Category Archive for: ‘Issue 26 – Special Issue: Early Europe’
Screening Early Europe: Premodern Projections
The study of screen representations of early Europe is a growing area that has come in recent years to occupy a vital place within the various disciplines of early European studies, especially in medieval studies and, to a lesser degree, in Classics and early modern studies. From encyclopaedias of medievalist films such as Kevin J. Harty’s The Reel Middle Ages (1999) and …
Read MoreThe Long Path Back: Medievalism and Film
Abstract Various forms of neo-medievalism are currently revealing themselves on an international scale, both in popular audiovisual culture and in progressive art cinema. This essay critiques the assumptions behind the widespread notion that today’s blockbuster entertainment movies are a ‘perfect match’ with medieval narratives; while delving into the far lesser-known theory and practice of an ‘archaic-innovative’ approach to medieval form …
Read MoreTransparent Walls: Stained Glass and Cinematic Medievalism
Abstract In its representation of stained-glass windows, medievalist cinema exploits the shared capacity of both media to articulate the dreams, visions and memories of both past and present. Many films avoid the detailed depiction of religious imagery, but in their fascination with the patterns of light and shade, and the oneiric aspects of stained-glass windows they tap into what medieval …
Read MoreSuspended Animation: Myth, Memory and History in Beowulf
[1] The last ten to fifteen years have witnessed a rapid growth of academic interest in the formal, cultural and political aspects of both medieval film and graphic novels.[2] While more recent scholarship has highlighted their aesthetic as well as cultural complexities, both have been (and sometimes still are) accused of political conservatism (in relation to the former) and frivolity …
Read More“We are the Monsters Now”: The Genre Medievalism of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf
Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (USA 2007) is an unusual film. It follows an unusual narrative structure – the hero’s path shifts dramatically into the future at the very moment in which we might expect a romantic resolution – and yet it is at the same time recognisable as a very ‘generic’ film, investing energy in fulfilling rather than challenging generic norms. The film …
Read MoreFrom Mythic History to Cinematic Poetry: Terrence Malick’s The New World Viewed
Abstract Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) is a poetic evocation of one of America’s founding myths, the story of Pocahontas. While the film allegorises – through the theme of marriage – the possibility of successful cultural exchange and of reconciliation with nature, it also fuses mythic history, subjective reflection, and the self-expression of nature. This unstable point of view has led …
Read MoreMusic for Myth and Fantasy in Two Arthurian Films
Abstract This essay examines music in two Arthurian films: John Boorman’s Excalibur (USA 1981), and the television miniseries Mists of Avalon (USA 2001), directed by Uli Edel. It explores the role of music in the nostalgic desire evoked by the medieval in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century film. From a perspective informed by Lacanian understandings of desire and its lost object (objet (petit) a), …
Read MoreMedieval Reimaginings: Female Knights in Children’s Television
Abstract This paper will consider three medievalist children’s television programmes, Jane and the Dragon, Sir Gadabout and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, each of which grant knightly roles to their central female characters. Given the cultural power attached to representations of the past, such rewritings of the Middle Ages can offer a retrospective authorisation for active female participation in today’s society. The ‘girl …
Read MoreIraq, the Prequel(s): Historicising Military Occupation and Withdrawal in Kingdom of Heaven and 300
Abstract As well as being historical films, Zack Snyder’s 300 and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven both reflect on the value and the danger of historical commemoration and amnesia. The films’ opposing stances on the ‘righteous’ use of history directly link to their differing uses of historical East-West clashes (Thermopylae and the Crusades) as allegorical commentaries on current East-West tensions, specifically the Western occupation …
Read MoreReel Medici Mobsters? The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance Reassessed
Abstract This article considers the 2004 PBS documentary Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance in relation to its suggestions that the Medici family of Florence shared similar traits to modern Mafiosi. It analyses the cinematic influence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy on the documentary’s filming, as well as that of Hollywood gangster films in general, the distinct references that the director used to illustrate …
Read More“A Continuous Return”: Tristan and Isolde, Wagner, Hollywood and Bill Viola
[1] Abstract The story of Tristan and Isolde is one of the founding myths of Western culture and fifteen hundred years after its first appearance artists continue to embrace and re-write this early medieval tale, with Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde remaining a touchstone for contemporary reinterpretations. This paper examines two recent screen-based responses to the legend, Reynolds’ Hollywood film, Tristan …
Read MoreThree Thrusts at Excalibur
1. We were in China. I had to clear up some urgent business and, after breakfast with a member of the Gang of Four (Yao Wenyuan), we appointed a leader. It was four in the afternoon. Outside, everybody was doing gymnastics. The rest of us (at the time, numbering more than forty), ensconced in a small room, listened to the …
Read MoreContributors
Anke Bernau lectures in Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. She is co-editor of Medieval Film (2009) and author of Virgins: A Cultural History (2007), and has authored numerous essays on medieval literature and medievalism. She is currently working on the Albina myth and theories of memory and history in the late medieval and early modern periods. Narelle Campbell is a PhD …
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