Publisher Details
Edited by Kevin J. Harty and Scott Manning (Jefferson: McFarland, 2024)
Pages: 386
Bibliographic Info: 73 photos, notes, bibliography, index
This collection of original essays presents new scholarship on nearly three dozen feature-length films, including silent films, animated films, films in black and white, and films in technicolor, along with other, shorter examples of cinematic medievalism.
Written by contributors from around the globe with a wide variety of backgrounds, the essays in this volume take a critical approach to one of the most popular forms of medivalism. This book presents a full century of cinematic depictions of the Middle Ages, with new examinations of works such as The Seventh Seal, God’s Fool, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Saladin the Victorious, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic, and A Knight’s Tale, among others.
Table of Contents
Preface
The Middle Ages, from Real to Reel: An Introduction by Kevin J. Harty and Scott Manning
Accidents of Time and Timing: The Seventh Seal (1957) and Black Death (2010) by Dorsey Armstrong
The Consolation of Medievalism in Vincent Ward’s The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988) by Helen Young
Francis of Assisi: Making a Twelfth-Century Saint Accessible to Twentieth–and Twenty-First-Century Audiences by Francis Berna
The Archbishop and the King: Peter Glenville’s Becket (1964) by Jonathan Good
The Book of Joan of Arc on Trial: Dreyer and Bresson by Gail Orgelfinger
The Northman’s Place in Viking Film History by Zachary J. Melton
“A decadent and child-murdering Wali”: The Targeted Racialization of the “Arab Sectarian” in Youssef Chahine’s Saladin the Victorious (1963) by Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan
Medieval Scotland on Film: Braveheart and the Scottish Discursive Imaginary by Laura S. Harrison and Andrew B.R. Elliott
Making Padanians: Barbarossa (2009) and Repurposing the Myth of the Lombard League by Scott Manning
The Illusion of Musical Authenticity in Alexander Nevsky (1938) by John Haines
On the Queerness of England’s King John, as Captured in 473 Years of Stage and Screen Portrayals by Tison Pugh
The Depths of Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic by Karl Fugelso
“Nevertheless, she persisted”: Marginalizing the Other at the Intersection of Gender and Race in Fritz Lang’s Film Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge) by Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir and the Principle of “Included Third” by Raeleen Chai-Elsholz
Authenticity, Neoliberalism, and Socialism: The Name of the Rose (1986) by Richard Utz
Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring in Dialog: From Shame Culture to Guilt Culture by Sandra Gorgievski
“Are you a woman or a blacksmith?” Cross-Sex Friendship Bonds in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale by Richard Sévère
“Beware the Jabberwock”: Terry Gilliam’s Fractured Fairy Tale by Susan Aronstein and Taran Drummond
David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021): Authenticity and Accuracy, Historicons and Easter Eggs by Kevin J. Harty
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index