On the Threshold between Past and Present

In her book on British cinema, Sarah Street points out that there have been two types of historical film during the 1980s, the heritage film, as defined by Andrew Higson, and the bio-pic. ¹ The former include the Merchant-Ivory films, for example A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986) and Howards End (James Ivory, 1992); the latter include such films as Dance with a Stranger (Mike Newell, 1985), Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986) and Scandal (Michael Caton-Jones, 1989). There is, in my view, a third category of historical film, the rite of passage film set in the past, focusing on child or adolescent protagonists, most of which appeared in the 1980s. Like the heritage film, ‘they engage with the idea of the national past in a national context’, ² but they do so through the eyes of a single child protagonist. In that respect they are also like the bio-pic, showing ‘a fascination with difficult moments in the national past which indicate contemporary fears’. ³ After suggesting a taxonomy for the rite of passage films, I shall look more closely at a small selection of them which help to define what I propose to call an ‘alternative heritage’ film.