Paradise postponed? The Department of National Heritage and political hegemony

Established following the Conservative Party's election victory in April 1992, the Department of National Heritage has been heralded as an important stage in the growing recognition of the significance of the leisure industry to Britain. By combining, for the first time, responsibility for sport, tourism, the arts, libraries, heritage, broadcasting and film, and by providing them with Cabinet representation, a unique opportunity has, seemingly, been provided to develop and promote the interests of leisure in Britain. This paper takes the view that although this initiative has been broadly welcomed, there are important inconsistencies which require attention. On the one hand the selection of the portfolio appears somewhat eclectic. On the other hand, it is questionable why such a department should have been developed at all. An inspection of the implicit ideology suggests that rather than the traditional use of the state to promote leisure interests, the introduction of the department signifies a shift to the use of leisure to promote the Government's interests. Thus the new Department of National Heritage is to be used as a central feature in the legitimation of the government's political programme. Rather than emphasising its traditional quasi-welfare role, the new place for leisure and heritage is firmly in the market economy. Whilst a leisured society may be the epitome of post-industrialism, therefore, the citizen rights claim for access to leisure activities can only be secured by engaging with the market. This legitimised construction of post- modern citizenship is at the centre of a new political order where choice has been replaced by means and where the classless paradigm championed by the Prime Minister will be a classlessness of constructed omission.

The zero, the centre and the empty utopia: from Rossellini to Walter Salles

This article examines utopian gestures and inaugural desires in two films which became symbolic of the Brazilian Film Revival in the late 1990s: Central Station (1998) and Midnight (1999). Both evolve around the idea of an overcrowded or empty centre in a country trapped between past and future, in which the motif of the zero stands for both the announcement and the negation of utopia. The analysis draws parallels between them and new wave films which also elaborate on the idea of the zero, with examples picked from Italian neo-realism, the Brazilian Cinema Novo and the New German Cinema. In Central Station, the ‘point zero’, or the core of the homeland, is retrieved in the archaic backlands, where political issues are resolved in the private sphere and the social drama turns into family melodrama. Midnight, in its turn, recycles Glauber Rocha’s utopian prophecies in the new millennium’s hour zero, when the earthly paradise represented by the sea is re-encountered by the middle-class character, but not by the poor migrant. In both cases, public injustice is compensated by the heroes’ personal achievements, but those do not refer to the real nation, its history or society. Their utopian breadth, based on nostalgia, citation and genre techniques, is of a virtual kind, attune to cinema only.