Medieval films imagine and portray the Middle Ages through the visual, audio and thematic forms of cinema.
Medieval films imagine and portray the Middle Ages through the visual, audio and thematic forms of cinema.
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 imagined, portrayed and depicted the Middle Ages through painting, architecture, poetry, music and novel. In the 20th century, film has defined Medieval history perhaps more so than any other medium. While the conclusions of academic research and findings of archeology have advanced knowledge of the Middle Ages, nothing has had more widespread influence on more people than the images created by film. Just as most people's perceptions of the American 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, Hollywood was the most influential image maker. Hollywood films reached a global audience through big budget productions, and equally big distribution and advertising channels. Hollywood adapted works of the Romanticism movement to the screen, seamlessly forging a bridge between Romanticized 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, Jeanne d'Arc released in 1900. The first Robin Hood film dates to 1907 and was called Robin Hood and His Merry Men .
The historiography and 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 historiography and cinematic history, since the publication of works such as Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages in 1991 demonstrated the extent of the influence of historiography on Medieval History. Harnessing the work of the earlier 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]
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 | France | Joan of Arc. The film was so powerful that it was initially banned in Britain. | |
| 1938 | 12th c. | The Adventures of Robin Hood | 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 | USSR | Russians defend against invading German Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades of the 13th century. | |
| 1957 | 13th / 14th c. | The Seventh Seal | Sweden | About a knight returning from a crusade who plays a chess game with Death during the Black Plague. | |
| 1960 | 13th c. | The Virgin Spring | Sweden | Story of Christian medieval Swedish family whose daughter is raped by vagabonds. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. | |
| 1961 | 11th c. | El Cid | USA | Epic film of the legendary Spanish hero. | |
| 1964 | 12th c. | Becket | 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 | 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 | USSR | Life of Andrei Rublev the great 15th-century Russian icon painter (Andrey Tarkovsky). | |
| 1968 | 12th c. | The Lion in Winter | UK | King Henry II's three sons all want to inherit the throne. His sons and wife Eleanor of Aquitaine variously plot. Based ten years after the events of the Revolt of 1173-1174. | |
| 1976 | 7th c. | Mohammad, Messenger of God | UK/Lebanon | Also known as The Message . Tagline: The Story of Islam. | |
| 1986 | 14th c. | The Name of the Rose | France/Italy/Germany | Based on the novel by Umberto Eco. | |
| 1988 | 14th c. | The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey | 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. |
King Arthur is a legendary king of Britain, and a central figure in the medieval literary tradition known as the Matter of Britain.
English mythology is the collection of myths that have emerged throughout the history of England, sometimes being elaborated upon by successive generations, and at other times being rejected and replaced by other explanatory narratives. These narratives consist of folk traditions developed in England after the Norman Conquest, integrated with traditions from Anglo-Saxon mythology, Christian mythology, and Celtic mythology. Elements of the Matter of Britain, Welsh mythology and Cornish mythology which relate directly to England are included, such as the foundation myth of Brutus of Troy and the Arthurian legends, but these are combined with narratives from the Matter of England and traditions from English folklore.
The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Denmark during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life. Bergman developed the film from his own play Wood Painting. The title refers to a passage from the Book of Revelation, used both at the very start of the film and again towards the end, beginning with the words "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour." Here, the motif of silence refers to the "silence of God," which is a major theme of the film.
A swashbuckler is a genre of European adventure literature that focuses on a heroic protagonist stock character who is skilled in swordsmanship, acrobatics, and guile, and possesses chivalrous ideals. A "swashbuckler" protagonist is heroic, daring, and idealistic: he rescues damsels in distress, protects the downtrodden, and uses duels to defend his honor or that of a lady or to avenge a comrade.
Medieval studies is the academic interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages. A historian who studies medieval studies is called a medievalist.
Bernard Gui, also known as Bernardo Gui or Bernardus Guidonis, was a Limousin Dominican friar, Bishop of Lodève, and a papal inquisitor during the later stages of the Medieval Inquisition.
The film industry or motion picture industry comprises the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking, i.e., film production companies, film studios, cinematography, animation, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post-production, film festivals, distribution, and actors. Though the expense involved in making films almost immediately led film production to concentrate under the auspices of standing production companies, advances in affordable filmmaking equipment, as well as an expansion of opportunities to acquire investment capital from outside the film industry itself, have allowed independent film production to evolve.
Sir Richard William Southern, who published under the name R. W. Southern, was a noted English medieval historian based at the University of Oxford.
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is a 1999 English-language French epic historical drama film directed by Luc Besson and starring Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway and Dustin Hoffman. The screenplay was written by Besson and Andrew Birkin, and the original score was composed by Éric Serra.
Classical Hollywood cinema is a term used in film criticism to describe both a narrative and visual style of filmmaking that first developed in the 1910s to 1920s during the later years of the silent film era. It then became characteristic of American cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, between roughly 1927 and 1960. It eventually became the most powerful and pervasive style of filmmaking worldwide.
Medievalism is a system of belief and practice inspired by the Middle Ages of Europe, or by devotion to elements of that period, which have been expressed in areas such as architecture, literature, music, art, philosophy, scholarship, and various vehicles of popular culture. Since the 17th century, a variety of movements have used the medieval period as a model or inspiration for creative activity, including Romanticism, the Gothic revival, the pre-Raphaelite and arts and crafts movements, and neo-medievalism . Historians have attempted to conceptualize the history of non-European countries in terms of medievalisms, but the approach has been controversial among scholars of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Blanchefleur is the name of a number of characters in literature of the High Middle Ages. Except for in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, Blanchefleur is typically a character who reflects her name--an image of purity and idealized beauty.
Fire and Sword is a 1981 romantic drama film directed by Veith von Fürstenberg. It is based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, played by Christoph Waltz and Antonia Preser. Leigh Lawson and Peter Firth also star. Set during a raging war between Cornwall and Ireland, the film explores themes on conflict between magic and religion, violence, and destruction.
Geoffrey Barraclough was an English historian, known as a medievalist and historian of Germany.
Swashbuckler films are a subgenre of the action film genre, characterised by swordfighting and adventurous heroic characters, known as swashbucklers. While morality is typically clear-cut, heroes and villains alike often follow a code of honour. Some swashbuckler films have romantic elements, most frequently a damsel in distress. Both real and fictional historical events often feature prominently in the plot.
Prince Valiant is a 1997 Irish-British independent sword and sorcery film directed by Anthony Hickox, written by Michael Frost Beckner, and starring Stephen Moyer, Katherine Heigl, Thomas Kretschmann, Joanna Lumley, Ron Perlman, and Edward Fox. It is a loose adaptation of the long-running Prince Valiant comic strip of Hal Foster, some panels of which were used in the film. In it, Valiant must battle the Vikings and a scheming sorceress to save the kingdom.
Georges Alphonse Hatot was a theater manager and pioneering French filmmaker during the late 1890s and early twentieth century. He directed the first known film based on the story of Joan of Arc in 1898 as well as having made the first films to feature the Roman emperor Nero. Besides being a director he also wrote the 1908 serial Nick Carter, le roi des détectives which was a major success and spawned many detective series in the following years.
Bettina M. Bildhauer is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. She is an expert on medieval German literature in its cultural and multilingual context, and on modern perceptions of the Middle Ages.