Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader

ginette vincendeau

Period costume dramas are major box-office commodities, exploiting the lucrative gap between blockbusters and art films with their mixture of rich visuals, popular sensibility, and literary association. "Heritage cinema" is all too often discussed from literary (not cinematic) perspectives, and criticism of the films has long been overshadowed by the question of a film's fidelity (or lack of) to the original text. This volume of essays redresses the balance by examining the relationship between literature and film, representing both the view--and the critics of the view--that heritage cinema's elaborate aesthetics owe more to nostalgia than to historical accuracy. In her introduction to the volume, Ginette Vincendeau makes a case for the genre as an important and critically neglected form of popular cinema. Film / Literature / Heritage includes discussions of a wide selection of adaptations from Shakespeare to William Burroughs, as well as interviews with the screenwriters and adaptors of major films from Elizabeth to LA Confidential, and directors from Martin Scorsese to Peter Greenaway. Contributors are drawn from the best industry, academic, literary, and journalistic commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Genres film

284 pages, Paperback

First published July 1,2001

This edition

Format: 284 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 2001 by British Film Institute
ISBN: 9780851708416
ASIN: 0851708412
Language: English

About the author

ginette vincendeau

Ginette Vincendeau is a French-born British-based academic who is a Professor of Film Studies at King's College London.[1]

Vincendeau was educated at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, gaining a degree in English and at the University of East Anglia, where she completed a doctorate in Film Studies. Before assuming her post at King's, Vincendeau was Professor of Film Studies at Warwick University.

A regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine, she is the editor of The Encyclopedia of European Cinema (Cassell/BFI, 1995) and biographer of director Jean-Pierre Melville.[2]

Ginette Vincendeau's research interests are in French cinema, especially popular genres (thriller, film noir, heritage, comedy) and stars, as well as European cinema. She is also interested in issues of film history, national identity, trans-national cinema and women's cinema. She is currently completing a book on the cinematic representation of the South of France, writing a book on Brigitte Bardot and co-editing a book on Jean Renoir.