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Newland, P (2015) We come, our country’s rights to save: English rural landscape and leftist aesthetics in Comrades. Visual Culture in Britain, 16 (3). pp. 331-347. ISSN 1471-4787
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We come, our country’s rights to save English rural landscape and leftist aesthetics in Comrades.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (273kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, representations of rural landscapes inBritish cinema were most notably found in what became termed the heritage filmgenre (as exemplified by A Room with a View). These films have often beencritiqued for their alleged conservatism (political but also aesthetic) and theirideological perniciousness. But Bill Douglas’s epic film about the Tolpuddle mar-tyrs, Comrades (1986) – uniquely for 1980s British cinema – incorporates a range ofleftist aesthetic devices in order to mark the English rural landscape as a politicizedspace of socio-cultural conflict. The film foregrounds the fact that the English rurallandscape has been the subject of a long and complex tradition of representation.But as it does this it also critiques the ideological nature of much of this represen-tation. Therefore, this article argues that Comrades is evidently Brechtian in itsdesire to involve spectators in this important story of political struggle, and, assuch, unlike many British cinematic representations of English rural landscape inthe 1980s and 1990s, the film encourages intellectual curiosity in (and objectivejudgement on) the socio-cultural events taking place in the rural landscape
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Visual Culture in Britain. Newland, P. (2015). We Come, Our Country’s Rights to Save: English Rural Landscape and Leftist Aesthetics in Comrades. Visual Culture in Britain, 16(3), 331–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2015.1078257. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (Deed - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - Creative Commons ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Bill Douglas; Comrades; aesthetics; rural; landscape; 1901 Art Theory and Criticism; 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media; 2102 Curatorial and Related Studies |
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR |
| Divisions: | Screen School |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| SWORD Depositor: | A Symplectic |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Oct 2024 11:01 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Oct 2024 11:01 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.1080/14714787.2015.1078257 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/24393 |
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