Royal Portraits in Hollywood

Royal Portraits in Hollywood

Author: Elizabeth Ford

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2009-06-26

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0813173396

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the history of cinema, many film genres have gained and lost popularity with the changing times, but one has maintained its supreme reign—the royal biopic. In Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens, authors Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell follow the lives of historical queens as depicted on film from the 1930s to the present. Women as diverse as Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, and Marie Antoinette have been represented on the silver screen, dominating the masculine world of politics while maintaining their femininity. During the golden age of American film, these roles gave Hollywood a means of portraying powerful women without threatening the patriarchal social order. Depictions of the lives of queens have progressed from idealized and romanticized portraits to the more personal, complex portrayals of modern Hollywood. By walking the line between fact and fiction, these royal portraits of queens reveal just as much our society as they do about the historical periods they represent. Audiences are drawn to the theaters year after year because the lives of queens promise good drama and attract some of the most talented actresses. The success of Hollywood’s leading ladies in playing queens further solidifies the link between Hollywood royalty and authentic royalty. Actresses such as Bette Davis, Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Greta Garbo have done more than influence the way we imagine historical queens—they also have changed how we perceive women in powerful positions today. Royal Portraits in Hollywood analyzes seventy-five years of films about queens as well as the lives of the actresses who starred in them. Combining biographical sketches and excerpts from letters and journals, Ford and Mitchell show how filmmaking and our society’s perceptions of gender have changed. The authors compare Hollywood’s on-screen portrayals to the historical records, often drawing connections to the actresses’ careers and personal lives. This comprehensive analysis provides a more complete picture of the lives that take place behind the thrones—both real and fictional. The spectacle of a woman dressed in the full regalia of power remains a compelling image in our society. Hollywood actresses and the queens they portray are women who wield power, and by examining the lives of these women, the authors reveal not only society’s perceptions about female power but also how those perceptions continue to evolve.


Royal Portraits in Hollywood

Royal Portraits in Hollywood

Author: Elizabeth A. Ford

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2009-06-26

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0813139031

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few lives provide as much history or drama as those of monarchs. Filmmakers from the silent era to onward have displayed a deep fascination with the lives of royalty and with queens in particular. Still, the question remains: what do these films really tell us about the women beneath the crowns? Drawing on films from the 1930s to those of today, Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens investigates the ways in which these films reproduce history and represent women. Though hardly progressive in nature, many early films offered an acceptable, nonthreatening way to present strong female characters in an economic and social landscape run almost exclusively by men. Authors Elizabeth Ford and Deborah Mitchell track the evolution of queens on film, noting how depictions of prominent women have changed over the past several decades and calling attention to the ways in which films both reflect and dictate the social norms of their eras. By comparing historical records of monarchs such as Queen Christina of Sweden, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, and Elizabeth I with their onscreen personas, and examining the biographical details of the actresses who portrayed these women, Ford and Mitchell present a fascinating inquiry into issues of historical accuracy and gender politics in film.


Beaton Portraits

Beaton Portraits

Author: Terence Pepper

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780300102895

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Presents a catalog to accompany the exhibition of Cecil Beaton's portraits.


Representing Royalty

Representing Royalty

Author: Julia Kinzler

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-07-27

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 152751496X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the early days of cinema, filmmakers have been intrigued by the lives and loves of British monarchs. The most recent productions by ITV and Netflix show that the fascination with British royalty continues unabated both in Britain and around the world. This book examines strategies of representing power and the staging of myths of power in seven popular films about British monarchs that were made after the mid-1990s revival of the “royal biopic” genre. By combining approaches from cultural studies with concepts and theories from the humanities, such as film studies and art history, it offers a comprehensive understanding of the cinematic portraits of royalty. In addition, the volume opens up new perspectives on how meaning is generated in films about the monarchy and on the connections between the biographical narratives. The introductory chapter to the case studies reviews the different academic positions on representations of royalty, provides a toolkit for studying the subject and demonstrates ways to approach the films. The book addresses questions of historical context and goes beyond a mere exploration of historical accuracy to reveal the films’ underlying ideological aims. As such, it makes a distinctive new contribution to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on the British monarchy in general and its cinematic representations in particular. It is the first monograph about representational mechanisms of royal identities and British past(s) in royal films such as Elizabeth, The Queen and The King’s Speech.


Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic

Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic

Author: Márta Minier

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317185560

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Beginning with the premise that the biopic is a form of adaptation and an example of intermediality, this collection examines the multiplicity of 'source texts' and the convergence of different media in this genre, alongside the concurrent issues of fidelity and authenticity that accompany this form. The contributors focus on big and small screen biopics of British celebrities from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, attending to their myth-making and myth-breaking potential. Related topics are the contemporary British biopic's participation in the production and consumption of celebrated lives, and the biopic's generic fluidity and hybridity as evidenced in its relationship to such forms as the bio-docudrama. Offering case studies of film biographies of literary and cultural icons, including Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Diana Princess of Wales, John Lennon, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Beau Brummel, Carrington and Beatrix Potter, the essays address how British identity and heritage are interrogated in the (re)telling and showing of these lives, and how the reimagining of famous lives for the screen is influenced by recent processes of manufacturing celebrity.


World-Making Renaissance Women

World-Making Renaissance Women

Author: Pamela S. Hammons

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 110883115X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection affirms the shaping authority of early modern women in literature and culture, evident well beyond their own moment.


Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination

Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination

Author: Eleanor Dobson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1786726645

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ancient Egypt has always been a source of fascination to writers, artists and architects in the West. This book is the first study to address representations of Ancient Egypt in the modern imagination, breaking down conventional disciplinary boundaries between fields such as History, Classics, Art History, Fashion, Film, Archaeology, Egyptology, and Literature to further a nuanced understanding of ancient Egypt in cultures stretching from the eighteenth century to the present day, emphasising how some of the various meanings of ancient Egypt to modern people have traversed time and media. Divided into three themes, the chapters scrutinise different aspects of the use of ancient Egypt in a variety of media, looking in particular at the ways in which Egyptology as a discipline has influenced representations of Egypt, ancient Egypt's associations with death and mysticism, as well as connections between ancient Egypt and gendered power. The diversity of this study aims to emphasise both the multiplicity and the patterning of popular responses to ancient Egypt, as well as the longevity of this phenomenon and its relevance today.


Adapted from the Original

Adapted from the Original

Author: Laurence Raw

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2018-09-14

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0786478721

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Critics and audiences often judge films, books and other media as "great" --but what does that really mean? This collection of new essays examines the various criteria by which degrees of greatness (or not-so) are constructed--whether by personal, political or social standards--through topics in cinema, literature and adaptation. The contributors recognize how issues of value vary across different cultures, and explore what those differences say about attitudes and beliefs.


Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers

Premodern Rulers and Postmodern Viewers

Author: Janice North

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 3319687719

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pop culture portrayals of medieval and early modern monarchs are rife with tension between authenticity and modern mores, producing anachronisms such as a feminist Queen Isabel (in RTVE’s Isabel) and a lesbian Queen Christina (in The Girl King). This book examines these anachronisms as a dialogue between premodern and postmodern ideas about gender and sexuality, raising questions of intertemporality, the interpretation of history, and the dangers of presentism. Covering a range of famous and lesser-known European monarchs on screen, from Elizabeth I to Muhammad XII of Granada, this book addresses how the lives of powerful women and men have been mythologized in order to appeal to today’s audiences. The contributors interrogate exactly what is at stake in these portrayals; namely, our understanding of premodern rulers, the gender and sexual ideologies they navigated, and those that we navigate today.