More on Medieval Movies: Surveys from the Field

Special Introduction | Driver Martha Driver Pace University More on Medieval Movies: Surveys from the Field "Where does the truth lie in all this history?"1 E.L. Doctorow, in an essay published in The New York Times last March, discussed the potential power of film to destroy the written word: "That pictograms, whether corporately or privately produced, may eventually unseat linguistic composition as the major communicative act of our culture is a prospect I find only slightly less dire than global warming." His essay claimed that film, relying on the visual, "de-literates thought," involving only the "intuitive nonverbal intelligence" of the viewers: "You understand what you see without having to think it through with words." Finally, Doctorow commented that writers on film typically analyze work that is beneath their notice: "The most meretricious or foolish movie will elicit a cogent analysis," a point that supports his thesis that print culture continues to be affirmed "by subjecting the nonliterate filmgoing experience, good or bad, to the extensions of syntactical thought."2 Should this worry medievalists? Scholars and teachers of the Middle Ages study and teach a period of history that existed before printing, before the privileging of print over oral culture, of written word over the image. To characterize the fluid content of medieval texts, the critic Paul Zumthor used the term "mouvance." The term means alive, "moving," unfixed. Zumthor described medieval literature as "a sequence of productions."3 Like the retellings of the Robin Hood legend or the King Arthur stories on film, medieval texts are multivalenced and often open-ended, the same stories told and retold across time, in many cultures and many languages. Medieval literature, chronicles and art could also be said to be collaboratively produced, with medieval authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio drawing on rich sources of folktale and earlier narrative to tell their stories. The expertise revealed in the telling of old tales, the technical acumen and rhetorical skill on display, were more valued in medieval culture than originality. And what of the medieval emphasis upon the Vol. 29.3-4(1999) | 5 Driver !Special Introduction image over (or perhaps as equivalent to) written language ? In a recent New Yorker article, Simon Schama argued that history too is made of pictures: "The most enduring historians have always valued the necessary alliance between picture-making and argument . Sometimes they have relied on actual illustrations , like the unknown maker of the Bayeux Tapestry ...."4 Schama concludes his essay with a dramatic retelling of an episode from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, offering to option the movie rights by e-mail ("To option this story, please contact Bedeworks@Clio.edu"). Writing about historical film in his 1987 essay on Abel Gance's Napoleon, Marc Ferro poses the compelling question"Where does the truth lie in all this history?" and provides a provocative answer, which may appeal to historians and film-lovers alike: With distance, one version ofhistory replaces another but the work of art remains. And so, with the passage of time, our memory winds up by not distinguishing between, on the one hand, the imaginative memory of Eisenstein or Gance, and on the other, history such as it really happened, even though historians seek to make us understand and artists seek to make us participate. As we learn from Ferro and know from our own experience, film provides immediacy and also appeals to the imagination, engaging the viewer in the past, forcing him to participate and to become involved emotionally and imaginatively with the action on screen. This rich engagement with the imagination is one main theme connecting the essays in this companion issue to the first number of Film & History: Medieval Period in Film in which scholars discuss real and historical figures of the Middle Ages as they appear on film. To open the second issue of Film & History devoted to discussion of the Middle Ages, Stephen Knight provides a comprehensive survey of some of the greatest movies in the genre, those about the legendary figure Robin Hood. In this scholarly, yet also very funny essay, Knight persuades us that the film medium is a natural progression of the Robin Hood legend, which begins as...