Torn stitches of the heart : post-imperial trauma and colonial romance cinema, 1979-2005

Abstract

Period romance films set in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, India, or Kenya are intriguing: although set during times of active colonisation, they largely focus instead on romantic and erotic interpersonal relationships. The ensuing juxtapositions between the erotic and the traumatic, between romantic imagination and cultural memory, provide the central problem which motivates this thesis. What function does the colonial past perform, in the romance, given that this past is decentred and seemingly superfluous to narrative requirements? My hypothesis is that the structure of these films facilitates a return of traumatic elements of the colonial past through the formal and narrative properties of the film texts themselves, and through their affective and sensory address to filmgoers. This thesis occupies interstices between three strands of critical engagement with such films: that which focuses on heritage cinema’s role in constructing a nostalgic national imaginary; that which centres on costume film’s ability to interrogate and articulate liberal, gendered and sexual identity; and a third, discursive strand dealing with questions of postcolonial representation. My theoretical framework is further informed by Caruth’s account of structural trauma (Caruth, 1996) and by accounts of the mediation and transmission of cultural trauma in cinema. (Mishra, 2007; Kaplan, 2005) This project undertakes a textual analysis of five films which I argue may be taken together as examples of colonial heritage romance: The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, 1993), My Brilliant Career (dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1979), Out Of Africa (dir. Sidney Pollack, 1985), A Passage to India (dir. David Lean, 1984), and The Age of Innocence (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1993). Drawing on this analysis and on historical data, I contend that the setting of each film has narrative, formal and traumatic manifestations. In investigating the way in which the filmic representation of the colonial constructs historical time, I draw on Bhabha’s account of colonial discourse. (Bhabha, 1994) An exploration of how the articulation of erotic subjects in these films intersects with their colonial settings centres on their rhetorical and affective address to embodied filmgoers. Colonial heritage romances may not directly address the trauma of the past, but through them, that past addresses us.