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Reviewed by:
  • Medieval Film
  • Candace Barrington
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, eds. Medieval Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Pp. 241. £55.00; $84.95.

This collection of essays contributes to the study of medievalisms by focusing on medieval film, a paradoxical genre the editors define in three [End Page 395] ways: films set in the Middle Ages; films with medieval themes, characters, or allusions; and (most elusively) films that "resist adhering to chronological history" (3). By working with this expanded notion of medieval film, these essays demonstrate why it is no longer necessary to limit our judgment of cinematic depictions of the medieval past to how well they achieve historical accuracy. Not only do film narratives set in the Middle Ages help us to see how difficult it is to create a history not influenced by contemporary conventions and concerns, but medieval film's pretense of transporting the audience to an authentic past (that is in truth unavailable) reveals "the narrative and cinematic manipulations underlying all historical films" (4). As these various essays explore, these manipulations bring together the moment of history being depicted, the moment of the historical moment's being filmed, the moment of its screening, and the moment of its reinterpretation, causing each moment to shape the other moments and confounding any ability to create a historically accurate moment. The essays take three approaches: understanding the ways in which medieval film defamiliarizes standard film conventions; understanding how medieval films can convey contemporary political concerns; and understanding how medievalism shaped film history and film theory.

Four essays explore the significant ways that films set in the medieval period manipulate such standard conventions as setting, music, and language. The artificiality of these cinematic conventions can be invisible when films are set in more historically accessible periods. Medieval film, however, foregrounds the partial availability of historical authenticity. Because films set in the Middle Ages portray events, places, and characters that must be re-created, these films manage to reveal the inevitable intervention implicit in any filmic depiction of the past. Sarah Salih demonstrates the particular trouble attempts at authenticity pose for films set in the Middle Ages. Because medieval artifacts and other visual representations survive into the film era as broken, dirty, colorless ruins, filmmakers are faced with a dilemma: either portray the premodern world from a contemporary perspective by providing audiences with the dark and grim setting that accords with these remains, or present medieval artifacts as new and freshly painted, as they would have been seen by medieval men and women, but then fail to meet audience expectations. Thus, the films that are most medieval in spirit may feel the least visually authentic. For example, Camelot (1967), an apparently inauthentic version of the Middle Ages, successfully captures medieval [End Page 396] attitudes toward the past when it reuses and juxtaposes texts and materials looted from the past. Andrew Higson's essay continues Salih's trajectory by arguing that associations of the Gothic with the Middle Ages frequently influence the sort of audience to which medieval films appeal. Because audiences have come to define the Middle Ages as "dangerous and dirty," the small subset of British heritage films set in the Middle Ages tend to earn "a more populist and masculine appeal" than similar films set in Victorian or Edwardian England, which tend to be depicted as clean and prim (203).

The two further essays in this line of inquiry examine the ways in which medieval films defamiliarize our assumptions about what audiences hear when they see a film set in the Middle Ages. Alison Tara Wilson examines the apparent dissonance between a film's medieval setting and its nonmedieval, contemporary music. As she demonstrates, such music can provide commentary affirming or challenging the film's medieval ethos. Carol O'Sullivan examines how films set in the Middle Ages deal with the problem of presenting different languages to a modern, frequently monolingual, audience. Whether filmmakers resolve the challenge by using only the language of the target audience, by inserting stray medieval morphemes (such as the ye, thee, and -eth associated with Middle English), or by using subtitles for multilingual exchange, the intervention foregrounds language difference. In both cases...

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