Abstract

For the past four years at the National University of Singapore I have taught a fourth-year Honours seminar called Film and History, originally designed to compare and contrast the ways in which films of the Middle Ages and those of more recent history (1860-1940) reconstruct the past. (The most significant biassing factor is that the films considered are European and American and made within the last forty years.) I quickly figured out that almost all the “history” was in the latter, modern half of the course. Not long after, I realized that virtually none of my medieval films were reconstructing the past at all, at least not in the detailed, this-is-what-they-had-for-lunch-and-this-is-the-actual-china-they-had-it-on way of, say, [Martin] Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993). More importantly, also unlike Scorsese, the medieval films were not working from the assumption that the past was of inherent interest or historically connected to the present. This paper is an attempt to explain that anomaly. It is also frankly personal and exploratory: a report of what I have found within this area. It asks at every point what others have found. It aims, however optimistically, to induce discussion of a subject – medieval film – which to date has received woefully little sustained criticism. [1]

We can begin where the course does, with one of the most familiar opening sequences in historical film: the one from [Ingmar] Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). I will only remind you of the elements of that famous sequence: the hawk hanging in the stormy sky accompanied by a notably shrill version of the Kyrie Eleison; a rocky shore under dark cliffs between an empty sea and an empty sky; two isolated figures, one with a dagger at hand, waking on the rocks; a voice-over reading of Revelations 8; the chess set with the sea behind it; Block’s failure to pray; the appearance of the monastically-robed Death; the two figures sitting down to play.

Are we in the Middle Ages? Officially, the date is 1349. Actually, of course, we are in Beckett-time (that is, Any- or No-time), the major difference being that this time Godot comes, and turns out to be just who we thought he would be, albeit disguised as Mephistopheles. The place, nominally if namelessly Swedish, is a beach located midway between T. S. Eliot and Neville Shute. The players we meet later in the film are on their way to Elsinore, presumably to entertain Fortinbras. We are looking, in short, at the almost painfully familiar Nevernever-but-always-land of twentieth-century European high modernism. If we are in any historical period, it is less the 1340s of the plot premise than the sub-atomic early 1950s, with universal death looming out of the northern sky. As Peter Cowie has written, the film “reflect[s] the trepidation of the Cold War era”. [2]  A child of the fifties, I react to that hawk by wanting to crawl under my schooldesk.

The music is medieval – at least on the assumption that the Kyrie is automatically “medieval” – but filtered through modernist and electronic distortion. Even Block’s chess set has clearly been borrowed from another, more highly polished age. And, of course, Antonius and Jons have landed on this beach conspicuously without ship or other realistic means of transport, called there, like Death himself, by the needs of allegory, and landed in a notional 1340s derived more from mystery plays and woodcuts – and an earlier Bergman play – than from any but the flimsiest historical records. Even the meals they eat will be symbolic: from beatific strawberries and milk to bitter bread. Not to labour an obvious point for too long, we are looking at a version of the Middle Ages that has been carefully lifted out of historical sequence in order to serve as a mirror and an alienating device for viewing the mid-century present and/or the timeless present of parable. [3] This is not a fault, merely a fact. What is perhaps more striking is how many films, even those ostensibly committed to reproducing the medieval past – Vincent Ward’s The Navigator (1988), even Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) – put it to similar ahistoric purposes. I once thought The Seventh Seal was an exception. In fact, it’s the rule. The Age of Innocence manages to be both a meticulous recreation of its recent period and a meditation on the evolution of modern sexual mores and visual codes. There is no inherent reason why medieval films could not do likewise. But, in my experience, they don’t.

As many readers will know, the long debate among historians about the relevance and value of historiophoty – the creation of valid or useful historical narrative in film – has been “won”, for the moment at least, by the advocates of film. [4]  Hayden White’s currently dominant assertion of the essentially tropic, necessarily “fictive character of historical reconstructions”, and their conformity to ideologically-driven genres (“realist history as comedy, tragedy, etc.”) was developed nearly a quarter-century ago. [5] White, after all, was mostly following [Michel] Foucault on history as subjective and perverse construction, as it seems we all must, and has been followed in turn by Simon Schama’s frankly fictionalized recreations of historical experience in, for example, Citizens (1989) and the aptly titled Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991), a concise summary of what we generally expect of historical films. [6] While allowing that film narrative cannot do the discursive work of analytic history, the Annales work, there is no theoretical reason why it cannot extend the mythographic work, as films of the recent past like Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), Matewan (John Sayles, 1987), Little Women (Gillian Armstrong, 1994) and The Age of Innocence – to choose a calculatedly motley collection – do. (There is also no record, of course, of the film industry ever being deterred by the theoretical objections of historians.) What is remarkable is how few films of the medieval period do this work. Where films of the more recent past habitually construct their subjects as existing in linear and causative historical relationship to the present, films of the medieval period present their matere in an analogical relation: as type or anti-type of current circumstances, as allegorical representation of them, or as estranged retelling. The distant past may mirror us – we, not it, are the real subject – but it does not lead to us, as the experience of Black troops in Glory or proto-feminist New England families during the American Civil War (in Little Women) are presumed to do. The heroines of Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985), Howards End (Ivory, 1992), and so many other Merchant-Ivory films – not us, but in line with us – are struggling to create the freedoms current viewers are presumed to enjoy.

We are dealing here, I realize, with a conflict between two different discursive constructs of history, one linear, the other non-linear. I am arguing, however, that one of these constructs incorporates a denial of historical process and connection, and that that construct is the one usually applied to films of the Middle Ages. The dominant mode of medieval film – regardless of country of origin or degree of commercial calculation – is fabular, whatever claims, usually unfounded, a given film may make to factuality. [7]  And, in practice, we automatically privilege the current signified over the medieval signifier, referring the boat people in The Navigator, for example, to their 1980s equivalents. The historical accuracy of the scene is clearly not the point. When we ask casually what the film of The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986) is “about” we usually mean “what’s the relevance?” (Nazis? Red Brigades? liberal impotence in times of terrorism?) What’s The Navigator about? AIDS, environmental and spiritual devastation, the ills of modern technology – in a word, Auckland. [8]  While Braveheart gets an occasional fact right – some of the tactics at Stirling Bridge, for example, or the carnival elements at medieval executions – historical chronicle is not the mode in which that film operates, its occasional ventures into accuracy serving only to license critical abuse. Its subject, clearly signalled, it seems to me, is not Scotland in the 1290s but Ireland and the rest of Celtic Britain in the 1990s, prominently including Scotland, that “nation colonised by wankers” memorialised in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), Braveheart‘s anti-heroic bookend. Why else has Wallace been given a fictive Irish colleague devoted to talking – in conspicuously modern dialect – about the liberation of his island? Why else, as everyone notices, does Wallace paint his face with the colours of a Scottish football supporter and lead an army which resembles nothing so much as the terraces at Ibrox Park? This war is the continuation of Euro 96 by other means. Of course Wallace’s appeals to “Freedom” are anachronistic; surely, in the context of so many proleptic references – even down to the substitution of Irish pipes for Scottish on the soundtrack – they are meant to be? The opening line of the film’s voice-over warns us that this not so much a true story (“some say” it is) but a contending fiction.

At the risk of defending a film generally considered indefensible, I think the prevailing critical tendency to attack Braveheart for a failure, essentially, of literalism represents a misunderstanding of its genre which in turn reflects a larger misunderstanding of medieval film (not to mention, a misunderstanding of history as a set of objective facts). It misses the point to complain about Wallace wearing kilts or pretending to be a highlander. To borrow White’s categories, this is “realist history as satire and comedy”. (It is also a Robin Hood story, of course, with Longshanks as the Sheriff and two Maid Marians, one tragic, one comic.) The film’s notorious rearrangement of dates and sequence serves the purpose of producing a classic, sexual-revenge, comedy plot. Longshanks – always referred to by his fairy-tale ogre’s nickname – plots to cuckold the Scots out of existence. In revenge Wallace, helped by the kind of French girl common to this sort of story, cuckolds the English monarchy. The dates have been changed to allow Isabella to whisper the punchline in the dying ogre’s ear. The French girl in question is pointedly referred to as “the Princess of Wales”, lest anyone miss that now rather unfortunate contemporary reference. In the name of correctness, to be sure, the affair has been given the dignity of romance (the cuckolders are, after all, the only two characters in the film who can converse in Latin). The radical telescoping of events which represents Isabella’s revelation, Wallace’s death, and the Scottish victory at Bannockburn as an almost instantaneous sequence is condensed tragicomedy. The villain shoots himself in the foot for the last of many times, the hero dies a martyr, and thereby the cause is won. This is not, and could hardly be mistaken for, chronicle. This is a nationalist fairy-tale and a passage in the long history of ritualized abuse between Celts and Sassenachs. The condition it aspires to is more that of a Billy Connelly comedy routine than academic history. (Connelly is who they should have hired to read, and better to write, the voice-over. Then there would not have been so much confusion about what genre we are watching.)

In a move common to medieval film, what appears to be historical sequencing – the Bruce’s concluding announcement of Scotland’s liberation – in fact refers to a radically broken sequence, that independence having ended with the Act of Union nearly three hundred years ago. By implication, Scotland still needs freeing, by devolution or whatever. (Why else is this film being made in the mid-1990s?) History is a loop, in which the same patterns recur because, fundamentally, the nationalities involved do not change. As innumerable of the film’s devices – such as the contemporary Thames Valley RP accents of all the British noblemen – tell us, the English are always the English and abuse the Scots because it is in their sexually inadequate but ahistorical nature to do so. Celts resist so erratically because it is in their lovable, virile, but shambolic nature to do so. In this essentialist paradigm, of course, the past cannot lead causatively to the present, but can only mirror it. Superficial changes of technology or dress serve only as distancing devices, allowing a Scottish audience in particular to see with renewed clarity what might be hidden by a common currency.

At this point, leaving Lanarkshire behind, let me offer a few general propositions about historicity and ahistoricity in film. Of course, all historical film is necessarily mythic: a radical selection and rearrangement of facts plus exemplary fictions into a narrative that embodies an interpretation. One difference between recent-past and medieval-past films is that the former are much more likely to obscure this fact by particularizing detail (the minute detailing, for example, of Newland Archer’s milieu and character vs. the representativeness implied by his name). As we all know, films of the recent past have been and continue to be dominated by narrative codes derived ultimately from nineteenth-century fiction, just as they remain one of the last bastions of Classic Hollywood Cinema technical conventions. [9]  My students delight in The Age of Innocence precisely because of the opportunities it allows them for empathy and character analysis; they recoil from Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) primarily because it frustrates those reactions.

Like Excalibur, medieval films are far more likely to foreground their mythic status than to obscure it. Boorman’s Arthur evolves from Sun Prince to Fisher King to embodiment of the land to type of Christ without ever resembling an actual person. Merlin is chthonic deity, druid, voice of the unconscious, priest of the land. Manifestly every character in that film exists as archetype to the virtual exclusion of particularity (not to mention, credibility). Their primary function, after all, is to play out a Jungian myth of male adolescent character formation. As such, they necessarily exist outside history, a temporal dislocation signified by the film’s deliberately pastiche style (sixth-century knights in fifteenth-century armor with twentieth-century chrome plating accompanied by nineteenth-century music, mostly Wagner). The opening titles credit [Thomas] Malory, but omit Jesse Weston and [Carl Gustav] Jung, through whom he’s being filtered. This kind of dislocation is, of course, characteristic of Arthuriana, from Chrétien [de Troyes] to the present. Clearly also, however, this temporally abstract middle ages, unconnected to any period before or after, is the preferred one. Far more medieval films, as we all know, are based on folklore and romance (chiefly of Camelot and Robin Hood) than on history. Historical kings most often appear in their Shakespearian incarnations, i.e. as literary figures: not behind us in time, but beside us, in a parallel universe.

Films of the recent past are, of course, precisely situated in time: 1881 for Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), for example, carefully linked to the asssassination of President Garfield. Moreover, the mythos of these films is nearly always the Macauleyan one of progress (inevitably, in the case of Merchant-Ivory) or, with increasing but insignificant frequency, the disasters wrought by progress (the mythos of, say, Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner, 1990). In either case, a coherent and developmental pattern of historical change is assumed. Since medieval films depend on the mirroring of the present in the distant past, however, they are almost automatically anti- or non-progressive in their construction of history. The mere fact that present conditions can be represented by, say, fourteenth-century ones precludes a developmental model. The primitive equals the modern or is superior to it, usually by virtue of faith, as in The Navigator or The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991). Again, what appears to be historical sequencing usually is not. The Middle Ages serves, in Ward’s film for example, as the present’s defining Other. No causal sequence connects fourteenth-century Gosford (which in the film passes from superstition to faith, from relying on finial spikes for spiritual protection to relying on crosses) with the modern city of full television shops and empty cathedrals. The implied, cliche process – the decline of faith – takes place in that vast historical gap represented in the film by the villagers’ blind tunneling toward an illusory destination. It hasn’t happened on one side of the world; it has already happened on the other. As in Braveheart, historical continuity is broken or omitted. The film may imply some causative process in which technology displaces faith – Griffin, as you remember, loses his visionary power when confronted with banks of television images – but it is more concerned to present the medieval as a (potential? wistful?) cure for the ills of the present. The villagers, dreams of our forgotten ancestors, plant their spire in the modern city and disappear from it. In a typical configuration, the medieval past both mirrors the present (the modern workers at first mistake the villagers for Maoris or FOBs [10]) and serves as a defining opposition. That combination, in turn, allows the villagers both to embody an alienating point of view through which our familiar world of locomotives and submarines appears monstrous, and to supply the religious vision presumed to be missing from that world.

In any case, the subject is the present, not the past. “History”, Pierre Sorlin has written, “is a society’s memory of its past, and the functioning of this memory depends on the situation in which the society finds itself”. [11]  In a well-known article reprinted in Faith in Fake [1986], Umberto Eco defines “ten little Middle Ages”, only the first of which is “The Middle Ages as a pretext . . . . a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters”. [12]  Unwise as it is to disagree with Eco, especially in his playful moments, it seems to me that the medieval past, in film at least, is always pretext. It may be a pretext for revisiting ourselves as children or in simplified and stylized forms, but the subject is always ourselves. The past is signifier, not signified. Eco’s other categories, such as the “Middle Ages of Romanticism” are simply subsets, analagous to Hayden White’s tropes and genres. If you’re Jean-Jacques Annaud at least, you stage a 1327 trial in The Name of the Rose in order to bring out its twentieth-century analogies: Benedictines as Blackshirts, Fraticelli as the Brigate Rosa, Adso and William as compromised liberals. Ask Murray Abraham about his character, Bernardo Gui, and he talks automatically about Nazis. [13]

The crucial difference between the two kinds of film we are considering is between presentness by analogy, the medieval mode as we have seen, and presentness by evolution. When Daniel Vigne shoots The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) in its original sixteenth-century setting he treats it as a timeless parable of acting and identity. Natalie Zemon Davis, who collaborated on the film, says that she wrote her later study, in fact, “to dig deeper into the case, to make historical sense of it”. [14] When that story is remade as Sommersby (Jon Amiel, 1993) and set in the post-Civil War American south, its hero becomes an early proponent of racial integration and agricultural cooperatives persecuted primarily for his progressive views; i.e., he is historicised as an agent of social evolution. Like “medieval”, “Victorian” is the other Great Other that defines “modern”, but it is the other from which the same emerges: as all those certified good things – modern marital arrangements, jobs for women, even multi-culturalism – emerge from mid-nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists at the end of Little Women. A similar pattern of evolution is acted out in the epilogue to The Age of Innocence with Newland Archer failing to explain the scruples and inhibitions of the 1870s to his son in 1910. The evolutionary view of recent history films explains not only why their preferred mode is tragicomedy – the barriers which appear timeless and insurmountable to Newland and Ellen appear as historical accidents to Ted Archer and ourselves – but also the overwhelming dominance, over the last twenty-five years at least, of women’s issues and specifically the evolution of gender roles in films of recent history: virtually any Merchant-Ivory film, for example, Ragtime (Miloš Forman, 1981), Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996), The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley, 1997) as well as films already mentioned in this paper. I leave the reader to complete her own list. That is to say, our priorities order the selection that mythologizes the past, as White shows they usually do in academic historiography or in popular film. [15] We get the past we need: one, in this case, in which the importance of the American Civil War – at least the importance that gets the emphasis – is that it encouraged mothers and daughters to bond and gave Black males a chance to die in uniform.

We may be dealing here with a problem, real or only presumed so by film-makers, about the length of historical memory. Audiences may lack in the case of the Middle Ages that store of readily available associations and connections that Sorlin calls “historical capital”. [16] It seems to be difficult to draw the lines of historical causation much further back than the late seventeenth-century, where Restoration (Michael Hoffman, 1995), for example, tries to locate the beginnings of modern psychology. Those lines may be a fiction, but they are one that audiences are assumed to accept about one period but not about the other. More than cultural amnesia is involved, however. We tend to figure Western history in terms of a break between medieval and Renaissance in which the latter is the beginning of modernity and the former that which is discarded: what Carl Rubino has called “the despised and rejected ‘Middle Ages'”, the period defined as an unreal era between two real ones. [17]  It is the Other that doesn’t lead to us. After that break, you’re dealing with history. Before it, you’re in the land of archetypes, Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985) country, dreamland. [18]

In place of – or, more modestly, as a supplement to – Eco’s schema, I would like propose my own list of little Middle Ages, all of them, at bottom, analogues, either positive or negative, to what we imagine our present to be. The Middle Ages are, to steal a cliche from Barbara Tuchman, a distant mirror; they are also, and often at the same time, a Significant Other, supplying some perceived need, but not, however, what they are in history: an antecedent.

(1) The Middle Ages are used as an entry into childhood, either of the archetypal individual or of the culture, a place where mythic patterns are played out “innocently” by naive versions of ourselves. This view probably stems from Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages [1919], in which actual medieval people are typed as savage children, and will hardly survive a reading of Dante [Alighieri] or [Geoffrey] Chaucer, but is certainly the view of Excalibur and necessarily that of any film, like The Fisher King, involving Robin Williams.

(2) The Middle Ages as shorthand for the-spirituality-missing-in-our-lives: the view represented, as we have seen, by The Navigator (where the medievals occupy a position of holy innocence comparable to the Eskimos in Ward’s A Map of the Human Heart, 1992). It is also the view of Excalibur, that grab-bag of all views, where the medieval represents a time when the voice of the unconscious (aka Merlin) is still heard in our unselfconscious land. This is also the Middle Ages that licenses magic realism for directors not fluent in Spanish. In Peter Weir’s terms, it is dreamtime. In [Leger] Grindon’s, it is “an escape into nostalgia [that] seeks a ‘golden age'” [19] , as is:

(3) The Middle Ages as the Land of Lost Sexual Archetypes (where Sean Connery and Richard Gere went to die in First Knight, Jerry Zucker, 1995): the preserve of directors, Boorman prominent among them, for whom gender difference remains fundamental and essential; where, as in Ladyhawke, the boy may also be a wolf and the girl a falcon, but not vice versa. Closely related to this is:

(4) The Middle Ages as a game preserve – or elephant’s graveyard – for unironized heroism, the purpose it was also serving when transposed into that extended and conscious tribute to Joseph Campbell, Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), and continues to serve with conspicuous commercial success in Braveheart. Like the preceding categories, this is also an example of the use of the Middle Ages as a mode of psychological and social simplification: a distancing device, like the bark-paintings which provide visual models for the style of The Seventh Seal, meant to show us the rude outline of things.

(5) The Middle Ages as visionary key, the use to which it is put in, say, Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) where Inferno and that other “medieval” text, Revelations, provide the clarifying principle that allows the film’s detectives to understand both the psychopath they are pursuing and the hellish (i.e., medieval) modern city through which they pursue him. On the Morgan Freeman side of this equation, the Middle Ages provides a source of moral rigor and clarity; on the psychopathic, Kevin Spacey side, they provide the inspiration for inquisitorial fanaticism. As we have seen, that is an ambivalence fundamental to medieval film.

In all these cases, as in the final one I will be taking up, the Middle Ages are not a subject of interest – though they may be a subject of curiosity – in themselves. They are, most obviously in Se7en, a way of reading the present. What goes missing in this process is a sense of the period as having ever had any real or independent existence. The notional Middle Ages supplants the historical one, being, after all, much simpler to deal with and easier to sell. The image of this notional Middle Ages has seldom been clearer than it is in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. Anyone who has seen that film will remember the motifs by which it represents the medieval:

• the crazed-but-angelic bum Parry, armed with a child’s bow-and-arrow and shielded by a garbage can lid; a free-form combination of academic, holy innocent, Parsifal, Merlin and the Fisher King; a human pastiche;
• the bum’s shelter: a junkshop basement with cathedral lighting, decorated with a postmodern melange of clippings from encyclopedias and popular magazines, religious junk, and a shrine to his dead wife with offerings of candy and ketchup sachets;
• a loving cup serving as a holy grail, desacralized into a token of redemptive male-bonding;
• a neurotic secretarial-pool drudge sacralized into a courtly lady;
• a Red Knight who is at once an id-monster, an Arthurian allusion, and a pastiche of garbage: a demon of industrial waste.

These are, I would suggest, defining moments which, taken together, demonstrate the Disneyfication of the Middle Ages: medievalism presented as redemptive childishness and/or the structuring code for a kind of holy foolishness. The period is no longer present, you’ll notice, except as a pastiche of pseudo-medieval pictures out of magazines like the Saturday Evening Post: a cartoon version in which the courtly lady is crossed with “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” (the Groucho Marx song Parry sings to Lydia in the Chinese restaurant). Medievalism here is a benevolent form of false consciousness allowing Parry to love an illusory version of his Ragnell-like girlfriend until she is – I’m sorry to have to say this – transformed by his devotion. It serves as a mystified way of figuring regression, allowing Robin Williams, as he always does, to get in touch with his inner child. And it figures that regression as saving grace. Now, I can live with this kind of sentimentality – if you’re going to watch Terry Gilliam movies, you more or less have to – but I do note that it is not a medieval attitude; rather it is one inflicted on the Middle Ages in the process of turning them into children’s literature. I also note that we are watching a vanishing act here, in which the medieval dwindles into medievalism (Parry’s subject in his lost academic career) and medievalism dwindles into sanctified kitsch. Parry isn’t the only one regressing. The Fisher King marks that point at which our always somewhat illusory interest in the Middle Ages is wholly absorbed as play-therapy into our self-interest: a denial of historicity, not an affirmation. Now that Otto Preminger is safely dead, perhaps it’s time for someone to take another try at filming Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw, 1923). Shaw at least understood that the Middle Ages have an important historical connection with the plagues of our time. I increasingly suspect that medieval films exist to make us forget that connection.

NOTES
[1] One could note the absence of books by medievalists as well as books of any kind devoted to medieval film. A rare exception is Kevin Harty’s Cinema Arthuriana (New York: Garland, 1991), though it does not primarily address historical issues or medieval film as a genre. Harty has recently completed editing a second volume. At least for the moment, however, anyone looking for a survey of medieval films has to make do with George Macdonald Fraser’s aggressively lightweight Hollywood History of the World (London: Harville, 1996). The situation may be beginning to change. Anthony Guneratne has impressive chapters on the medievalism of [Sergei] Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the marginally medieval case of The Return of Martin Guerre in his forthcoming Cinehistory: The Representation of Reality in Documentary and Narrative Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1994). At least one distinguished medievalist, Alan Gaylord, is working on a book tentatively titled Medieval Movies. The present essay is a modest interim proposal toward the construction of a genre or subgenre of medieval film.
[2] Peter Cowie, “The Seventh Seal”, Criterion Collection (1987) [www.criterion.com].
[3] This is not the place for the essay on anachronism in The Seventh Seal that I will write someday, so I am relying on a certain amount of (hopefully persuasive) assertion. As a medievalist, I could point out that one of the most striking things about The Great Death is that it did not produce a literature of religious despair. While I would not deny that a medieval man could experience the world, in the way Block does, as a signless void, I would say that that is far more characteristic of the mid-twentieth century. A medieval thinker would be more likely to perceive the creation as a plethora of signs, however confusing and unreliable. S/he would certainly have been taught to do so. On the micro level, I would point out, for example, that Jons’s comment that the Crusade “was such madness that only a real idealist could have thought it up” (The Seventh Seal, translated from the Swedish by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner [London and Boston: Faber, 1984], p. 30) depends on a modern sense of “idealist” not available to a fourteenth-century speaker. In any case, Jons’s resemblance to the early seventeenth-century figure of Sancho makes him only nominally “medieval”. Melvin Bragg, The Seventh Seal (London: BFI, 1993), pp. 48-49, and Frank Gado, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1986), p. 197, have noted the (significantly non-medieval) presences of Orff, Picasso, and Durer in The Seventh Seal‘s stylistic genesis. Like many of its critics, Bragg refers casually to the film’s “utterly modern view of the relationship between God and Man” (p. 21). I quite agree.
[4] An extremely useful digest of this debate is the forum “History in images/History in words: reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film”, edited by Robert Rosenstone, in American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December 1988), pp. 1173-1227.
[5] See, especially, the opening chapters of Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); the quotation is from pp. 2-3. See also White’s later The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), and Tropics of Discourse (Johns Hopkins, 1978), especially “The historical text as literary artifact”, pp. 81-100.
[6] Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989); Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991). White refers his theories primarily to Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971) and L’archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
[7] Significantly, nearly all the books which deal with history and film concentrate on recent (usually American) history. See, for example, Robert Rosenstone ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Peter C. Rollins, Hollywood as Historian (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983); John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson, eds., American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979). Leger Grindon’s Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1994) is less circumscribed but does not deal with medieval film. While I share Grindon’s concern with “the diplacement of the present to the past” (pp. 2-3) as characteristic of historical films, I think that displacement takes radically different forms in medieval- and recent-history films.
[8] The AIDS-allegory reading of The Navigator, a regular favourite with students, was started, as far as I have been able to find, by Tom Pulleine’s review in Sight and Sound 56, no. 664 (May 1989), p. 145. The film itself does not, in fact, refer to AIDS, but does supply the nuclear threat and the dehumanizing effects of high technology as modern equivalents for the medieval plague. The bank of TV sets which temporarily deprives Griffin of his visionary powers is showing a Hyman Rickover-like US officer defending nuclear submarines, one of which later attacks the miners’ boat. The other “plague” is clearly the loss of religious faith, which the miners may counter by supplying the medieval cross for the modern church. In any case, they serve throughout as an alternative to contemporary unbelief. They serve, in other words, our needs.
[9] See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988).
[10] They are Maoris in the published script, but “FOBs” in the film, the change being made, I assume, to avoid localizing the setting. See The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, screen play by Vincent Ward, Kely Lyons and Geoff Chapple (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 34.
[11] Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 16.
[12] Umberto Eco, “The return of the Middle Ages”, in Faith in Fakes (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), pp. 61-85, here p. 68.
[13] “C.I.A.: F. Murray Abraham interviewed by Gideon Bachmann”, Film Comment 22:5 (Sept.-Oct. 1986), pp. 16-20.
[14] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983), p. viii (emphasis added). Davis’s account both locates the story in the specific context of the peasant culture of the county of Foix in the 1550s and treats it as a chapter in the evolution of gender identities and Protestant attitudes toward religious authority.
[15] See White’s contribution to the AHR Forum [note 4], pp. 1193-99.
[16] The Film in History, p. 20.
[17] Carl Rubino, “The invisible worm: ancients and moderns in The Name of the Rose“, SubStance 47 (1988), pp. 54-63, here p. 55. Rubino has a useful discussion of the Middle Ages as defining Other: “our ghastly medieval enemies, who turn out, of course, to be ourselves” (p. 56).
[18] Significantly, this kind of break does not seem to occur in Japanese or Chinese film, either because there is no dividing moment or because it comes much later, with the opening of Japan or with the Chinese revolutions of 1911 or 1949. It is a peculiar effect of the Renaissance that we tend to divide Western history into the relevant proto-modern and the discarded post-ancient.
[19] Shadows on the Past, 3.