From private to public: Royal family memory as prospective collective memory in A Jubilee Tribute to The Queen by The Prince of Wales (2012)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the production of prospective memories in the 2012 BBC documentary A Jubilee Tribute to The Queen by The Prince of Wales. The contemporary British monarchy relies heavily on memory products in order to connect to their subjects and to secure their popularity. This entails the production not only of memories of the past, but also of memories for the future, i.e. prospective memories. One way to fashion opportunities for the creation of prospective memories is by sharing private recollections in the form of (royal) family photographs and films. These media were once located in the family’s private archive, but through forms such as documentaries commissioned by members of the royal family they were able to travel into the public sphere. Through commodification, these formerly exclusive small-scale memories reach vast audiences, who engage with them and might form new memories of their own. While cultural memory studies still tends to favour research on traumatic events and the actualisation of memories of the past, this case study demonstrates that a focus on positive events and on memories’ prospective side opens up rich and fruitful research avenues.


Introduction: the intersection of monarchy and memory (studies)
In order to secure their longevity, contemporary monarchies have to negotiate their place between tradition and modernity, and, consequently, not only between past and present, but future as well. Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Crown Jubilee in the summer of 2012, then surpassed Queen Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch on 9 September 2015 and became the first British sovereign to celebrate a Sapphire Crown Jubilee (65 years on the throne) in 2017. The second Elizabethan Era, i.e. the time following Elizabeth II's accession in 1952, is a period during which the monarchy became increasingly "post-political" (Higson 2016, 360). The Crown's former political influence-which had already been reduced to the monarch's rather limited "right to be consulted, […] to encourage, […] to warn" (Bagehot [1873] 2001, 69)-was gradually exchanged for cultural importance, enacted first and foremost by the royal family's medial omnipresence.
This cultural importance relies heavily on "memory work" 1 as essential element of the British monarchy's public relations strategies. One can hardly doubt that most citizens of Britain or the Commonwealth have their own memories of the Queen and the monarchy, given the Crown's omnipresence in (global) media. In addition to the (re-) activation of these memories through a purposeful staging, the creation of new memories constitutes a further layer of memory work pursued by the British monarchy. Creating positive events 2 such as celebrations in the UK and Commonwealth nations involving royal participation or events like the recent royal weddings in 2011 and 2018, which endear the monarchy to the people and which can be remembered later, is vital for the public's positive attitude towards the Crown and hence their continuing acceptance of the monarchy.
The present is not only the time in which we recall and thus recreate memories (cf. Erll 2011a, 8); it is also the temporal space for the (strategic) creation of future memories. It is thus curious that, as Brown et al. argue, "the future has been largely left out of memory studies research" (2010, 1). Research on (collective) memories usually presupposes that memories encompass all three levels of time-past, present, and future. Nevertheless, most studies clearly focus on past events and practices of remembering them in the present, while the relevance of the creation of prospective memories for the future remains in most cases only a side note. The topic of futureoriented memories, however, has been discussed in psychological and cognitive memory studies for several decades, which define prospective memory as "remembering to carry out intended actions at an appropriate time in the future" (Einstein and McDaniel 2007, 1). This concept is not only applicable for the individual level, but also for the collective level of memories. Collective memories, which this article understands as a pool of memories shared by a group of people and thus are to be distinguished from individual memories, are often created intentionally because of the function they are supposed to perform in the future. This is what gives them their prospective character, i.e. the potential to be remembered, and, thus, to seek to attribute enduring meaning and significance to events of the present. Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt defines collective prospective memories as collective remembrance of "what still needs to be done, based on past commitments and promises" (2013,92). This article additionally argues on the premise that prospective memories are central to maintaining ideas, values, and continued points of identification for a collective.
Across the multidisciplinary spectrum of memory studies, prospective memories have only recently been discovered as a fruitful field of investigation. 3 The future (-orientation) of collective memory has moved closer to the centre of cultural memory studies since 2010 and continues to remain a vibrant focal point as the conferences "Thinking through the Future of Memory" (Memory Studies Association, 2016) and "Memories of the Future" (Institute of Modern Languages Research, 2019) demonstrate. This article agrees with Ann Rigney who recently argued that memory studies should not get "locked into" the "apparently natural link between memory and trauma" (2018, 369), but that research rather needs to go beyond this still very prominent focus in order to "set out a long-term agenda" for the field of future-oriented memories (368), combing a focus on positive, hopeful events with an interest in prospective memories.
The case study presented here analyses the documentary A Jubilee Tribute to The Queen by The Prince of Wales (2012) with respect to its use of diverse medial, dramaturgical, and narrative strategies facilitating the creation of prospective collective memories. By granting public access to photographs and films, which, the documentary suggests, depict royal family memories of an intimate and private nature, the programme allows these memories to travel from the private archive to the public sphere and, thus, enables them to become collective memories. 4 Closely linked to this transgression of the border between the private and public spheres is the memories' temporal reorientation. While the images originally trigger retrospective memories for the royal family, who use them to remember their own genealogical history, the photographs and films cannot serve the same function for their new public audience. Rather, in the moment of their adoption by the viewers, they act as "memory offers" (cf. Schulz 2007), which possess the potential to become collective memories and hence to be remembered in the future by both the original and also the newly-acquired audiences.

Monarchy, media and memory
With regard to ancient monarchies, Aleida Assmann highlights sovereigns' general dependency on the creation of memories: [P]ower needs origins. Precisely this need is fulfilled by genealogical memory, which has a retrospective and a prospective side. Rulers usurp not only the past, but the future as well, because they want to be remembered and so they try to ensure that their deeds will be commemorated; for example, talked and sung about, immortalized in monuments, recorded in archives. Power desires to legitimize itself retrospectively, and to immortalize itself prospectively. (Assmann 2011, 128) Although Assmann refers to rulers of the Ancient East and equates monarchy with power, the statement still holds true for contemporary monarchies in modernised governmental systems, too. In the case of the British monarchy, many references to its past are regularly made, for example by pointing out similarities between Elizabeth II and her famous predecessor Queen Victoria, by highlighting the longevity of rituals, or by implementing (seemingly old, but often invented) traditions (cf. Cannadine 1983) in royal events like jubilees. In all of these cases, a diachronic genealogical link to the past is established in order to point to the institution's continuity, stability and anchorage in British history. 5 Monarchies use the forms mentioned above not only to commemorate their past, but also to secure their continuation into the future. This is what Aleida Assmann calls the "prospective side" of memories. Their production and prospective "immortalization" (Assmann 2011, 128) relies heavily on mediatisation, which, on the one hand, enables instant circulation while also ensuring, on the other hand, their future reproducibility. The use of reproducible visual media for prospective memorymaking has been particularly common since the time of Queen Victoria. The monarchy's increased use of photographs and films to address the public coincided with two major shifts in the monarchy's general public representation. Firstly, the whole royal family rather than the sovereign alone became the focal point of public interest, and secondly, the public's interest in the human beings fulfilling the royal roles increased significantly.
As a consequence, the genre of the family film gained importance for the royal family's communication with the public. Ian Christie points out that [t]hese [private films] are the prototypes of what would become the British royal family's most potent mode of communication with its subjects: the occasional and partial 'glimpse' of informal family life, away from the official news media, yet communicated by these same media in 'special' documentaries. (Christie 2016, 39) Especially since Elizabeth II's accession to the throne in 1952, media have developed as quickly as never before and the public expects the monarchy to keep pace with the conventions that these media introduce, including by granting access to the monarchy's private life in ways that these media allow and support. Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 was the first televised media event and even sparked the sales volume of television sets (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992). While it was a novelty back then, just like TV itself, simultaneous participation in royal events at home in front of the TV screen is commonplace nowadays. The monarchy also increasingly makes use of digital media as well, including Tweets and posts on its own Facebook pages. Consequently, for the large majority of people it is not the actual royal events that become part of collective memory, but the carefully selected and curated images which are part of the medially conveyed and preserved versions. This observation ties in with Dagmar Brunow's demand that [m]edia memory studies […] need to widen their scope from representations of the past towards questions of the archive, the collection and preservation of films, the use of archive footage in television programmes and/or in documentary filmmaking as well as processes of distribution and reception. (Brunow 2015, 14) The selection and aesthetic curation involved in the (re-)mediation of images and stories is vital for their perception and the shape they might take as future collective memories.
Although they were very hesitant about giving insight into their private lives at the beginning of Elizabeth II's reign, the royal family still tried to keep pace with the public's wish to gain access to private details. As Erin Bell and Ann Gray note, "since Richard Cawstone's documentary The Royal Family (BBC, 1969), the Windsors have acknowledged the necessary evil of allowing the cameras in to record less formal aspects of their life and work" (Bell and Gray 2016, 291). This documentary marked the beginning of the production of officially commissioned documentaries (often BBC productions), such as the Tribute discussed in this article, the 2017 documentaries Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy (ITV) and Diana, 7 Days (BBC), which were both commissioned by her sons Prince William and Prince Harry to commemorate the 20 th anniversary of Diana's death, or Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70 (2018), a documentary commissioned by the royal family to celebrate the Prince of Wales' 70 th birthday. Such programmes differ from documentaries produced without royal cooperation, as they not only involve interviews and informed comments by royal experts, but also feature private photographs and family films, thus enabling formerly private memories to travel into the public sphere.

Retrospective and prospective memories in the Jubilee Tribute
In June 2012, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. The celebration entailed a huge pageant on the River Thames, a service of thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral, a big concert with renowned artists performing in various musical genres, the lighting of beacons all around the Commonwealth, fireworks, street parties and the establishment of permanent monuments, including renaming the clock tower housing Big Ben to Elizabeth Tower. Besides the broadcasts of the events, which are to their core planned and staged as media events and are therefore likely to enter collective memory (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992, 210), there are other instances which contribute to the production of future collective memories. The one-hour long programme A Jubilee Tribute to The Queen by The Price of Wales, which is labelled as documentary, premiered on BBC1 on 1 June 2012 at 8 pm, two days before the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee began. It not only served as a prelude to the events, preparing audiences for the celebrations, but also invited people to relive their own memories of the royal family. Importantly, however, it also sought to forge new memories by granting access to Prince Charles' supposedly private recollections.
"A rather personal tribute to the Queen": Prince Charles' memory work The Tribute begins with short film clips of different moments of Elizabeth II's reign, which vary highly in filmic quality. This suggests authenticity and historicity, while highlighting the long duration of the Queen's reign. These images are familiar to the public and might thus (re-)actualise the programme's viewers' memories, paving the way for what will follow: The audience is invited to join Prince Charles on a journey through the royal family's homes and on a journey through Elizabeth II's 60-year long reign.
Throughout the programme, which Prince Charles terms "a rather personal tribute" (Tribute 00:30), he looks at old family photographs and watches private films shot by members of the royal family. As Annette Kuhn explains, performances or enactments of memories via family photo albums take place "with (as opposed to in) the photographs and albums" as an interactive and dynamic activity (Kuhn 2010, 303). Prince Charles' role in the documentary should therefore not be underestimated. Charles occupies a twofold function; first of all, he combines roles as the programme's presenter and a central character. Second, he acts as a first-person narrator, the person who tells the story to us, and as the focaliser, i.e. the person whose perspective we share.
Before the viewers get to know the images, Charles has to open an ancient looking chest, which he calls a "wonderfully battered box" (Tribute 00:01) and which contains old film reels. In the Tribute, this box embodies the royal family's private archive, containing hidden "treasures" which are, the programme suggests, partly unknown even to members of the royal family. Kept for many years and maybe even forgotten, what seem to be mere storage media, apparently once produced for later private consumption, become circulation media (cf. Erll 2011a; Assmann 2011) and are remediated (cf. Erll and Rigney 2012) in the programme the audience watches.
The Tribute grants a privileged perspective to its viewers. In addition to being able to watch the original footage and look at allegedly authentic private photographs of the royal family, the audience also observes Charles while he is contemplating them. Several filmic techniques are employed to engender identification with the Prince of Wales in his process of recollecting: alternating shots of the original footage and Charles' face, sitting in an armchair and watching the clips or browsing through the photo album are shown. Furthermore, the audience not only adopts Charles' position when viewing, i.e. seeing what he sees with the footage filling the whole screen. Sometimes the programme's viewers see over his shoulder, with Charles' figure forming a silhouette in front of the screen. The filmic technique of the "Over the Shoulder Shot" is usually used in conversation scenes, with two people looking at each other, enabling the establishment of the persons' positions and the feeling of looking at characters from another person's point of view (cf. e.g. Van Sijl 2005, 154). It is curious that the Tribute uses a similar camera angle, alternating with shots of Charles' face, thus imitating while subverting the original filmic technique by reducing it to one character. This perspective of looking over Charles' shoulder enhances the viewers' status and puts them in a liminal position, crossing the border between public and private sphere of the royal family. The situation is highly exceptional, as the viewer takes a backdoor position, sneaking a peek of this seemingly authentic yet obviously staged private situation. In these instances, the content of the clips often seems to be less important than the fact that the audience watches them together with Charles. Some images on screen (e.g. Elizabeth driving in the Golden Carriage during the celebration of her coronation, Tribute 00:07) are blurred and out of focus, whereas Charles' black shadow is in the foreground and in the camera's focus, enabling an empathetic identification with him.
Empathy on the part of audiences is also fostered by attributing an emotional air to what the viewers see. Charles terms the medial representations of the family memories "interesting, amusing and touching" (Tribute 00:02) as they not only appeal to people's curiosity, but also to their sense of humour and emotions. In addition to their own emotional responses to the filmic material, viewers are invited to share Charles' emotional approach to the images. Psychological studies have shown that emotions can promote the creation and recall of memories (cf. e.g. Hertel and Reisberg 2004). Thus, the emotional charging of the pictures can reach the audiences on an affective level and might enhance their potential to become prospective collective memories.

Transgressing borders and jumping scales: private family memories as public collective memories
The Tribute is an offer to participate in what is staged as the royal family's private memories, feeling with the Prince of Wales and taking on these memories, which are derived from the engagement with a mediated representation of the actual events, as one's own. This process can be framed through Alison Landsberg's model of prosthetic memories, even if it was initially developed for the analysis of traumatic historical memory narratives like the Holocaust and slavery. Landsberg explains that through (mass) mediated memories, people are able to take on a "more personal deeply felt memory of past events through which [they] did not live" (2004,2). This article contends that the underlying idea of Landsberg's model can also be applied to nontraumatic memories, as they are transportable as well. Furthermore, their acquisition is, like Landsberg claims for painful memories, not (necessarily) limited by notions of natural ownership or heritage (cf. 2, 9).
Indeed, the Tribute has the potential to serve as an extension of the audiences' own memories like an "artificial limb" by adding and maybe also completing a picture that already lives in the viewers' memories. This is rendered possible both through technical innovations and the commodification of formerly private material. Landsberg points out that "[c]ommodification enables memories and images of the past to circulate on a grand scale; it makes those memories available to all who are able to pay" even though they "have no natural […] claim to them" (2004,18). As the Tribute is publically accessible on DVD and as digital stream, the family memories which are congenitally small-scale become available to audiences on a large scale (on scales of memory cf. de Cesari and Rigney 2014).
The (theoretical) availability of these memories to everyone who is interested in them and who is in possession of the technical and financial means to access them is by far not the only determinant that should be considered. While Landsberg tends to emphasise the unifying and participatory character of these memories and generally discharges an ownership of memories, her metaphor of the "prosthesis" nevertheless implies that an essential difference between memories acquired first-hand and memories derived from the engagement with media persists: The latter are likely not to feel natural, but are deemed to remain artificial and alien to their new possessors. Landsberg's claim that prosthetic memory "opens up memories and [even] identities to persons from radically different backgrounds" (2004,11) should therefore be questioned.
Charles' narrative of sharing his memories with the public might be considered an attempt to water down differences between his and the viewers' status regarding their (emotional) claim to these memories and, linked to that, discrepancies between the respective felt quality of the recollections. However, this asymmetry, which differentiates and separates royal family and viewers, remains in existence. The contextualised circulation of these recollections on TV and DVD is the vehicle allowing these (prosthetic) memories to travel, and thus to become "filled with new life and new meaning in changing social, temporal and local contexts" (Erll 2011b, 11). The content, form and aesthetics the memories take on depend on the complex interplay of all palimpsestic layers of the mediatisation process-from the production of the original photographs and films, to their placement in the family archive, their remediation, contextualisation and distribution in the Tribute and finally their reception by the viewers.
The Tribute employs several strategies which suggest that the shown images are worth remembering. A pertinent example is the spatially staged transgression of the usually carefully protected border between public and private spheres. In the Tribute, the habitually closed doors of Balmoral, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle are opened to the public, allowing a glimpse into private space. However, the border is also preserved by allowing only very limited access to some carefully selected-and not too privaterooms. In the 19 th century, Walter Bagehot explained that "[the Crown's] mystery is its life. We must not let daylight upon magic" ([1873] 2001, 63). The Tribute still adheres to this principle, trying to balance both, on the one hand giving audiences the impression of receiving an exceptional and privileged view behind the palaces' walls while on the other hand retaining the air of "mystery" by denying access to the rooms where (royal) family life takes place.
The border between private and public sphere is also upheld while at the same time transgressed by the way that Charles refers to his mother when speaking about her. Being both son and successor, he frequently calls her "Mama" while at other times referring to her as "The Queen", acknowledging both her private and public roles. This twofold address serves to remind the audiences of Elizabeth Windsor having the special status of the Queen and of her private role as mother of four children. On the one hand, such detachment elevates the images to a status worth remembering. On the other hand, the intimate address of the Sovereign as "Mummy" or "Mama" stresses the family relationship and brings the Queen back down to earth to the level of the commoners, who view the programme. This depiction of the Royals as a normal family can render the monarchy emotionally accessible and a point for identification, contributing to a more personal access to the events, the images conveyed, and thus also to the memories developing out of them.
Self-fashioning as a normal family is pursued from several angles and is vital for the successful creation of images that might become collective memories. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have often been publicly criticised for being bad parents (cf. e.g. Hari 2002). Accusations of bad parenthood in the royal family are countered in the Tribute not only by fashioning the Windsors as a normal family, but also as a loving family, thus rendering them amiable. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes in What is Visual Culture? that "[o]ne of the most striking features of the new visual culture is the visualization of things that are not in themselves visual." (2002,6) This observation holds true for the image of the royal family established in the Tribute. Through a two-stage process, feelings-which are per se invisible-are visualised. Firstly, family situations are captured in photographs and films, which imply abstract virtues such as parent-child relationships, love among family members, or middle-class values. In a second step, the Tribute captures how Charles looks at these images, decoding their invisible aspects while adding new layers of feelings with his own reactions, which are then to be interpreted by the viewers.

Documenting royal family life: the family photo album
Prince Charles highlights several times that the pictures of family activities such as playing together in the gardens of Balmoral (cf. Tribute 00:03), riding ponies and bikes, or an outing for a picnic with Sir Winston Churchill in Scotland (cf. Tribute 00:17) were taken by the Queen herself or her husband, and thus adds to the photographed subjects and events the level of the (royal) photographer. Just as with the filmic material, these private memories travel to the public sphere with the display of the family photo albums. Jens Ruchatz explains that [f]amily and personal photographs are produced expressly as future invitations to revive past events and thus support living memory. The chronological collection of photographs in an album offers a sequentially ordered choice of pictures that can serve as a material basis to retell one's own experiences or the story of one's family.
[…] Photographs in general and personal photographs in particular do not appear as self-sufficient memory content, but as fragments in dire need of contextualization. So they initiate active memory work instead of replacing it. (2018,185) This is exactly what Charles does: he takes them as a starting point to narrate parts of the (royal) family history and engage in "active memory work", but not only for his family and himself, but for the public. The "travelling" of the photographs from the private sphere to the public sphere is accompanied by Prince Charles' verbal contextualisation as a way of curating the images, which on the one hand facilitates an understanding of the pictures, but on the other hand contributes to securing a certain way of interpreting the images.
It is curious that Charles highlights not only the content, but also the production context of these memories, consequently thematising the photo album's producer on a third level next to the photographer and the photographed subject. Charles comments on the activity of producing the photo album as follows: "The photographs would pile up around, you know, everywhere. It was trying to find time, I think, for her [the Queen] to sit and fit them into the albums. But over the years, it's amazing how many she's managed to do." (Tribute 00:41) Like a normal mother, the Queen deemed it necessary and important to collect private family photographs in albums despite the stately tasks she has to perform and despite the masses of images of the royal family which are printed and reprinted in newspapers, books and nowadays also on the Internet. Annette Kuhn highlights the central function of creating photo albums for a family's selfperception: "As repositories of memory, family photographs and albums work, in cultural terms, very much as souvenirs […]. [V]alue is placed on keeping-preserving-family photographs and albums, even (and perhaps especially) if they are rarely looked at." (Kuhn 2010, 304) Marianne Hirsch also addresses the centrality of photo albums for family memory in her seminal work Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997). She explains that "photography quickly became the family's primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation-the means by which a family's story would be told." (Hirsch 1997, 6-7) In the case of the British monarchy, photographs and visual images per se not only have the capacity to represent the family within the own living room, but also for people in Britain, the Commonwealth and even beyond.
This idea is of course taken one step further nowadays, as the publication of family photographs and films online, using social networks for example, has become commonplace. Joanne Garde-Hansen perceives a general tendency "to share one's personal archive of photographs and videos with others" (2011, 74;cf. also Hoskins 2018) and continues, arguing that "by doing so we consciously select, organise, display and curate our lives. The archive of the self becomes opened up […] as it moves out of the private sphere and into the public sphere." (Garde-Hansen 2011, 74) The royal family participates in this ordinary activity as well, following their own tradition of keeping pace with the media and sharing (family) photographs on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well.

Conclusion: prospective mediation as new horizon in (media) memory studies
On 24 July 2017 Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy premiered on the American channel HBO and on the British channel ITV. In this programme, which commemorates the 20 th anniversary of Lady Diana's death in a car accident in Paris, her sons William and Harry reflect on their mother's work, her character and her capacity as their mother. It is intriguing that allegedly private royal photo albums play as big a role here as in Charles' Tribute. William and Harry sit together at a table on which handmade photo albums pile up. They take individual pictures into their hands and use them as starting points for their personal memory narratives. It is highly interesting that the staging of private memories' travel to the public sphere by ways of narrative, filmic, and editing strategies seems to be an ongoing endeavour in endearing the monarchy to their subjects.
Through his personal reflections in the Tribute, Prince Charles reawakens old memories viewers might already have and combines them with new memories through granting access to formerly private photographs, films, and stories. This enables them to "travel" through mediation from the private to the public sphere and, simultaneously, to jump from a small to a big scale. Through this dynamic process of the photographs' and films' editing, (re-)mediation, and reception, the family memories acquire a prospective and collective potential, which is inextricably linked to their function to be remembered by a larger group in the future. This "memory work" of creating prospective collective memories is an essential practice for securing the monarchy's persistence in the future. In the Tribute, the "memory work" with emotionally charged private memories is instrumentalised to bring the monarchy closer to audiences. The "'classic' memory community" (cf. Böhling and Lohmeier 2017, 277) of the family is extended to the whole nation and Commonwealth, as well as beyond to global audiences interested in the royal family. They are all invited to participate in the Windsors' memories.
Research on prospective memories, a form that is not exclusive to the royal family, must necessarily carefully analyse such memories' mediated travels and (re-)presentations, including verbal and visual narratives and contextualisations, as well as the overall editing and curating processes involved in the creation, preservation, and circulation of these memories. Studies on prospective memories could prove to offer fruitful avenues and new horizons in the field of cultural memory studies as they call for interdisciplinary attention from scholars working in fields as varied as cultural, literary, and media studies, psychology and neurosciences.