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The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. First coined in the UK in the early 1990s as a new label for an ostensibly new, post-1979 kind and cycle of period cinema, the ‘heritage film’ is now firmly established as a widely used term and category in academic film studies. Although the heritage film’s defining features, ideological character and ontological coherence would remain debated, its status as a ‘new’ category hinges, self-evidently, on the presumption that the films of post- 1979 culturally English heritage cinema marked a new departure and were clearly distinct from their pre-Thatcher-era precursors. Yet, paradoxically, the British period/costume films of the preceding decade, the 1970s, have attracted almost no scholarly attention, and none which connects them with the post- 1979 British heritage film, nor the 1980s cultural and industry conditions said to have fostered these productions. This article pursues these questions through the prism of Britain’s largest film production and distribution entity throughout 1970–86, EMI, and EMI’s place as a significant and sustained, but little-acknowledged, force in British period film production throughout that time. In so doing, the article establishes the case for studying ‘pre-heritage’ period cinema. EMI’s period film output included early proto-heritage films but also ventured notably wider. This field of production is examined within the broader terrain of 1970s British and American period cinema and within wider 1970s UK cinema box-office patterns and cultural trends, attending to commercial logics as well as to genre and the films’ positioning in relation to the later heritage film debates.

Despite the transnational character of the 21st-century film and entertainment industries, and the transformation of modes of consumption by the interlinked impacts of globalisation, digitisation, media convergence, social media and participatory culture, academic discourse around ‘heritage cinema’ has nonetheless persisted in framing it (however anachronistically) as a national ‘project’. The Screening European Heritage project, similarly, has pursued research questions that assert the key importance of heritage films within national and European film culture(s), and in supporting domestic film industries and the wider heritage and tourism sector at a national-cultural and nation-state level. As Andrew Higson correctly observes, however, ‘a great deal of what passes as (national) heritage cinema is actually the product of transnational, even global, markets’ (cited by Cooke and Stone, ‘Introduction’ to the current volume, 2016, xxxi). These ‘transnational circumstances’ are thrown into still sharper relief if we focus on the heritage film from the plural, unpredictable and surprising perspectives of transnational audiences and fans – from Europe and beyond. This chapter builds upon my earlier empirical engagements with real UK-based audiences of heritage cinema, and with the place of these films in internet-based fan cultures, to explore 21st-century transnational and transcultural fan discourses, understandings, and creative/participatory practices around Anglophone, ‘culturally British’ heritage films and their actors. Intriguingly and usefully, these fan engagements focus on, or intersect with, the same iconic ‘culturally English’ period-film texts of the 1980s that were cited and denounced in the founding early-1990s British critiques of the ‘heritage film’. Attention to 21st-century internet culture, however, reveals that these same films are consumed, appreciated, understood and (at times) (re-)appropriated by audiences and fans within markedly different generic, media, fannish and transtextual contexts that depart sharply from notions of ‘heritage cinema’ or narrowly national interpretative frameworks, and may even render them redundant. 21st-century global fan perspectives and practices around these films are transnational and even deterritorialised; but also trans-temporal and trans-generational; while focusing on films and actors which, and who, always were more transnational and ‘European’ than the 1990s debates which cast them as exemplars of ‘conservative English heritage’ were willing to concede. The culture of fandom itself shifts the consumption and interpretation of ‘English’ ‘heritage’ films further away from the ‘national’, since committed fans perceive fandom itself as (a, self-evidently, transnational and deterritorialised) ‘community’ in which pseudonymised interactions (which may strongly reveal or conceal nationality, region or other salient facets of identity) are the norm. And, with regards to the presumed relationship between heritage films and heritage tourism, some fan perspectives reveal a passionate interest in sites which remain uncommodified or even un-visitable in relation to the beloved film.

This paper considers Aki Kaurismaki’s film I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) as an iconoclastic (not to say eccentric) addition to the small canon of transnational ‘outsider’ representations of London by European directors and involving European stars. Its more particular interest, however, is in exploring Contract Killer’s London in terms of its cinematic geography and the specifics of its resonant choice of determinedly off-centre locations (drawn largely from the postindustrial, post-imperial east London docks and old East End, but extending to a wider palette of districts in London EC, north and west), and in the insights that might emerge from detailed attention to these. As Charlotte Brunsdon explores in the introduction to her book London in Cinema, the task of ‘thinking about London in the cinema’ is fraught with ‘difficulty’ (2007: 11). Part of this ‘difficulty’ has to do with the gap between the methodologies and usual concerns of ‘legitimate’ film studies and the different approaches and preoccupations of both other salient academic disciplines (such as cultural geography or

The 1990s saw a notable cycle of British films that drew their subject or subtext from the problems of unemployment and social exclusion faced by a social stratum identified by some social and political commentators as an ‘underclass’. The cycle is loose-knit, spanning a range of genres (and, in keeping with wider trends of the 1990s, often mixing different genres), and including films aimed at both minority and mainstream audiences. The use of the term ‘underclass’ by its best-known populariser, the conservative American academic Charles Murray,1 and in the bulk of subsequent debate, has been condemnatory, portraying a class seen as parasitically dependent and work-shy rather than merely work-less. By contrast, my use of the term is descriptive, denoting a ‘subordinate social class’.2 In common with Murray’s critics on the liberal centre and neo-Marxist left,3 my discussion takes the ‘underclass’ to be a post-working class that owes its existence to the economic and social damage wrought by globalisation, local industrial decline, the restructuring of the labour market and other legacies of the Thatcher era. In what follows, I shall examine the cycle of underclass films in terms of what they say about gender, class and national identity in the context of the culture and politics of contemporary Britain.