Nostalgia and nostophobia : filming Englishness and Italianness in A room with a view and Where angels fear to tread

Abstract

Nostalgia - that wistful feeling of longing for a past and a place that no longer exist and perhaps never really existed; that crepuscular sentiment elicited by the loss of an object of desire that is seductively elusive; that languid emotion which mourns the irreversibility of time and yearns not only for the repetition of unrepeatable past experiences, but also for the fulfilment of dreams that were always destined to remain unfulfilled 1. I would like to preface what follows by unapologetically asserting that in my view, one of the more tantalizing aspects of the heritagedetailed filmic adaptations of E.M. Forster's novels is precisely their ability to evoke within me that much-maligned feeling of nostalgia which has been frequently labelled as an anaesthetized and deceptively inauthentic form of history. This is not to say that the ideological nature of my engagement with nostalgia is unquestioning. Nor is it conservative. Rather I feel that nostalgia is too nuanced and ambivalent to be simply dismissed as a manifestation of false consciousness or of historical amnesia which obfuscates our relationship with the past by softening the negative within it to the point of effacement.