the camera's fixed point. The landscape is unchanging over time except in relation to daily and seasonal rhythms: day to night, high to low tide; the circular structure of the sequence is echoed in the repetitive, vaguely jazzy theme music. The pan comes to rest, finally, on a view of the cove from the sea, then pans around the cove to Martin's new practice, up on the cliffside. In place of this sequence, the beginning of the pilot episode dramatizes the centre-periphery relationship by beginning in media res with panoramic aerial shots of the coast as Martin flies from London to an interview in far-flung Cornwall. As Picturing Cornwall will demonstrate, these sequences are metonymic, in both form and content, of the audiovisual grammar of place that has developed across the long twentieth century. However, over the course of the characteristic weekly, seasonal and annual repetition of television, the initial spectacularity of these landscape sequences, which frame and divide episodes, drains away, fading into prosaic familiarity. In this way, the specificity of the broadcast television text reinforces the picturing of Cornwall not only as unchanging over time, but also as always, already constituted through a few, distilled and familiar place-images.
In my view, Lefebvre's primary contribution to the discussion of landscape and the moving image resides not simply in his distinction between landscape's possible modes as narrative setting or as spectacle, as the primary subject of the image (2006a: 23), but also in his emphasis on the potential ambiguity of landscape's function, its ability to hover between the two (27). His argument about the flexibility of landscape, which takes the example of dispute over the role of landscape in the paintings of Joachim Patinir (c.1480–1524) (24&ndsh;25), depends largely on interpretation by the spectator (48) and it is here that the potential of landscape's ability to operate between setting and spectacle can be foregrounded. Lefebvre argues that this '"impure" landscape, whose existence we cannot clearly attribute to a director's intention', is its 'principal mode of existence in cinema and it plays an important role in our experience of films' (48). When viewed through the politicized, critically regionalist lens I suggest here, landscape refuses a role as mere narrative setting, and is persistently called forth as an ideological space, even as it remains specific as place. Higson has argued of British New Wave films that because they 'are promoted as realist, landscape and townscape shots must always be much more than neutral narrative spaces. Each of these location shots also demands to be read as a real historical place which can authenticate the fiction' (1996: 134). I want to suggest that such a reading is not dependent upon a moving image text's claim to realism, but rather that, from the perspective of 'impure landscape', the historical and political specificity of place in the moving image might always be in play. This approach has something in common with eco-critical approaches which seek more embodied perspectives in which the removed viewpoint is displaced (Kerridge 2013: 223), and with Ingold's suggestion that we consider using 'taskscape' as an alternative to landscape:
a word to remind us, when our surroundings seem to be laid out for our gaze, that our perception of them is not comprehensive, but is a function of the activity we are engaged in, work, or leisure. Perception is conditioned by the specialization that a task involves (Ingold 2000: 195, quoted in Kerridge 2013: 225).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction: A Journey into Cornwall
1 Landscape, Region and the Moving Image
2 The Outsider and the View: Travel, Tourism and Film
3 Screen Fictions
4 The ‘Real’ Cornwall
5 A Different View
Notes
Filmography
Television Programmes
Bibliography
Index