Anachronism Old and New: A Knight's Tale and Black Knight

Regular Feature | Film Reviews into believing that their equipment is up for this particular challenge and perhaps it is the courage to question this challenge that they lack. In those Bigelow films where women emerge only briefly, it is all the more important to read their presence symbolically. Her women always have something to say. Like most of Bigelow's female characters, this one knows (even from the periphery) what the men can only learn through relentless trials and tests, that they need to wake up and re-thinktheirrelation to power and to one another. There are many signals of a rising auteur in K-19, the most basic of which is Bigelow's commercial savvy in forging a heretofore-unprecedented relationship withNational Geographic. With Paramount as her primary backer, she obtained substantial financing for the $80 million budget from the company, which helped provide equipment and resources, including a corps of twenty-nine marine experts for the underwater filming. Always an exceptional visual artist, Bigelow, working with cinematographerJeffCronenweth (Fight Club), also demonstrates her flair for formalism and technical prowess. She rhymes a number of lush frame compositions into dazzling and poetic symmetry such as when she echoes the deep structures of a shot ofFord ascending a stairway inside the Kremlin with one in which his caravan inches down a hill at Kola Peninsula. (Consider, too, the moving shot that captures an officer sleeping in his bunk and then travels into the walls of the sub and out into the water, conveying the fragile line that divides crew from the unknowns of their environment.) The director innovates difficult camera movement through her invention of a barely detectable monorail system that enabled the camera to glide through the submarine's tight caverns alongside its more visible pipes and wires. She captures the spectacle of the widowmaker's massiveness and the ocean's vastness with every bit ofsophistication as that other little "big water movie," Titanic (1999), which was directed by her former husband. And she pays homage to Soviet film history by skillfully referencing images from Sergei Eisenstein and Dzigo Vertov. She also subscribes to one of the agendas of those 1920s filmmakers by avoiding single-shotframing ofindividuals in favor of group or communal compositions (emphasizing two-shots because ofthe funnel effect created by her two-character conflict but still taking care to centralize the collective crew in cinematic terms). All ofthis speaks volumes in favor of Bigelow's enormous talent and makes it even moreunfortunatethather ending becomes mired in labored speeches about "true heroes." She clearly plays her strong suit when she harnesses her intellectual energy and asks her audience to turn inward, toward a radical understanding ofhow, as gendered, racial, and national subjects, we have arrived in the current political and cultural climate. For many years, she has struggled to gain a greenlight for a portrayal of the Kent State University student riots. If given the chance to direct this project, or develop others like it, she could become a valuable voice from the Left about the Left, a voice that, when combined with her questioning ofAmerican sentiment in K-19, might just provide a thorough-going, civil-rights-movement-inspired, political commentary that goes relatively unspoken in Hollywood. The questions that remain unanswered at this point in her career are whether or not she can seize the power, and, if so, what she decides to do with the doubleness of the mask. Christina Lane The University of Miami Anachronism Old and New: A Knight's Tale and Black Knight 2001 saw a spate of films set in the historical past; so as a scholar of the Middle Ages who also teaches cultural studies, it was a good excuse for me to see some really bad movies. But as much as I was prepared to hateA Knight's Tale (Helgeland 2001) and Black Knight (Junger 2001), I found myself drawn to them just as much as my students were—despite the overwhelming urge to come up with a hundred reasons why the movies were nothing more than the latest in the adolescent feel-good genre. The movie reviews, panning both films for interspersing historically accurate depictions ofmedieval life with...