Middle Ages in film

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Robin Hood
(1922)

Medieval films imagine and portray the Middle Ages through the visual, audio and thematic forms of cinema.

Background

The 20th century is not the first to create images of life during medieval times. The Middle Ages ended over five centuries ago and each century has

Wild West were drawn from cinema
, versus source material or academic research, so too most peoples perceptions of the Middle Ages were influenced by the powerful narratives and images of film.

If film was the most influential medium,

historical novels, operas, paintings, and music of the 19th century onto film in the 20th. The ideals of the Romantics were fully realized on the screen in such influential works as Ivanhoe (1952) and El Cid
(1961) which belong to the same late Romantic culture in their music, imagery and themes.

Strong cinematic images of the Middle Ages can be found in European films. Influential European films included Fritz Lang's two-film series Die Nibelungen: Siegfrieds Tod and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924), Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), while in France there were many versions of the story of Joan of Arc.

The first Medieval film was also one of the earliest films ever made,

Robin Hood and His Merry Men
.

Historiography

The

historiophoty of medieval film originated in the late 20th century. Historiophoty, the study of history through film, was coined by noted historiographer Hayden White in Historiography and Historiophoty (1988) in which he theorized that one of the main sources of friction between History and Film is the problem of translating from a written discourse (hence the -graphy) to a visual one (-photy).[1] The French historian Marc Ferro had already devoted his seminal work Cinéma et Histoire (1977) to precisely this question, he asks in Chapter 16, "Can a filmic writing of History exist?"[2]

Although in general terms the relationship between film and history has been a subject of interest since as long as films have been made, it was only in the last decade of the 20th century that medievalists paid attention to film as a serious means of learning about the Middle Ages. As Arthur Lindley said in 1998 "One could note the absence of books by medievalists as well as books of any kind devoted to medieval film," however he prophetically observed "The situation may be beginning to change". This change took place in part by the recognition of the complex relationship between

New Historicism, this emergent field of historiography began to challenge the hegemony of Medieval historians over the history which they narrate, and opens the door for new modes of thinking by the proposition that "we cannot interpret medieval culture, or any historical culture, except through the prism of the dominant concepts of our own thought worlds."[3]

Until the publication of Kevin J. Harty's book The Reel Middle Ages (1999) there had been no comprehensive survey of medieval films, and John Aberth's book A Knight at the Movies (2003) can probably be called the first book in English dedicated solely to the subject of history and medieval history on film. One year later, in 2004, the eminent French historian François Amy de la Bretèque published his L'Imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental, in which he proposes a number of useful theories to finally break out of the circle of historiography vs historiophoty. One of the most pervasive of these, and one picked up in Robert Rosenstone's History on Film/Film on History (2006) is that both History and Film are ways of narrating the past, both equally susceptible in theory (though not in practice) to perversion. As Rosenstone observes, "we always violate the past, even as we attempt to preserve its memory in whatever medium we use... Yet this violation is inevitable, part of the price of our attempts at understanding the vanished world of our forebears."[4]

Select films

At over 900 films listed by Harty in 1999, it is beyond the scope of this article to create a complete list. Listed here are some of the best and most significant films in both quality and historical accuracy as determined by a consensus poll of medieval students and teachers at Fordham University.[5]

Date Era Title IMDB Country Notes
1928 1431 The Passion of Joan of Arc [1] France
Joan of Arc
. The film was so powerful that it was initially banned in Britain.
1938 12th c.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
 		[2] USA Prince
John and the Norman Lords begin oppressing the Saxon masses in King Richard
's absence, a Saxon lord fights back as the outlaw leader of a rebel guerrilla army.
1938 13th c. Alexander Nevsky [3] USSR Russians defend against invading German
Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades
of the 13th century.
1957 13th / 14th c. The Seventh Seal [4] Sweden About a knight returning from a
Black Plague
.
1960 13th c. The Virgin Spring [5] Sweden Story of Christian medieval Swedish family whose daughter is raped by vagabonds. Directed by Ingmar Bergman.
1961 11th c. El Cid [6] USA Epic film of the legendary Spanish hero.
1964 12th c. Becket [7] UK Based on Jean Anouilh's play about Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and King Henry II of England.
1965 11th c. The War Lord [8] USA Based on Leslie Stevens' The Lovers. Charlton Heston is a knight invoking the "right" to sleep with another man's bride on their wedding night.
1966 15th c. Andrei Rublev [9] USSR Life of
Andrey Tarkovsky
).
1968 12th c. The Lion in Winter [10] UK
Revolt of 1173-1174
.
1976 7th c.
Mohammad, Messenger of God
 		[11] UK/Lebanon Also known as
The Message. Tagline: The Story of Islam
.
1986 14th c. The Name of the Rose [12] France/Italy/Germany Based on the novel by Umberto Eco.
1988 14th c. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey [13] New Zealand Seeking relief from the Black Death, guided by a boy's vision, people dig a tunnel from 14th-century England to 20th-century New Zealand.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Hayden V. White, 'Historiography and Historiophoty', The American Historical Review, 93 (1988), 1193–99.
  2. ^ Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Paris: Denoël, 1977).
  3. ^ Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1991), p. 37.
  4. ^ Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, London and New York: Pearson, Longman, 2006), p. 135.
  5. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Fordham University. Archived
    from the original on 2021-09-20.

Further reading
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