Browsing by Author "Monk, Claire"

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    Always too early
    (British Film Institute, 2009-07) Monk, Claire
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    The British heritage-film debate revisited
    (Routledge, 2002) Monk, Claire
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    British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film
    (Routledge, 2002) Monk, Claire; Sargeant, Amy
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    ‘But you know, there have been queer characters from the very first film’: Call Me by Your Name and the long shadow of James Ivory
    (Intellect, 2024-07-15) Monk, Claire
    The imprint of the veteran gay independent director James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name is fundamental: not merely as the 2017 film’s Academy Award-winning credited screenwriter, but via Ivory’s intimate involvement from 2007 onwards when the rights to André Aciman’s novel were first optioned. This chapter explores the contours of Ivory’s influence on Call Me by Your Name in cinematic–authorial and production–strategic terms to situate Call Me by Your Name’s remarkable 21st-century impact as LGBTQ+ cinema and same-sex romance in relation to Ivory’s longer and wider film oeuvre and to Merchant Ivory Productions’ collaborative, representational and promotional practices in their 44 years as a (widely and wilfully unacknowledged) queer filmmaking partnership. The chapter, firstly, offers a new, nuanced reading of Call Me by Your Name’s affinities with Ivory’s long-underrated affirmative gay film Maurice (1987), adapted from E. M. Forster’s posthumous 1971 novel – questioning viral social-media assertions about the ‘parallels’ between the two films which proliferated amid the rising 2017–2018 hype around the film – and, secondly, establishes Call Me by Your Name’s place and cinematic precursors within Ivory’s wider, less-known body of work beyond the ‘heritage film’ mode between 1963 and 2009, focusing particularly on Ivory’s films Slaves of New York (1988), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998) and The City of Your Final Destination (2009). Thirdly, drawing on archive and wider primary sources, the chapter establishes the senses in which Call Me by Your Name’s exceptional crossover success owed a debt to the innovative promotional and release strategies which had been rehearsed three decades earlier in the release of Merchant Ivory’s Maurice.
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    EMI and the ‘Pre-Heritage’ Period Film
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2021-01) Monk, Claire
    First coined in the UK in the early 1990s as a new label for an ostensibly new, post-1979 kind and cycle of period cinema, the ‘heritage film’ is now firmly established as a widely used term and category in academic film studies. Although the heritage film’s defining features, ideological character and ontological coherence would remain debated, its status as a ‘new’ category hinges, self-evidently, on the presumption that the films of post- 1979 culturally English heritage cinema marked a new departure and were clearly distinct from their pre-Thatcher-era precursors. Yet, paradoxically, the British period/costume films of the preceding decade, the 1970s, have attracted almost no scholarly attention, and none which connects them with the post- 1979 British heritage film, nor the 1980s cultural and industry conditions said to have fostered these productions. This article pursues these questions through the prism of Britain’s largest film production and distribution entity throughout 1970–86, EMI, and EMI’s place as a significant and sustained, but little-acknowledged, force in British period film production throughout that time. In so doing, the article establishes the case for studying ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema. EMI’s period film output included early proto-heritage films but also ventured notably wider. This field of production is examined within the broader terrain of 1970s British and American period cinema and within wider 1970s UK cinema box-office patterns and cultural trends, attending to commercial logics as well as to genre and the films’ positioning in relation to the later heritage film debates.
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    Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies
    (Polish Association for the Study of English (PASE), 2022) Monk, Claire
    This essay advances the conversation around the subject of (E. M. Forster and adaptation – or Forsterian adaptation – by appraising the current state of Forster/ian adaptations scholarship and proposing conceptual and methodological tools for advancing the study of this field. As a cross-disciplinary scholar of film, adaptation, literature, popular and critical reception, and digitally enabled participatory culture, I write with the more specific goal of heightening and extending transdisciplinary awareness of the materials available to be studied, the available methodologies, and their merits and limitations, while identifying issues and challenges for the development of a Forster/ian Adaptation Studies. Structurally, the essay proceeds by identifying ten ‘themes’ – or important considerations – for the study of Forster/ian adaptation. The ten themes look substantially beyond ‘page-to-screen’ adaptation studies to demonstrate the roles and impacts of institutions, institutional practices, personal relations, the successive ‘new’ media of the past century and their advancing technologies and practices, commercial forces, and Forster’s literary estate (as the rights-holders and royalties beneficiaries for his works); while also calling for a closer, evidence-based, attention to film and media adaptation and production processes and their adaptational consequences; and foregrounding the importance of the visual and unscripted – performed, embodied, intangible and even accidental – elements and determinants of audio-visual adaptation. Temporally, the essay conceptualises the field of Forster/ian adaptations by proposing that there have been three phases of Forster/ian adaptation. Phase 1 (1942–1973) comprises those adaptations of Forster’s stories and novels written and produced (broadly) during his lifetime, always for non-cinematic media. Phase 2 comprises the 1984–1992 era of the Forster feature-films cycle, instigated by a (widely disregarded) institutional shift which brought a step-change in the nature of Forster adaptation: for the first time, the development of new adaptations of Forster’s novels, going back to the source, became the norm. Phase 3 comprises everything that comes after the 1984–1992 Forster feature films, plus certain earlier adaptations which fall outside the ‘classic adaptation’ category. This third (and current) phase is characterised by its heterogeneity: adaptation to a range of media, across a range of forms and aesthetic approaches, by creators with varied interests, but, I propose, spanning four main areas: Sci-Fi Forster, Queer Forster, The Revisionist or Condescending Forster Adaptation, and twenty-first-century Forsterian Bio-Drama, Bio-Fiction and ‘Literary’ Paratexts.
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    Forster and adaptation: across time, media and methodologies
    (International E. M. Forster Society, 2021-06-07) Monk, Claire
    This paper seeks to advance conversations around Forster and adaptation – or Forsterian adaptation – by appraising the current state of Forster/ian adaptations scholarship and proposing conceptual and methodological tools for advancing the study of this field. As a cross-disciplinary scholar of film, adaptation, literature, popular and critical reception, and digitally enabled participatory culture, my more specific goal is to heighten and extend transdisciplinary awareness of the materials available to be studied, the available methodologies, and their merits and limitations, while identifying issues and challenges for the development of a Forster/ian Adaptation Studies. Structurally, the paper proceeds by identifying ten ‘themes’ – or important considerations – for the study of Forster/ian adaptation. The ten themes look substantially beyond ‘page-to-screen’ adaptation studies to demonstrate the roles and impacts of institutions, institutional practices, personal relations, the successive ‘new’ media of the past century and their advancing technologies and practices, commercial forces, and Forster’s literary estate (as the rights-holders and royalties beneficiaries for his works). Via this approach I call for a closer, evidence-based, attention to film and media adaptation and production processes and their adaptational consequences; and foreground the importance of the visual and unscripted – performed, embodied, intangible and even accidental – elements and determinants of audio-visual adaptation. Temporally, the paper proposes that there have been three phases of Forster/ian adaptation. Phase 1 (1942–1973) comprises those adaptations of Forster’s stories and novels written and produced (broadly) during his lifetime, always for non-cinematic media. Phase 2 comprises the 1984–1992 era of the Forster feature-films cycle, instigated by a (widely disregarded) institutional shift which brought a step-change in the nature of Forster adaptation: for the first time, the development of new adaptations of Forster’s novels, going back to the source, became the norm. Phase 3 comprises everything that comes after the 1984–1992 Forster feature films and also certain earlier adaptations which fall outside the ‘classic adaptation’ category. This third (and current) phase is characterised by its heterogeneity: adaptation to a range of media, across a range of forms and aesthetic approaches, but, I propose, spanning four main areas: Sci-Fi Forster; Queer Forster; The Revisionist or Condescending Forster Adaptation; and twenty-first-century Forsterian Bio-Drama, Bio-Fiction and ‘Literary’ Paratexts.
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    From Costume Romps to Queer Milestones: Adaptation, Collaboration, Queerness and Modernism in the ‘Long New Wave’ of Richardson, Schlesinger and Reisz
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2024-06) Monk, Claire
    The post-New Wave films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors remain under-analysed terrain, both in terms of their potential relevance for interrogating how we understand the British New Wave itself and for the terms in which we might conceptualise a ‘Long’ New Wave. This essay departs from persisting auteurist approaches to consider the post-New-Wave oeuvres and careers of these directors collectively, in terms which foreground the importance of collaborations and networks rather than individual authorship and seek to decentre, denaturalise and potentially dislodge their pre-eminent association with Northern, British, social realism and its presumed legacies. I argue for the importance of a cluster of less-analysed areas of intersection and development which emerge across the eclectic filmmaking careers of Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Karel Reisz) in the immediate post-New Wave decade from the 1963 success of Richardson’s Tom Jones to the early 1970s. My discussion pivots on two commonalities: during this time, all three directors contributed significantly and plurally to innovations and advances in genre and representation across two areas distinct from British Northern working-class realism: historical/costume film genres, and queer representation. An approach which centres the (broadly defined) queer elements in these directors’ post-New-Wave oeuvres – intersecting at times with their equally undervalued contribution to ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema – reveals the ‘Long’ New Wave as substantially a cinema of adaptation, collaboration and queerness which encompassed important, near-forgotten, international projects as well as modernist influences and, in Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), a significant advance in realist queer representation.
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    From costume romps to queer-cinema milestones: revisiting sexuality, gender, class (and more) through the lens of the ‘Long New Wave’
    (Symposium Paper: University of Sheffield, 2023-04-20) Monk, Claire
    The ‘post-New Wave’ films and trajectories of the key British New Wave directors in the period from 1963 onwards remain significantly underexplored terrain, particularly in terms of their potential relevance for rethinking and interrogating how we understand the ‘British New Wave’ itself and for the terms in which we might (or might not) conceptualise a ‘Long New Wave’. The individual directorial careers of Anderson, Reisz, Richardson and Schlesinger have, of course, yielded book-length studies; but the impulse in such work remains broadly auteurist, and often loyal to consensus framings of the four as pre-eminently directors of realism and social commitment. In contrast, my paper argues for the importance of two far-less-analysed areas of connection, commonality and development which emerge across the work of Richardson, Schlesinger and (in a smaller way) Reisz from the box-office triumph of Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) onwards. First, Richardson’s successful foray into the costume romp was merely the first of several significant contributions by all three directors to a post-New Wave shake-up of the historical/costume film during the ‘pre-heritage film’ period (Monk 2021) across a spectrum of genres including ‘classic’ literary adaptation, revisionist British imperial history and twentieth-century retro. Second, the centrality of gay and bisexual directors (Anderson, Schlesinger, Richardson) and collaborations in shaping the British New Wave highlights a need to revisit the place of queerness, and the male as object of the gaze, within these filmmakers’ ‘long’ oeuvres – not least in Schlesinger’s groundbreaking direct contributions to a post-1967 queer cinema. My consideration of both strands highlights the importance of continuing director–star collaborations and, more speculatively, prompts the question of how attention to these directors’ period and queer films might inform a reassessment of the place of sexuality, gender, class and region in their earlier New Wave work.
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    From ‘English’ heritage to transnational audiences: fan perspectives and practices and why they matter
    (Palgrave, 2016-09) Monk, Claire
    Despite the transnational character of the 21st-century film and entertainment industries, and the transformation of modes of consumption by the interlinked impacts of globalisation, digitisation, media convergence, social media and participatory culture, academic discourse around ‘heritage cinema’ has nonetheless persisted in framing it (however anachronistically) as a national ‘project’. The Screening European Heritage project, similarly, has pursued research questions that assert the key importance of heritage films within national and European film culture(s), and in supporting domestic film industries and the wider heritage and tourism sector at a national-cultural and nation-state level. As Andrew Higson correctly observes, however, ‘a great deal of what passes as (national) heritage cinema is actually the product of transnational, even global, markets’ (cited by Cooke and Stone, ‘Introduction’ to the current volume, 2016, xxxi). These ‘transnational circumstances’ are thrown into still sharper relief if we focus on the heritage film from the plural, unpredictable and surprising perspectives of transnational audiences and fans – from Europe and beyond. This chapter builds upon my earlier empirical engagements with real UK-based audiences of heritage cinema, and with the place of these films in internet-based fan cultures, to explore 21st-century transnational and transcultural fan discourses, understandings, and creative/participatory practices around Anglophone, ‘culturally British’ heritage films and their actors. Intriguingly and usefully, these fan engagements focus on, or intersect with, the same iconic ‘culturally English’ period-film texts of the 1980s that were cited and denounced in the founding early-1990s British critiques of the ‘heritage film’. Attention to 21st-century internet culture, however, reveals that these same films are consumed, appreciated, understood and (at times) (re-)appropriated by audiences and fans within markedly different generic, media, fannish and transtextual contexts that depart sharply from notions of ‘heritage cinema’ or narrowly national interpretative frameworks, and may even render them redundant. 21st-century global fan perspectives and practices around these films are transnational and even deterritorialised; but also trans-temporal and trans-generational; while focusing on films and actors which, and who, always were more transnational and ‘European’ than the 1990s debates which cast them as exemplars of ‘conservative English heritage’ were willing to concede. The culture of fandom itself shifts the consumption and interpretation of ‘English’ ‘heritage’ films further away from the ‘national’, since committed fans perceive fandom itself as (a, self-evidently, transnational and deterritorialised) ‘community’ in which pseudonymised interactions (which may strongly reveal or conceal nationality, region or other salient facets of identity) are the norm. And, with regards to the presumed relationship between heritage films and heritage tourism, some fan perspectives reveal a passionate interest in sites which remain uncommodified or even un-visitable in relation to the beloved film.
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    Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2011-07) Monk, Claire
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