AVANCA | CINEMA 2013

De-siring History in Shekhar Kapurs Elizabeth films

Aateka Khan Bharati College, University of Delhi, India

Abstract
Indian director Shekhar Kapurs two films on the life and times of the great British matriarch Queen Elizabeth are remarkably complex instances of attempts by a post-colonial at delineating the glories of empire in its heyday. The present paper shall try to examine the element of choice in representing a particular period or individual in history. Hegels ideas regarding the world historical individual and his philosophy of history can serve as a useful theoretical background to begin with an analysis of the two films. The figure of the virgin queen Elizabeth is perhaps one of the most loaded in terms of both desire and history. It is this heady cocktail of history and desire that sets the narrative pace of the films. If history is mans burning desire for lost time, it can never be fulfilled though it has as Hegel writes an infinite right to be satisfied. The paper shall also attempt to apply another theoretical category -that of the simulacra - to the proposed analysis in order to examine historical representation as a kind of image making and thereby to try and suggest as Deleuze does elsewhere, that the films serve as apertures opening up to an understanding by which privileged historical positions could be challenged. Alternatively, applying Baudrillards or Nietzsches negative perception of the simulacra concept to the films could lead to a very different understanding of Kapurs films. Reading history as desire (entertainment?, distraction?) shall then become the mainstay of the present analysis besides negotiating the issue of how Kapurs films compare to formal works of history and their limitations as avenues to historical truth. Keywords: Shekhar Kapur, Elizabeth films, historiography, desire, post-modernism

Introduction
Responding to a question while being interviewed by Rebecca Murray about his Elizabeth films, Shekhar Kapur quipped I would describe all history as fiction and interpretation. He goes on to inform us that he hated history as a child and wouldnt have any of it unless somebody made it entertaining for him. History seen from Kapurs juvenile perspective comes across as a rather unwanted academic subject. Of more serious consequence perhaps, is Queen Elizabeths first historian William Camdens wry observation To relate over and over again the same series of transactions diversified only in the method and style and with the addition of a few particular incidents, would be no very agreeable undertaking (even) to the historian(parenthesis mine, Collinson 469). It would seem that history as a bare statement of fact would perhaps be too much to expect even from a professional historian. Paradoxically, some of the best and most
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passionate artists have borrowed freely from no very agreeable historical sources. To make matters more complicated Kapur unabashedly boasts of his dispassionate stance towards history. Cate Blanchett, one of the many artists who have played Elizabeth told Murray about the opposite extremes she and Kapur (her director) hold: I am fascinated by history and hes utterly disinterested. Why then, one would ask, does a disinterested director from a colonized nation team up with a fascinated actress and other native actors to retell a saga that is not even in a loose sense of the word a reinvention (as Blanchett erroneously calls it in her interview with Murray)? The directors answer is loud and clear or so it would seem. He admits that There was something about Elizabeth that was very interesting Kapur takes up Elizabeths figure from history for contemporary production/consumption given its commercial potential but there is also a more serious concern, namely, to use history as a moral story that is more relevant to our times. The moral of Elizabeths story as Kapur sees it is that of tolerance and peaceful co-existence. Hegel on the contrary makes it clear in his Philosophy of History that history generally teaches us nothing truly valuable as far as our future actions are concerned. He also warns against looking for parables in history: We must not fall into the Litany of Lamentations (Hartman). History is thus more or less amoral for Hegel. Kapur, on the other hand wishes to learn from the historical experiences of civilization and seeks to accomplish this in his films. Kapurs stance is in fact complex given the extremes of his cinematic perception and his aspirations from film. In the same interview he comments about the first film I had forgotten how sexy it was. I had forgotten the film. Kapurs interest in Elizabeth finds a resonance in Hegels ideas about the world historical individual, which the latter describes as devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately(Hartman, italics and parenthesis mine). Elizabeths portrayal in the films fits the bill except that Elizabeth is a woman. Hegels individual is politically correct but obviously all the examples that he cites are of men e.g. Caesar, Napoleon etcetera. While Kapurs subject may be historically appropriate by Hegelian standards, more than one critic has pointed out the anachronism of Elizabeths portrayal in the first film. David Moss being one of them writes: Kapurs Elizabeth becomes the Ditchley painting even though the film purports to end in 1563, almost 30 years before the painting was completed (Moss 796). Mosss relentlessly unromantic analysis of the reign does not flinch from spelling out right at the outset a very typical ambiguity concerning the queen. The reign is overshadowed by the image. Elizabeth Is image, the Ditchley portrait in particular, has come to

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denote England itself. In the next sentence Moss goes on to compare the image to an animated shop window dummy advertisingBritishness. Kapur seems to embrace the trademark, symbolic ( and highly complex) image of Lizzy in the final scene of the first film climaxing with the Ditchley portrait of Lizzy coming to life on screen. Moss admonishingly notes that Kapur would seem to argue that the Ditchley portrait is the reigns true achievement and dismisses the ending of the first film as a post-modern tactic that compromises the major events of the reign (Moss 801, 802 ). Quoting from Elizabeths first Archbishop of Cantebury, Matthew Parkers letter to Lord Burghley, historian Patrick Collinson spells out his worst fears I fear her Highness shall be strangely chronicled, when he adds and very variously to the original. Kapurs film strays far away from the accounts of professional historians in search of greener pastures. The caustic sarcasm in Collinsons wry comment We should not confine our attention to the verdicts of professional historians is more than apparent. (What is worth scrutiny is the underlying reason for this deviation.) The article in The Journal of Popular Culture (2006) written by David Grant Moss brings forth an interesting observation. Moss feels that Kapurs film has come a long way from earlier cinematic and televised representations addressing the issue of lack of sexual experience or love to the post-modern difficulty of a woman trying to have it all. Though this could be true, it still seems after reading historical accounts of the queens life and conduct that Kapurs Elizabeth is nave in comparison??. Even Moss describes her as more damsel in distress than anything else. Moss comments on the strange world of Kapurs Elizabeth echoing Matthew Parker, the queens first archbishop of Canterbury. J.A. Froude one of the more influential of Elizabethan historians, found in his analysis of the queen no ability at all worth calling by the name except tortuousness and artifice. Moreover, Froudes views about the greater political and diplomatic skills of the queens advisors Lord Burghley and Walsingham are ratified by Martin Hume who claims their centrality in being able to save her against herself. The historical account thus begins with what Moss calls conventional admiration fizzling out finally in a portrayal of the queen as a woman in need of male direction. Kapur film does not differ much from the historical account in this respect. From the very beginning she lives in the shadow of her male mentors. Burghleys comment in the confession box at the outset of the first film is insipid besides making the audience cringe at the growing possibility of witnessing in the film the sordid bildungsroman of a typical Hollywood period movie princess. Indeed the films suffer from a near Hollywood style period movie format as well as a great affinity for expensive and exotic sets and special effects. Kapur for sure, has not produced historical masterpieces like those of Stone, Bertolucci or Speilberg. However, Kapur seems to have had no ambition for making a historical masterpiece. Given Kapurs desire to make history more entertaining, his treatment

seems to be in tune with his project and Mosss description of the film as providing a Disneyesque view of Renaissance Britain is apt (Moss, pg. 803). One further tends to agree with Moss when he calls the film gleefully anachronistic and also when he argues that Kapurs Elizabeth is nave as compared to earlier cinematic and televised representations. A more serious accusation Moss makes is that Kapurs Elizabeth is concerned solely with love and appearances playing the damsel in distress for the most part besides lacking any significant agency. Kapur accepts more than that when he describes his first film as sexy. It is true that Kapur glosses over the intellectual life of the queen who is only once in the film shown reading a book, and not even once seen writing any of her deeply sensitive poems though he does present her as a very perceptive and sensuous woman. Moss goes on to relegate the film to consumerist attitudes for those who wish to use the queens image to further their goals. (pg. 803) However, the concern over commercial success does not take away anything from Kapurs artistic vision which seems to illustrate in Elizabeths portrayal, Kracaeurs notion of the mass ornament wherein, the opposition between myth and reason or abstraction and rationality is only apparent (Elsaesser 78). Though Kraucaeur, in his 1927 essay introduces his concept specifically in the context of modern industrialized societies, it is particularly useful in understanding Elizabeths transformation in the film as a mode of specular seduction wishing to preserve the collective nature and depersonalizing force of visual pleasure in the figure of the virgin queen rooted profoundly and popularly in the Madonna tradition. Elizabeths appearance in full court at the end of the first film thus, qualifies as Elsaessers media event or monster event existing only in order to be perceived by a camera. Kapurs brilliance lies in his demystification of Elizabeth the mysterious product of Britishness and perhaps more so in resisting her objectification as a mere trademark, a logo for England itself (Moss 797,798). Collinson seems to share with Moss an aversion for Kapurs post-modernist treatment of known facts and finds the films contemptuous of historical truth. He even goes to the extent of clubbing together under the umbrella term romantic fiction both Sir Walter Scotts and Kapurs attempts (separated by about two centuries) at imaginatively reconstructing Elizabethan times. Kracaeurs theory of entertainment as spatialization of time would lead one to the chutzpah of proposing that history (also spatialisation of time) at the level of mass culture comes embarrassingly close to entertainment which, as cinema, involves the systematic translation of the experience of time into spatial categories (Elsasser 70, 71). Kapurs treatment of the historical account(s) does seem to illustrate Kracaeurs vision of cinema as the all out gamble of history. History alongside of cinema can turn into play what was experienced as the primary reality of urban life Quoting Kraceur Elsaesser further informs: nothing is more typical of this life than the manner in which it conceives of the higher
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things. They are not aimed at a content but at glamour (Elsaesser 72). Many contemporary period films seem to be doing much the same. Both Moss and Collinson fail to see that Kapurs Elizabeth is more human than the others in her weakness. They lack Elsassers perceptive recognition of the edge that Kracaeurs cinema theory enjoys:
Against those who saw in films mainly the work of financiers and speculators, he elaborated a theory of entertainment which recognized the much more subtle (and potentially subversive) dynamic at work in the mass media between subjectivity and social experience

The object of analysis is the historical process itself Kracaeurs cinema theory is most relevant where it conceived of film as part of a new mode of representation (spectacle and spectacular display) recognizing the momentous political significance which a new experience of (gendered) subjectivity plays in the general field of a social semiotics. Again, Kapur seems to share Kracaeurs lack of trust in the ability of history to set limits to the play of signifiers and surface effects It is this distinctly post-historical note that seem to put off old school historians (Elsaesser 70). The Elizabeth and Leicester episode is used in the film to make it as Kapur says sexy in contrast to the historical high serious. The queen is at once human and orgasmic. She is shown shedding passionate tears as she climaxes with her paramour in a rather comely missionary position. This detailing of a world historical individuals sex life is obviously scandalous to a formal historian like Collinson who dare not as much as accept having seen the film before blasting it in a public-academic lecture. This is not to say that this irreverent attitude to formal history is strictly maintained as a matter of policy in the film. The films end shows a very clichd and conventional portrayal of Elizabeth, even more sordidly and idealistically so, her nun like self-denial and assumption of the virgins habit signifying marriage to England in a rather maudlin show of love for the Commonwealth. The scene where she discovers and pardons Leicesters role in the plot against her life she reasons that he will serve as an example of how close I came to danger. This comment could be read as a return to history in that Leicesters proximity to her would have inevitably threatened her claim to future greatness. As a wife she would obviously have had to take a back seat in his-story. Strategically, this happens only after the audience has already been treated to some real hot lessons in history. The scene where she makes out with Leicester is uncanny in the way it shows us the sexual act as seen by Elizabeths handmaids who are all eyes for the passionate union. It is intriguing that the curtains around Lizzys imperial bed are literally eyes (they have eyes printed all over them) and depict the complex dynamic of power, reality, society and history. Kapur shows the distortion produced by power and the public gaze, how historical figures though wrapped in public attention and curiosity are actually concealed by it. The curtains then stand
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for the public view of the queen unblinking and fixed (much like official chronicles) whereas the tiny and unacknowledged vista of a window or a keyhole (micro-history?) are deemed obscure and perverse despite being closer to reality. Kapur seems anxious to attack sexual taboo when he gives the viewer a peek into the virgin queens sexual life as well as shows the dukes transvestitism and incest openly in the film. In his interview to Murray Kapur questions the restrictive expectation of sexual normativity associated with the above normal personalities in contemporary society but you cant be mortal, you cant have a little affair somewhere. Those are the aspects of absolute power. It is not an accident that official history rarely mentions the sexual life of its greatest figures. Barbara Creeds discussion on sexuality and signification is relevant in highlighting this lacuna in historical discourse. Paraphrasing Jeffery Weeks she writes:
society expends a great deal of time and effort attempting to regulate sexuality in order to create an impression that the sexual dimension of an individuals life is something set, unchanging, solid and knowable. ( Creed 484 )

The beheading of Sussex glossed over by the film and the distortions of the Anjou affair too are significant in this regard. Sussexs beheading operates at the same level as Leicesters pardon. The suitors represent a subliminal phallic uprising that the virgin queen needs to suppress. (refer Elsaesser pg. 74). The duke of Anjou episode also reveals how Kapur takes liberties with historical accounts of the courtship between Francois and Elizabeth by presenting the affair in a scandalous format. Unrestrained and unconventional desire otherwise on the margins of the historical grand narrative which concerns itself mainly with heroic action, is brought under the spotlight by Kapur who conveniently and deliberately confuses Phillipe (the bisexual and cross-dressing Duke of Orleans) and Anjou in the early 17th cent. with Francois (Elizabeths contemporary). Francois was never suspected of homosexuality or transvestitism. The scene where Elizabeth storms into the Dukes carnivalesque revel betrays asomewhat conventional attitude to dissident sexuality in the response of the dukes male lovers who look rather ashamed and aghast (the duke remains unfazed) at being thus discovered. However, Anjous orgiastic frenzy when put under the spotlight is interesting and also particularly threatening precisely in terms of its sudden intrusion of excess into a socially (also historically) designated or socially sanctioned (historically) time. Lefebvre, in his Critique of Everyday Life, celebrates carnival as an occasion for release from rules and limits and as a day of excess but for Creed the casual disruptions of the everyday (like the Dukes gay abandon as a guest of historical significance at Elizabeths expense) is particularly threatening. Later in the film, after the dukes courtship fiasco Kapur presents another vignette of uncanny historiography when he openly hints at the incestuous

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relationship between the duke and his aunt. Kapur here seems to embrace what Kracaeur demonstrates through the comment of his ruminating typist Seriousness (read history/ learn from the past) is merely a distraction from what is happening (the present) and stops one from having fun ( in the future). Though history ( as a bourgeois phenomenon) would turn a blind eye to the excesses (especially sexual) of an age and focus on heroic action, cinema is an essentially proletarian mode of visual and sensorial experience (Elsaesser, pg.67). Conversely, Kapurs view of history as desire appropriated in a Capitalist framework contends David moss serves to evoke a Disneyesque view of renaissance Britainexploit the dramatic possibilities of the woman on the top (David Moss, pg. 803). History as desire works equally well for the haves and the have -nots. The background graphics of the casting score in the beginning of Kapurs second film conjures up church iconography, graphic novel, and even comic strip. This is followed by a nearly caricatured portrayal of the most powerful man in the world. The court with its many exotic diversions, displays and flirtations becomes the unlikely refuge of the virgin queen. Mark Kammen professor of history at Cornell University concedes that an exciting or innovative history teacher is almost unheard of. On the contrary they are villains who make history totally boring by requiring a lot of memorization and regurgitation of facts. This confession supplements Kapurs experience of history at school. The voice of history is plain and stern or simply uninteresting. It is never charged with emotion or as Kammen (despite his matter of fact acceptance that history enjoys the privilege of being boring) states that knowledge of the past and interest in the past are two very different things and relegates movies about the past to an area of nave nostalgiaand enthusiasm. In Phenomenology, Hegel writes:
Man essentially creates and destroys in terms of the idea that he forms of the Future. And the idea of the Future appears in the real present in the form of a desire directed towards another Desire - that is, in the form of a Desire for social recognition. Now, Action that arises from this Desire engenders history.

Hegel goes on to conclude that time is history whereas nature is space. Moreover, one feels, History is not only desire for Time future, in terms of desire for social recognition leading to historical action but also for Time past in terms of nostalgia as the simplest and a continuation of the self as the most complex of instances. According to Bakhtin, in history as in literature, and in fact more so in history, the primary chronotopic category is time. In Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel, Bakhtin defines the chronotope as literally time space. Further, if as Bakhtin remarks, the image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic, then one could go on to say that the image of Elizabeth has proved to be one of the most powerful amongst

such images in history as well as in literature and visual culture. So much so, that Kapur climaxes his first film with the Ditchely portrayal of his protagonist as a formally constitutive category of his art as film maker but the film radically presents the Queen as a literary artistic chronotope with a greater stress being laid on space and nature instead of time. Kracaeurs philosophy of history seems to make sense here. Given the contemporary mass culture where pleasure derives from artifice and show historys true power becomes its presence. Elsaessers comment on the cinema as the end of the historical perhaps refers to the cinematic representation of history as spectacle (Elsaesser 70). The timelessness of Da Vincis Monalisa portrait, for instance, is not a function of its age and creation but rather of its total disregard to time. When Bakhtin comments on the centrality of time in the artistic chronotope, he is patently upholding Aristotles privileging of the Plot but he misses the point widely. In art, time is nothing but a movement through space. Considering this, one needs to see how historical figures translate when dealt through the artistic medium. The timelessness of the queens Ditchley portrait on the other hand is far more complex in that it is as powerfully a chronotope of history as it is of art. By representing history as desire for time past Kapurs film offers an artistic and distracting (see cinema and the gamble of history)mass ornament revealing to the viewers a subtle dynamic at work in the mass media between subjectivity and historical experience. R. J. Blackburn in his useful analysis of Post-Modernism and the Philosophy of History opines that history is not the study of historical events or actions per say but the historical works, suggesting the basically textual nature of all history. Post modernism has, as Blackburn suggests, shifted the locus of philosophical thinking about history to the study, not of events, but of texts. The figure of the virgin queen Elizabeth is perhaps one of the most loaded in terms of both desire and history. It is this heady cocktail of history and desire that sets the narrative pace of the films. If history is mans burning desire for lost time, it can never be fulfilled though it has as Hegel writes an infinite right to be satisfied. Collinson in his Creighton lecture at Cambridge dubs Kapurs film as post-modernist because he contends that in the film the known facts together with a good many facts hitherto unknown, were shaken up like pieces of jigsaw and scattered on the table at random. Here, it is worth noting that Collinson himself in a way accepts the fracture and constructedness inherent in historical facts. Brecht too is critical of the process of reaching at Reality and opines that a hundred reports from a factory cannot be added to make up its realityReality is a construction. History too aims at reconstructing lost time drawing from different sources. However, as Collinsons analogy suggests, history denies whereas cinema never shies away from the violence done to reality in the process of representation (Elsaesser, page 76). This violence nonetheless, is inherent in historys desire to map time by attempting an instrumental control and mastery of the real through projection and measurement.
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Historys violence on reality is understood as its attempt to cleave asunder the inseparable categories of time and space and making them persist independently as dates and places - fixed coordinates in a sort of two dimensional framework of space and time. Cinema on the other hand forges a new and liberating aesthetic of history as an imaginative collage of time and space not necessarily sequential or geometrically precise by effecting a synthesis distasteful to historys prosthetic designs. The notion of History as given is challenged by cinemas fascination with history being made. Formal historical discourse (as in Hegel for instance) tries to impress the thingness of time and space as categories constitutive of experience. For Hegel history is essentially amoral, it tells of the time past as a thing in itself impossible to create again. Kapur films on the other hand try to highlight the beingness of time and space as constitutive of the historical. Therefore, history for Kapur ceases to be something to be beheld dispassionately as it is in itself but precisely as something to be sucked into, like a vortex of space and time. Kapurs films are thus informed by contemporary developments in historical studies (micro-histories and meta-history for instance) in that they privilege imaginative detail at the expense of the general and documented fact. In the post-modernist wilderness historical research does not exclude trivia and one would not be surprised to find in a modern library a book entitled A history of the Lavatory. Kapurs film gives a lot of footage to dance sequences, gossip, and exotic entertainments. This approach is antithetical to Kammens indignant knowledge and understanding are simply not the same as enthusiasm and nostalgia. Kraceurs reading of cinema in the 1920s is still as relevant, particularly in the way it sees cinema as a phenomenon which is ephemeral and related to surfaces. Kapurs film is post-modernist in that it exhibits what Karl Popper refers to as an enthusiasm for particulars and hostility to abstractions. Hegel defines fanaticism (which is so much on Kapurs agenda in his films) as enthusiasm for the abstract. Poppers comments about privileging particulars over abstractions are seen by Blackburn as characteristic of British empiricism which fits historiography after post modernism perfectly. Blackburn pertinently points out the post-modernist shift from the grand narratives of history to the problems of historiography, meta-history and microhistory (Blackburn 265) . Wulf Kansteiner impatiently dubs the post-modernist wave of historiography as the mad history disease. Kansteiners dis-ease one could say stems from the loss of face for history as the closest approximation of the distant past. In the first film Elizabeths enthusiasm and nostalgia as a princess compare poorly to the knowledge and understanding exhibited by Lord Burghley who early on in the film chides her for being most innocent about the matters of the world. The film in a way, perhaps unconsciously parodies the idea that the course of history (as action as well as text) is decided not by nostalgia and enthusiasm(represented by Lizzy/ Kapur the director) but by knowledge and
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understanding (represented by Burghley and Walsingham/ official history). Elizabeth in the first film is largely guided by her two advisors. However, at the end of the film we see an epic transformation of the woman Elizabeth into the enigmatic symbol that survives till date. This transformation into a mass ornament (Elsaesser/ Collinson pg.483) is shown in all its cosmetic detail to the audience of the film as the only real executive decision of the queen in the film. It is also the most powerful as it immortalizes her as a kind of ur-phenomenon (add a footnote/ Bakhtin 135) that resolves the tension between the personal and the public, the human and the divine, and also the virgin and the mother. The queens political apotheosis is complete and she is now neither core nor shell, both her exterior and her interior have been merged into one unified and whole being, an essence and a symbol of a nation. Bakhtins description of the fully exteriorized individual in the Greek encomium is one that is already formed, and the figure is usually given us at the moment of its greatest maturity and fullness of life. Elizabeths Ditchely portrait is not one that Kapur embraces blindly as in an encomium but one that he uses to develop the theme of becoming in his film. His films become instances of Bakhtins literary artistic chronotope where Time as it were thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible primarily through spatialization. Kracauer sees entertainment as spatialization of time and history too can be read as a temporalisation of space (Bakhtin refers to time as the fourth dimension of space). Kracauers idea of the cinematic imaginary lends itself greatly to the idea of the historical imaginary in that the lost fantasy self of the world historical individual is experienced through formal historical discourse as the true self. Glamour and estrangement are then functions of historical representation as much as they are functions of cinematic representation. Kapur implicitly proffers the idea of an intuitive and dialectical understanding of history as arising out of enthusiasm and nave nostalgia for the past. History for Kapur is an expression of mans desire for the lost past and since desire must of necessity be directed towards form, the desire for lost time is also best fulfilled as a faade that of history. It is in this play with the body of the past that history finds meaning for Kapur. The body of Elizabeth is then the body of the past and the two films mediate on the interplay of covering and discovering the queens body to offer a history not radical but fascinating, vivid and spectacular. The first film shows the queens body as desired and desiring torn apart by two contradictory desires. Carnal desire becomes as much a part of Kapurs historiography as does the desire for political supremacy. Kapur in fact develops the tension between these two conflicting desires as the very substance of his representation of Elizabeth something that formal history deems only worth mentioning in passing. The Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign frankly admits to Burghley I have no desire to go to war sir. Her desire to go to bed with Dudley is prioritised by Kapur. The virgin queen loses her virginity early on in the first film and in the second film her

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struggle with desire shapes the course of his-story significantly. In the scene where Bess out of consideration for the queen sends Raleigh to alleviate her spirits the queen begs him for a kiss which being given she declares in ecstasy I die. According to all historical accounts the queen died in 1603. Death by pleasure in the film is preceded by a scene where the queen beholds her naked body in a mirror and sees in it a womans body burning with carnal desire. The film then offers besides the text book version of Elizabeths history a micro-history of the great queens desire and self-denial while only trying to meet the larger demands of the former. We see in Kapurs second film that Elizabeths self-denial in the first film was not final or complete. Surprisingly, the courts proceedings are predominated by attempts on part of Walsingham to find a husband for the queen. She jokes frankly with her ladies in waiting about sex and masculine charms. She envies Besss open sexuality and tries hard to come to terms with her own choices. Going back to the first film we recall that Kapurs Elizabeth during the first celebration of her coronation vicariously enjoys watching her lover Dudley dance with the dames and comments innocently about marriage being unnecessary. Despite her great chemistry with Dudley she fails to give herself away in marriage to him. Dudleys betrayal does not illicit as violent a response on the queens part as does Raleighs. One could argue that the queens self-denial is not wholly due to her growing frustration with mens promiscuity. It is to be traced in the queens acute awareness of her social and political position, even her own history. The scene where she stands in front of her fathers portrait after the French fiasco is revealing in this respect. The queen feels naked in her tears and fires Walsingham for seeing her thus exposed How dare you come into my presence? What we see here are the queens systematic attempts to fight off her desire for the flesh in favour of her desire for the throne. She thus de-sires history by becoming a virgin queen, immune to the possibility of male dominance through matrimony and domesticity. De-siring history -the off-spring of male domination of time and space is effected by the queen in that her vow of virginity is a refusal to share not only her bed but also - by implication - her throne with another man. History as a domain reserved for male agency and heroic action is now divested of its male only sign board. Elizabeth declares in her last utterance I am called the virgin queen, unmarried I have no master. The defeat of the Spanish armada in the film is another occasion for the transformation of Elizabeth the woman and queen into Elizabeth the symbol and ornament of history. The scene following Englands decisive victory shows Elizabeth frozen in a stance very similar to the one she assumes when she is shot at by her Catholic assassin. The camera moves in circles around the frozen figure of the triumphant queen progressively turning into a statue of blinding white stone a symbol at once of power and Renaissance anthropocentricism. The sexual act has been likened in Renaissance sexuality with death and the queens pronouncement when she is kissed by

Raleigh I die! implies as much but it also implies another death that of the body politic (England, the nation) just about to be born. Sexual gratification within or without wedlock would have meant death for the later Elizabeth - the queen who has no master. Hence, the queens reluctance for consummation and the matter of fact injunction to Raleigh - It must be forgotten. The second film climaxes historically in the queens acceptance of self as faade which as Kracauer would have it, is a flight into image, away from Revolution and from death (Elsaesser 74) ). Historical narrative related to Elizabeth mark the persistence of something eerily akin to Baudrillards order of sorcery wherein all reconstructions of the past / her reign comprise of signs and images that lay claim to a faithful representation of something real and profound which could in actuality have been absent? Acceptance of the self as facade would seem to define the person of Elizabeth I just as well as it defines the new urban culture of the 20th century. A facade that hides nothing. ( Elsaesser 73)

Conclusion
The image deliberately adopted by Elizabeth at the end of Kapurs film is nothing short of a nuns initiation ritual. It can also easily be read as a renunciation of the personal-human-emotional core. The queen on occupying the throne has transformed herself into a shrine which in this case replaces the virgins lap. The lap is by following the same analogy occupied by the populace as the infant Jesus (of course unseen but implied). The earthly trinity is complete with the queen declaring to Burghley in her last utterance in the film Observe Lord Burghley, I am married to England. The queens political apotheosis is complete and she is now neither core nor shell in that both her exterior and her interior have been merged into one unified and whole being, an essence and a symbol of a nation. In this image of the virgin the tension between the core and the shell (the ruler and the ruled) is resolved as in Goethes ur-phenomenon of colour the tension between darkness and light is resolved. One wonders if Kapur is the subject bound to Elizabeths reality as image which is to him, a psychologically coherent but ideologically ambivalent form of loss and nostalgia, fragment and fetish (Elsaesser 71).Kapurs cinematography responds to the nexus of paradoxes in contemporary society that has its counterparts in historical writing. Blackburn points towards instances of these in the death of meta-narratives as announced by Lyotard, the interest of contemporary historians in what a previous generation of historians would have condemned as more insignificant details (Blackburn 266). Elsaesser points out how distraction came to be seen as early as in the 1920s as a device in cinema which is essentially proletarian and supports a realistic form of film-making (Elsaesser 67). Experience according to Ankersmit, in Blacburns words is the decisive new idea for post-modernist historiography to explore and embellish (Blackburn 269). Kapurs creative eye too it seems courts the experience of being
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Elizabeth instead of her history. It would be erroneous to include Kapurs films in the category of those which according to Becker have been (or are still being) made in an age of nave nostalgia (Becker 233). In fact Kapur seems to be pointing gleefully towards cinema as the end of the historical (Elsaesser 76). Arthur C. Danto opines, I think post modernism is an attitude for very sophisticated persons who are very comfortable crossing and erasing boundaries (Blackburn 267). Would that suffice as an explanation for what Kapur as an ought to be or should have been post-colonial need have done in his Elizabeth films? He totally ignores the boundaries that set him up as a post-colonial against the business of empire and its greatest icon. For Kapur too, the credo of the cinema is Everything is possibleEverything is true and realEverything is equally true and realthis is whatthe cinema teaches us (Elsaesser 88).

Bibliography
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LAVIOSA, Flavia. Studies in European Cinema Volume 4 Number 2 Intellect Ltd 2007. Article. English language. Francesca Archibugis cinema: Minimalism or microhistory? Italian cinema: 1980s2000s LOADES, David (2003), Elizabeth I: The Golden Reign of Gloriana, London: The National Archives, ISBN 978-1903365-43-4. MAZZOLA Elizabeth -- The Renaissance Englishwoman in Code: Blabbs and Cryptographers at Elizabeth Is Court: Critical Survey, 22:3 (2010) 120, ISSN: 00111570 MEARS, Natalie, Love-making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578 1582 The Historical Association 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Michael Dobson; Nicola Jane Watson (2002). Englands Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-818377-8 Murray, Rebecca. Director Shekhar Kapur discusses Elizabeth: The Golden Age. http://movies.about.com/od/elizabeththegoldenage/a/ elizabeth92607.htm Strong, Roy C. (2003) [1987], Gloriana:The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I London: Pimlico, ISBN 978-0-71260944-9.