Romanticism and the Problem of Capitalism in Post-­War British Film

This article provides a historical materialist approach
to changing and opposed forms of romanticism in post-­‐war British film culture. Using Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s definition of European romanticism as ‘a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past (the precapitalist, premodern past)’, it mobilizes their typology of romantic cultural politics in order to compare the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944); Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003); and Patrick Keiller’s concluding film in the Robinson trilogy, Robinson in Ruins (2010) (Löwy and Sayre, 2001, p. 17). These films, I argue, can be read respectively as articulations of conservative romanticism, restitutionalist romanticism and revolutionary romanticism. In developing these readings the article contributes to the literature on romanticism and film while introducing important distinctions between different forms of romanticism.