Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (review)

This is the third joint-authored book by two prolific medievalists interested in contemporary theorists and popular culture. As the title indicates, they examine some representations of the medieval West at the movies, mainly since World War II. Computer games are excluded. Their largely descriptive survey may be useful for anyone who wishes to set up a course on the ways popular movies interpret the past and who is patient enough to find a way through many pages of exposition. The cover, symptomatically, shows the late Heath Ledger in Brian Helgeland’s ridiculous rags-to-riches teen fantasy of chivalric social mobility, A Knight’s Tale (2001). Like Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, who have coedited books on film representations of the Middle Ages, the authors describe a number of movies in readily grasped, largely cultural-materialist categories: “accuracy,” “hagiography,” romance (through teen movies), and violence (through Crusade movies). Arthurian legend and the fantasy of “a” Middle Ages are, inevitably, front and center. Their bibliography is largely confined to titles in English, and even the chapter dedicated to Joan of Arc restricts itself to what is available in English translation. Naturally, books that survey a theme risk isolating the films they study from the work of particular directors or production companies, especially when these are outside the United States. What is most puzzling in such a book is the lack of a filmography, chronology, or reference list of directors, screenwriters, or actors. It is difficult to cross-reference, or to check the book’s many sweeping generalizations — for example, an opening analogy likening medieval book production to the “collaborative labor” of movie production. Th-th-that’s all, folks.