Yes, I agree. The juxtaposition/opposition was way overdrawn. I sensed that without knowing of the 1955 source. I took the basis of the film was not the story of his R3 was reinscribed as royalty but rather the story of an outsider facing off against authority. A long clichéd theme. And I suppose that would be where one would engage the question of influence. Of course, The Nasty Girl is among the best of the genre, though enhanced by the serious personal risk she took on as her research moved along. And it was the persistent work of serious research rather than spiritual communications that produced the result, as far as film representation takes it. I’m not equipped to move beyond Stage 1, but it think I dabbled Stages 2 and 3 in Combing of History on Nasty Girl and Heaven’s Gate😉🤔👌
Yes, Tim, I am moved by your effort to open this very difficult challenge. And by your suggestion of a way to organize one’s work and thinking--more specifically what an academic or expert might engage the challenge. I am taken by your attention to Langley’s project in The Lost King, exercised in your presentation of Stage 1. But I saw The Lost King (I grant this is my Stage 1 response) as a challenge to expertise, the claims of academic expertise, maybe also challenge to science as a field of practice. This is the story of an outsider. Close to true or not, that’s how I took in the story. Would there have been a story here without the outsider versus the experts? So perhaps we can also imagine an outsider to your model of analysis...though now that’s a challenge. In a next read I am thinking of the arguments about the successive film representations of Shaka that could not shake themselves free of earlier film images even as audiences were changing. (A new production for tv is coming out soon!!) And I think of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in its failed efforts to rehistorize the frontier of the West, partly the effect of an already too firmly established literary and film constitution of the frontier. You’ve opened a lot of questions. Thanks.
I think on some level The Lost King aggravated me because, very largely due to your catalyzing influence, I'm inclined to think of the outsider v. the expert story as always being more complex than "the innocent outsider who can see with instant clarity what the experts cannot see" and "the insider experts defending their self-interest in a guild monopoly". The outsiders are influenced by previously-produced expertise (you'd never guess in the film that the text that really pushed Langley's interest forward, by her own account, was published by an expert American historian in 1955) and the insiders are often quite aware of the outsider argument, and sometimes not so simplistically or dramatically compressed in their contempt or opposition to it. There *are* films that I think get closer to this complexity of motives and genealogies--The Nasty Girl is one good example. I just wanted Langley's initial engagements with the anti-Ricardians to feel more textured, I suppose--but also for her outsiderness to not be encoded as a spiritual presence.
E.g., the film could do more to say "Langley entered a long-standing community of outsider/dissenters who nevertheless used the research and analytical conventions of the insiders to insist strenuously on their point; moreover, she was from the beginning focused on defining Richard III as a legitimate ruler within the terms of pre-Glorious Revolution legitimacy, which is in some sense a curiously conventional sort of insider argument that is invested in the norms of argument about lineage and royal legitimacy whose terms actually *precede* the establishment of academic history in universities as we know it today."
Yes, I agree. The juxtaposition/opposition was way overdrawn. I sensed that without knowing of the 1955 source. I took the basis of the film was not the story of his R3 was reinscribed as royalty but rather the story of an outsider facing off against authority. A long clichéd theme. And I suppose that would be where one would engage the question of influence. Of course, The Nasty Girl is among the best of the genre, though enhanced by the serious personal risk she took on as her research moved along. And it was the persistent work of serious research rather than spiritual communications that produced the result, as far as film representation takes it. I’m not equipped to move beyond Stage 1, but it think I dabbled Stages 2 and 3 in Combing of History on Nasty Girl and Heaven’s Gate😉🤔👌
I think you're a master of State 2 and 3!
Yes, Tim, I am moved by your effort to open this very difficult challenge. And by your suggestion of a way to organize one’s work and thinking--more specifically what an academic or expert might engage the challenge. I am taken by your attention to Langley’s project in The Lost King, exercised in your presentation of Stage 1. But I saw The Lost King (I grant this is my Stage 1 response) as a challenge to expertise, the claims of academic expertise, maybe also challenge to science as a field of practice. This is the story of an outsider. Close to true or not, that’s how I took in the story. Would there have been a story here without the outsider versus the experts? So perhaps we can also imagine an outsider to your model of analysis...though now that’s a challenge. In a next read I am thinking of the arguments about the successive film representations of Shaka that could not shake themselves free of earlier film images even as audiences were changing. (A new production for tv is coming out soon!!) And I think of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in its failed efforts to rehistorize the frontier of the West, partly the effect of an already too firmly established literary and film constitution of the frontier. You’ve opened a lot of questions. Thanks.
I think on some level The Lost King aggravated me because, very largely due to your catalyzing influence, I'm inclined to think of the outsider v. the expert story as always being more complex than "the innocent outsider who can see with instant clarity what the experts cannot see" and "the insider experts defending their self-interest in a guild monopoly". The outsiders are influenced by previously-produced expertise (you'd never guess in the film that the text that really pushed Langley's interest forward, by her own account, was published by an expert American historian in 1955) and the insiders are often quite aware of the outsider argument, and sometimes not so simplistically or dramatically compressed in their contempt or opposition to it. There *are* films that I think get closer to this complexity of motives and genealogies--The Nasty Girl is one good example. I just wanted Langley's initial engagements with the anti-Ricardians to feel more textured, I suppose--but also for her outsiderness to not be encoded as a spiritual presence.
E.g., the film could do more to say "Langley entered a long-standing community of outsider/dissenters who nevertheless used the research and analytical conventions of the insiders to insist strenuously on their point; moreover, she was from the beginning focused on defining Richard III as a legitimate ruler within the terms of pre-Glorious Revolution legitimacy, which is in some sense a curiously conventional sort of insider argument that is invested in the norms of argument about lineage and royal legitimacy whose terms actually *precede* the establishment of academic history in universities as we know it today."