Learning on ScreenFilming the Middle Ages
In the medieval context, Bildhauer notes the tendency of the modern cinematic medium to favour authentication by experience and the visual, above the claims of books and writing. Books are objectified in film, becoming allegories or metaphors which signify something other than themselves. The subject of the third section is the re-imagining of the medieval world as a pre-industrial, pre-modern and pre-individual society, from which the leader/hero emerges as a representative of the personified collective. In this society, the social grouping is itself the individual, or body, with the people as its parts. In connection with this, Bildhauer delves briefly but very insightfully into the use of animation and CGI in the representation of blurred boundaries between the human and the fantastic – represented by technology – as a function of the far past as a place where the impossible could have existed. The past, she states, is ‘always already’ modern.
As already noted, medievalists and historiographers will find this book extremely useful for research and as a teaching resource. It also, however, has great potential for film studies scholars and teachers of all kinds – genre studies, gender studies, auteur studies, general film studies – and the study of German national cinema. One of the most impressive, and striking, features of this book is that its author has avoided the US/British penchant for (obsession with?) King Arthur, Robin Hood and the Crusades, instead focusing on European, and specifically German or German-influenced, cinematic output. The films discussed range from the more well-known such as The Seventh Seal, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Name of the Rose and Zemeckis’s Beowulf, to early films such as Faust, Golem, Destiny, Waxworks and Gade/Schall’s 1921 Hamlet, and lesser-known but more recent films such as Hard to be a God, Sword of Xanten, Dreamship Surprise and the animated Jester Till.
The book features an evaluation of German medieval cinema and its place in ‘transnational’ cinematic culture, describing and analysing the way in which the medieval past has occupied a very specific and powerful place in twentieth-century German cultural development. Bildhauer traces this from the early decades of the twentieth century, through the Weimar republic, towards an evaluation of its relationship with National Socialism and post-Nazi historical memory. In particular, she highlights the place of medieval films in the development of twentieth-century ideas of Heimat and Vaterland. This begs another book, which I would love to read, on that subject alone. Filming the Middle Ages should prove invaluable for anyone studying this, or associated, topics in cinema, literature or history. It should also prove an invaluable asset for auteur study, as many of the films discussed were the work of major auteurs in the history of European cinema, many of them (Pabst, Murnau, Eisenstein, Bergman…) exerting considerable influence on other national cinematic cultures. Maybe the answer/s to why such figures felt impelled to set at least one film in the European Middle Ages lies somewhere in this book…which is a really ‘good read’, hugely informative, should be on the reading list of all the above, and will not disappoint the reader with a purely general interest in medievalism or cinema, either – in other words, a really good book.
Dr Lesley Coote
