Looking at the Middle Ages in the Cinema: An Overview

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Williams | Looking at the Middle Ages in the Cinema: An Overview David John Williams University of Reading Looking at the Middle Ages in the Cinema: An Overview William ofBaskerville(Sean Conneiy) informsAdso(Christan Slater) aboutthe MiddleAges in TheNameoftheRose(1986). 8 I Film & History The Medieval Period in Film | Special In-Depth Section I first wrote on the cinematic Middle Ages some seven years ago,1 and since then have been following eagerly the debates among historians about history on film. Yet despite the encouragement provided by the work of film-literate scholars like Natalie Zemon Davies, Stephen Bann, and Robert Rosenstone, I must still confess to feeling a certain embarrassment when discussing the subject in the presence offellow professional medievalists. Part of the reason is my conviction that we should be ready to consider the whole range of the cinema's Middle Ages, including the too-casually-dismissed costume dramas and not merely the few attempts at conscientious historical and literary representation. We need to be thinking of that whole cinematic world, at once strange and familiar, where both Renée Falconetti and Ingrid Bergman are burned at the stake; where Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner are outlawed in Sherwood Forest; where Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston fight and love in eleventh-century Spain; and where Max von Sydow and Sean Connery confront the horrors of a fourteenth century beset from Sweden to Italy by corruption, plague, and apocalypse. Not surprisingly, the discussion among historians is focussed almost exclusively on what must be called "serious" films which make a considered attempt to reconstruct the past. But a wider view seems preferable for two reasons . First, the boundary between serious and popular is not entirely clear-cut. In the broad genre of films "where guys write with feathers,"2for example, even quite frivolous cases of what Umberto Eco calls the Middle Ages as pretext, such as the Robin Hood films - indeed especially those - are still apt to make claims for being authentic. However one may choose to regard such escapist adventure-worlds, it nevertheless seems to matter that the audience should be able to believe they did once exist. The cinematic Middle Ages represents the way many people really think of that part of their history. The second reason for keeping open the boundary between the popular genres and "serious" historical reconstruction is that the medieval past plays a role in the cinematic imagination distinctively different from other periods, and often appears to be not all that historical in any direct sense. The cinema's Middle Ages specializes instead in myth, spectacle, and adventure in settings of psychological potency, and perhaps for that reason has become an habitual context for personal statements and explorations by some of the medium's most selfconscious artists. Meanwhile, the Middle Ages continues to be a popular cinematic motif. A regular filmgoer might be forgiven for thinking that the film industry has been taking a particular interest in the period during the last few years. Not only have we had new versions of old staples like Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Joan ofArc, but rarer figures and stranger walks of medieval life have been represented, including William Wallace, an anchoress, and the trial of a domestic animal . But in fact two or three films a year depicting some sort of Middle Ages is no more than average ever since the first Joan of Arc in 1898. Perhaps too we should bear in mind other ways in which the medieval seems important to present-day imaginations . I am thinking less of the medieval knight satirically invading modern France in Les Visiteurs (1993) than of a film such as Seven (1996), in which an exposition of the deadly sins provides a structure for an apocalyptic detective story, suggesting some parallels with The Name of the Rose. Here, though, instead of recent films, I would like to look first at some questions raised by the historians ' debate (including some movies favored by medievalists), and then at four outstanding, as well as sharply differentiated classic examples to stand for the whole range. In a recent exchange on the internet, a number of medievalists traded information and opinion on which, if...