For Luhrmann, this is an important film. Following the astonishing success of Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996) and the dizzying Moulin Rouge! (2001), the director made his first significant misstep with Australia in 2008. This historical epic about Luhrmann’s homeland still did well at the box office, but was largely received with indifference by critics. The shine, it seemed, had started to come off the director’s frenetic visual style.

Gatsby is in many ways a rather sensible choice for Lurhmann’s comeback. In an age of rising concern about wealth, excess and societal cohesion, Gatsby‘s themes are as relevant as they were on the novel’s publication in 1925. Gatsby offers Lurhmann the opportunity to both question the morality and substance of America in the Jazz Age (and now) and to exercise his talent for screening opulence and glamour by exploiting its 1920s setting.

However, is there a note of caution to be sounded in reference to earlier adaptations of the book? After all, Gatsby films have often been criticised for ignoring the central ideas the novel tries to communicate in favour if showcasing superficial details of the period setting.

The first time Fitzgerald’s novel was brought to the screen was in 1926, just one year after the novel was initially published. This silent film version was directed by Herbert Brenon for Paramount Pictures. Sadly, no surviving copies of the film are now known to exist. Despite the efforts of film historians, notably Wheeler Winston Dixon who has attempted to track the film down, it remains lost. What have survived are a brief trailer and a reputation for depicting the frivolousness and opulence of the book’s famous parties without necessarily embracing the questions that Fitzgerald raises about this way of life. Though now it is not necessarily possible to be certain, it has been reported that this early Gatsby was less interested in social commentary than in having a good time.

The book’s second adaptation was released in 1949, again by Paramount Pictures who still owned the rights to the story. The production suffered from several delays, at least one of which was reportedly the result of a difference of opinion about how beautiful the actress playing Daisy Buchanan ought to be. Although the film itself ultimately received little praise from the critics, it is clear that beauty, glamour and style were key considerations in its production. Unfortunately, Paramount once again went too far in this direction, with the result that, as the New York Times noted, the film ‘achieved a dutiful plotting of the novel without the substance of life that made it stick’. Variety has agreed, claiming that ‘Elliot Nugent’s direction skips along the surface of the era depicted. The script doesn’t give him much substance to work with’. Once again, the glamour of the period seems to have outweighed the novel’s other achievements.

Paramount’s third attempt at Fitzgerald’s book came in 1974 with what has perhaps become the most famous of its adaptations to date. Both behind and in front of the camera, this Gatsby was graced by a wealth of familiar names. The screenplay was written by Francis Ford Coppola (though he would eventually distance himself from the finished product), it was directed by Jack Clayton and the leading roles were played by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. The sets were glorious, both in terms of scale and detail, while the costumes glittered with all the wonder of the era. This was a lavish production which is still beautiful to watch. However, as was the case with the previous Gatsby adaptations, this obsession with beauty and the look of the film ensured that other important aspects were overshadowed. The New York Times was once again dissatisfied, with its review arguing that stunning design work is not enough to save a film that ‘is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool’. This review concluded that the film was ‘frivolous without being much fun’. Although perhaps the shallowness of many of the characters is central Gatsby‘s success, the film itself lacked substance and got lost in its desire for visual perfection.

As is clear, previous Great Gatsby adaptations have displayed a tendency to hollow out the novel to various extents, reducing it to a certain look or visual style. This is particularly worrying in light of Baz Luhrmann’s already acutely developed interest in the aesthetics of glamour and opulence. Moulin Rouge! in particular suffered from his predilection for style over substance. In this sense, perhaps Gatsby is both obvious and dangerous source material for a director who needs this film to be a triumph.

Dr Matthew Jones

Dr Matthew Jones is a film historian and Research Associate on UCL’s ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-Going of the 1960s’ project. You can find out more about the project here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories

Reblogged from Adam I. P. Smith: Historian:

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The 1860 Presidential Election was one of the most consequential elections in world history, since it directly triggered the American Civil War. (Others on the shortlist include the series of three Reichstag elections in 1932-3). It was in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln that the first tranche of slave states seceded, and Lincoln – with the overwhelming support of public opinion in the North – responded to secession with war.

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The Department has always had some form of a global audience in so far as published research is available internationally and academics here collaborate with those at overseas institutions who share their research interests. The difference is that now, in 2013, that audience is no longer just academic; it transcends educational, social and geographical boundaries. Digital engagement is largely to thank for this, for example in the last month alone visitors to this blog have come from countries as diverse as the Philippines, Jordan, Ecuador, Serbia, Mauritius, Russia, Hong Kong, Canada and Thailand to name but a few. Social media channels (including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest) also enable us to communicate to an equally wide-ranging audience and to share research with them (including via video and podcast). Traditional media must not be overlooked either, as academic staff are called upon to put current events in perspective whether it’s the election of a new Pope, the death of a President or cultural events such as the release of a Hollywood blockbuster. Last week from an office in Gordon Square, Latin Americanist Dr Thom Rath was able to participate via video link in a panel discussion on live television in India. Technology therefore enables research to be heard worldwide, but is this a one-way or a two-way dialogue?

Research projects which are based in the Department provide opportunities for two-way dialogue to take place as members of the public are invited to become collaborators or respondents. Professor Margot Finn’s project ‘The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857′ has a network of 225 ‘Project Associates’ who come from all walks of life and actively participate in the project’s research (for more info see Dr Kate Smith’s blog). Furthermore, last night Dr Melvyn Stokes’ project ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going in the 1960s’ was launched and is inviting members of the public to share their memories via a questionnaire (as Dr Matthew Jones explains here).

It would be impossible to discuss global reach of historical research at UCL without talking about the ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ encyclopaedia, launched by Professor Catherine Hall and her team at the end of February. This is a public resource containing details of all the British Slave-owners at the time of abolition. Needless to say as a news story it had a strong human interest angle, but no one quite anticipated the scale of the global reaction with more than 65 pieces of media coverage appearing worldwide during launch week. The story was translated into several foreign languages and even appeared on the other side of the globe, just about as far away as possible, in the New Zealand Herald! Visitors to the encyclopaedia have come from all corners of the globe, with 159 countries represented in the first two days (since going live) alone. More interesting by far however are the conversations that it has prompted on blogs and via twitter.

Needless to say the journey doesn’t stop here, and we’re always happy to hear new suggestions relating to engagement!

Samantha Pickett

Reblogged from The Fall of Albion:

Last week, University College London publicly released a database that allows users to look up the names of people who were reimbursed by the British government for the slaves they owned after Britain banned slavery in 1833. It has touched off a debate over how to think about things in the past that we find morally repugnant in the present, as well as many other spin-off debates, such as the relationship between money and morality, past or present.

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For many, the street will be full of women in miniskirts and men in flares. The colours will be vivid and the sound of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones will be in the air. This is how 1960s Britain is often remembered. The country was, as Time Magazine commented, ‘swinging.’

Except, of course, that it wasn’t. While London was certainly a hub for fashion, music and art, the thrills of the capital must have seemed very remote elsewhere in the country. In recent years there has been a growing awareness that much of Britain came late to the 1960s and that the 1950s, in a cultural sense at least, persisted for many years after 1959.

In cinema, this was certainly true. The ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, which offered grim depictions of an austere 1950s for working-class youths in the North, continued to be made into the 1960s. The production of these films, which include Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961) didn’t show signs of slowing until 1963 and didn’t really come to an end until 1970. In terms of this genre, the 1950s lasted a long time indeed.

As this cycle waned during the 1960s, it was replaced by a new wave of films expressing the cultural energy that is now commonly associated with the decade. The ‘Swinging London’ films, which were at their peak between 1964 and 1969, painted the city as a place where authority and morals were crumbling in the face of a seductive but at times damagingly shallow youth culture. While the Beatles starred in frothy, harmless comedies, such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), elsewhere the glamour of Swinging London was tinged with uncertainty in Darling (1965), Alfie (1966) and Blow-Up (1966). However, despite the concerns they articulated about the age of free love, rebellion and youth, these films still traded on its glamour.

British cinema produced two competing versions of the 1960s. On the one hand, life was tough and gritty; on the other, it was vibrant, dazzling and more than a little sexy. However, for many audiences watching these films, reality would have been quite different from either of these depictions. Swinging London was, after all, a phenomenon experienced by only a limited number of people in one small corner of the nation. Equally, post-war austerity had eased by this time, causing some to look on kitchen sink dramas as relics of the past. For many, life was still hard, but this wasn’t true for everyone. British cinema reflected a number of competing realities.

This raises several questions. Why do we now often collectively remember the 1960s as a time when Britain was ‘swinging’ when the reality for many was quite different? What happened when Swinging London films were screened in economically deprived areas where their glamour was unrecognisable? What did audiences in affluent areas make of the kitchen sink dramas? Did they even watch these films at all? In wider terms, what did cinema-goers of the time make of films produced outside Britain, including Hollywood productions and European releases?

These aren’t questions to which we have answers at the moment. However, the project on which Dr Melvyn Stokes and I are working hopes to shed some light on these issues. The AHRC-funded Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s project, which is housed within UCL’s Department of History, is being launched in a few weeks and will ask how and why we remember the films of this decade and what role visiting the cinema played in everyday life.

To do that, we need your help. The questions we want to ask can’t be answered simply by looking in books or digging through archives. We need to get in touch with people who went to the cinema in 1960s Britain and to ask them to share their memories with us.

From 12th March 2013, there will be a questionnaire that can be completed on the project’s website. This can also be emailed or posted in paper form to those interested in taking part. If you would like to get involved and contribute to the project, we would be very excited to hear from you.

To find out more, please get in touch in one of the following ways:

Email: cinemamemories@ucl.ac.uk

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories

Telephone: 020 7679 7960

Dr Matthew Jones

Although the projects also cater for primary schools across London and Oxford, I personally enjoy volunteering at two superlative secondary schools in the London area. Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes are dedicated to around fifteen pupils from the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, while a group of erudite sixth-form students from BSix, Hackney, heroically forgo their spare time after school to learn Latin with myself and another student volunteer.

Although I say so myself, the lesson plans outlined by these outreach programmes are far removed from the typical Latin lessons of thirty years ago, filled with monotonous chanting and teachers so old they doubtless spoke Latin themselves. In fact, mini-games, etymology quizzes, acting performances, interactive white-boards, and sweets all form the corpus of a typical Latin lesson. All this, combined with various trips to see the Trojan Women performed at UCL’s Bloomsbury Theatre and a lecture series comprised of esteemed academics, is due to crescendo at the end of the year with students attending a summer school at Wadham College, Oxford.

Xavier Murray-Pollock

February 14^th was a special day for members of The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 project, for on Valentines Day our new UCL project website went live. You can view this portal to our project at www.ucl.ac.uk/eicah. The website is central to the project as we use it to communicate with members of the public and with the more than 225 people who are affiliated as Project Associates. We work together with these people to create research about East India Company officials and their families who returned to Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century after working in India. Together we explore what material objects these returned families brought with them from India. We question where and with whom these objects were placed, what they meant and how they were used. We also examine the country houses they bought, built, rented and renovated to understand how these imperial families shaped the domestic spaces and material cultures of Britain.

Research is compiled through writing case studies that focus on a particular person, family, country house or object. Case studies are made publically available through the project website and we encourage visitors to the site to comment and make suggestions on the research we post. Alongside research completed by members of the academic team, Project Associates from a variety of backgrounds (local and family historians, archivists, curators, heritage sector professionals, independent scholars, students and academics) also contribute case studies. For instance, local historian Georgina Green wrote our second case study on Valentines Mansion and Gardens in Essex.

Working on particular research questions with our group of Project Associates is a relatively new approach to historical research. It involves time and effort both on the part of the project team members, but also on the part of the Project Associates. Alongside the website, a monthly newsletter keeps Associates informed of the project’s progress, Tweets alert people to more immediate news and emails fly around passing information and making contacts. Outside of cyberspace the project team has met Associates in person through arranged meetings and organised Study Days at the British Library, the University of Edinburgh and in a couple of months, at the National Museum of Wales. We have also reached out to people through talks at Osterley Park and House, Valentines Mansion and Gardens and various conferences. Why you may ask go to these lengths? Why not just spend time in the archive? Quite simply, by reaching out to new people who are conducting research on or around the topic we have gained access to new seams of sources and findings. Project Associates have produced case studies on diverse topics from Charles Raymond to Sir Francis Sykes and from Chinese Chippendale staircases in Anglesey to armorial porcelain in Staffordshire. It has made this project’s scope broader and deeper than we could have managed as a four-person team. It has also made doing our research great fun. Obviously though you don’t have to take my word for it, you can begin to see the benefits for yourself by visiting our website (www.ucl.ac.uk/eicah) or by joining the project and following it as an Associate.

Dr Kate Smith

Kate Smith is a Research Fellow on the project ‘The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857′, based in the Department of History at University College London. Find out more about the project here –  http://ucl.ac.uk/eicah/

Reblogged from Adam I. P. Smith: Historian:

Jeremy Bowen, David Owen and Juliet Gardiner: guest speakers at our ‘careers outside academia’ event

People often ask me what I plan to do after I finish studying history. “What, you know, JOB, will you get?” they say. That’s not just people who don’t know me well or polite strangers making conversation; even one of my uncles asked me back when I started my undergraduate degree, “You’re going to be, what, a history teacher then?” As if history is a discipline whose only function is to perpetuate itself, a self-referential circle that exists only in academic institutions; ivory towers cut off from the real world.

There are all sorts of reasons why this view of history is false, which I won’t go into here, but it can sometimes be hard to get away from it in the midst of writing a doctoral thesis. For a long time a PhD has been seen as the route into a career in academia. A few decades ago one could, technically, do without one, and there are some excellent older historians around the UK that ‘only’ have an MA, but nowadays that won’t wash. If you want to be an academic you need a PhD; your thesis is a kind of 100,000 word cover letter.

This all makes a lot of sense and, like me, most of my peers are at the very least entertaining the possibility of going into academia after we finish. Equally, one has to be realistic and be aware that you might need an alternative. Everybody knows that more people complete PhDs in history every year than there are university jobs, and it follows that some of us will be disappointed. Others of us will find that although we have always loved history, and always will, three years studying one narrow question, spending most of that time alone, has put us off a career doing essentially the same thing. There’s no shame in discovering this, of course, but it can sometimes leave final year PhDs approaching completion in a state of panic. What, you know, JOB will I get?

It’s really important to bridge this gap, which is why I was grateful to the department for organising an event earlier this week for postgraduate students on ‘History careers outside academia’. We were joined by the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen, the writer and broadcaster Juliet Gardiner, and David Owen, a teacher at Fortismere School in North London. All three are history graduates; indeed Jeremy and Juliet are graduates of our department. They spoke about their academic studies and their working lives, showing us how they found – and continue to find – links between them. There is a world, it transpires, outside academia – and the skills we develop doing our PhDs are valued there too.

Jeremy Bowen explained that in his almost thirty years working at the BBC, much of it in the Middle East, his background in history had always stood in him good stead. Historians are used to thinking about causes, contexts, patterns, continuities and changes; we absorb lots of information and try to find the bigger issues that lie beneath. What’s really important here, where’s the argument? Reporters need to think like this too, Jeremy argued, and it was his training as a historian at UCL that helped him to do that. Here’s a rhetorical question for fans of The Wire: Scott Templeton and Gus Haynes – which one was more like a good historian?

Juliet Gardiner has had, she said, a ‘portfolio career’. Her experience flies in the face of the notion – still very popular when she was starting out, though perhaps less so now – that one goes through life pursuing one career. She started out in publishing as an editor, moved on to run her own non-fiction imprint, wrote a couple of books and eventually went her own way and became a ‘freelance historian’ so to speak, regularly appearing on TV history programmes like ’1900 House’ and writing more books as well. History isn’t just something that lives in universities or in academic monographs, and Juliet has found a way to make her knowledge of, and passion for, the subject translate into a working life that has been varied, interesting and rewarding.

Of course it’s obvious that as a teacher David Owen would find himself drawing on his academic work, but I was also interested to hear him talk about the ways in which he is continually challenged by teaching. History is incredibly popular at the moment in trade publishing and on television – as Juliet also pointed out – but for most people their main experience of the subject is still at school. If we want the public understanding of history to be shaped by historians and not just by politicians (see the latest national curriculum for an illustration of the risks of this) we need to be engaged with history at the school level. It was therefore very motivating to hear David Owen speak about the joy he finds in interesting his students in the subject; it also rounded off a very good evening.

Harry Stopes

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