Figuring the past : period film and the mannerist aesthetic
Registro en:
978-90-485-1353-6
10.26530/OAPEN_426536
Autor
Vidal, Belén
Institución
Resumen
In the introduction to his evocatively titled book The Past is a Foreign Country,
David Lowenthal remarks that ‘it is no longer the presence of the past that
speaks to us, but its pastness’.
This subtle distinction underlies the pleasures of
the period film, in which the ‘the Past’ (as original myth or foundational mo-
ment) resonates in the present through the visual (and aural) spectacle of past-
ness, and its intricate signs. The period film stages a return to a place and time
whose codes may seem strange and, more often than not, irrelevant. However,
period objects and rituals are a source of continuing fascination, which accounts
for the genre’s enduring popularity. Behind the apparent nostalgia for the es-
sence of something lost, there is always something found that becomes mean-
ingful for each generation of viewers, inscribed in the ways we imagine the past
according to the needs and expectations of the present. This book explores the
period film by focusing on the visual pre-eminence given to its figures of mean-
ing. The notion of figure provides a prism through which to look at a film genre
that thrives on convention and variation. Focusing on a cycle of films made
between and , I will be discussing the ways these films project the
contemporary historical imagination through a unique aesthetic that engages
with the textures of the past in distinctive ways.