CINEMA HERITAGE AND CRITICAL CELEBRATION OF THE PAST IN POSTMODERNITY

The main purpose of this essay is to highlight the relationship between heritage and cinema. We begin by questioning the concept of "heritage," as well as related discourses and debates that have arisen in the context of the British "heritage culture," to then point some reading possibilities of heritage cinema that have sustained a positive reconceptualization of this critical category in recent decades. The unequivocal link between the reconstruction of the past that we witness in heritage films and British conservative policies has been recurrent among critics. We conclude, first, that it is essential to dissociate heritage cinema from Thatcherism and, secondly, that both contextual analysis and textual analysis are fundamental to assess the (a) critical celebration of British cultural heritage in these films.