Filming the Middle Ages [1 ed.] 9781861899279, 9781861898081

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FILMING THE MIDDLE AGES Copyright © 2011. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Bettina Bildhauer

Filming the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2011. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Filming the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2011. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

filming the middle ages

Filming the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2011. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Filming the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Filming the Middle Ages

Copyright © 2011. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

bettina bildhauer

reaktion books

Filming the Middle Ages, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,

With love to Claire

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2011 Copyright © Bettina Bildhauer 2011 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by cpi Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bildhauer, Bettina. Filming the Middle Ages. 1. Middle Ages in motion pictures. I. Title 791.4’3658-dc22

isbn 978 1 86189 808 1

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Contents

What is Medieval Film? An Introduction

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The Blind Director

Part I Time’s Bow 1 The Non-linear Time of Medieval Film

25

Faust – Destiny

2 The Medieval Dead Reanimated

51

Golem – Hard to Be a God – Waxworks – The Seventh Seal – Siegfried

3 Queer Time Hamlet – Lady Venus and her Devil

74

– Dreamship Surprise – Abelard – Joan of Arc – Ferryman Maria – The Immortal Heart

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Part II Lethal Letters 4 The Dangerous Power of Writing

99

The Secret of Kells – The Passion of Joan of Arc – Pope Joan – Sign of the Pagan

5 The Printing Press vs the Cathedral

115

The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Copernicus – The Adventures of Don Quixote

6 Detecting the Middle Ages The Da Vinci Code – A Canterbury Tale – The Name of the Rose

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132

Part III Human Limits 7 The Birth of the Leader from the Collective

151

Condottieri – Luther – Alexander Nevsky

8 The Nation’s Lost Past

172

Nibelungen Films, 1924, 1966, 2004

9 Animation and the Human between Animal and Cyborg 190

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Jester Till – Beowulf – The Adventures of Prince Ahmed

Film’s Reliance on Medievalism: A Conclusion

213

references acknowledgements index of medieval films general index

223 251 253 260

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What is Medieval Film? An Introduction

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The Blind Director

A perturbing sequence in Alexander Kluge’s episodic film The Blind Director (1986) makes clear what is at stake in films about the Middle Ages. A young medieval monk watches over and prays for a beautiful dead girl, but then begins to touch and undress the body. When he is gone, the toes of the dishevelled corpse uncannily move and its eyes open (illus. 1). A cut reveals that this was a film-withinthe-film, The Monk and the Maiden, a film version of a medieval story in which the girl had not really been dead and gives birth nine months after her near-death experience. The film-within-the-film’s fictional director is later interviewed about why he chose a medieval rather than contemporary subject. He is pressed to explain the allegorical ‘bridge’ between the medieval tale and modern love. Throughout the long and confrontational dialogue, the viewer has time to work out why the director avoids answering this. There is no bridge in the sense the journalist is implying: the relationship between the monk and the girl does not mirror that between a modern man and a modern woman, but that between modernity and the Middle Ages. If modern people treat the past like the monk treats the girl, as a mere dead object to use for their purposes, they are abusing it and doing violence to it. The point of engaging with history is precisely not to reduce it to an allegory for the present, as either ‘like us’ or ‘not like us’, but to deal with it on its own terms. Like the girl, the Middle Ages are not a dead, passive object that can be used at will, but alive, responsive and capable of affecting the living. Like The Blind Director, many films about the Middle Ages demonstrate that the past is always more than a dead object. This

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1 The Blind Director (Alexander Kluge, 1986), the dishevelled corpse wakes up.

book aims to give an impression of the sheer range and ingenuity of medieval films’ ways of dealing with the past, and their critical as well as reactionary potential as legitimate engagements with history. By ‘medieval film’ I mean, as I shall describe in more detail below, films that are set between the years 500 and 1500 ad, and/or perceived to be medieval by their makers and recipients (which can include films set in a fictional world, or in the present or in a future that bears medieval elements). Too often, academics and amateur and professional critics treat such films in a patronizing manner, dismissing them as mere popular and childish entertainment and spotting the anachronistic details. This book spends most of its time taking seriously a number of these films and analysing what each of them has to say about the Middle Ages. This introduction, in addition, draws together some features common to the majority of such medieval films. Kluge’s depiction of the Middle Ages as a time of monks, death, sexual repression and violence, for example, is fairly widespread in cinematic representations of the Middle Ages. One might think of the murderous and sex-obsessed monks in The Name of the Rose (1986), the bloodthirsty and raping tyrants in Braveheart (1995, illus. 2), Joan of Arc’s corrupt and brutal inquisitors in the many films about her life or the plague-stricken world haunted by Death personified in The Seventh Seal (1958, illus. 3). Such images have shaped (and been shaped by) our rather biased view of the Middle Ages as a dark time of barbarism and ignorance, brutality and superstition, dungeons, disease and dirt. This demonization of the Middle Ages goes back to the fourteenth-century humanists and the later

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2 Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), the brutality of the Middle Ages.

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3 The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1958), the Middle Ages haunted by Death.

Protestant and Enlightenment reformers who all depicted the Middle Ages as a terrible time from which they had progressed. Filmmakers who create a brutal version of the Middle Ages partake in this tradition, whether they claim that contemporary culture has improved from such barbaric times or is in fact still, or again, just as dark. But many films – especially those purporting to be based on literature rather than history – also present the equally prejudiced other side of the coin of contemporary conceptions of the medieval: an idealization of the Middle Ages as a time of young knights in shining armour rescuing beautiful damsels in distress, from the alldancing, all-jousting Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale (2001, illus. 4) via Arthur pulling the shining sword out of the rock in Excalibur (1981, illus. 5) to Errol Flynn in his technicoloured Sherwood Forest in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). This view of the Middle

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Ages was shaped by the eighteenth-century Romantics, who saw a chance for renewal in a return to what they believed to be a more natural, holistic time; and it has been used ever since by thinkers and artists looking for alternatives to the flaws in modern culture. Surprisingly, both idealization and vilification of the Middle Ages actually rely on very similar and persistent ideas of history and of the medieval period. History is, in both cases, considered to be a series of radical revolutions: whatever the Middle Ages are, they are not modern. They provide a contrasting foil to modernity, whether as a lost paradise or as a backward precursor. This is rooted in a deeply ingrained understanding of the past as divided into three distinct eras: ancient, medieval and modern. While this tripartite scheme goes back to the mid-fourteenth century, it was established as the dominant

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4 A Knight’s Tale (Brian Helgeland, 2001), the all-dancing, all-jousting Heath Ledger.

5 Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981), Arthur pulling the shining sword out of the rock.

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academic pattern of periodization by the historian Christoph Cellarius in 1800. The actual dates associated with each era, however, have shifted considerably over time and in different countries. According to the most common definitions of the Middle Ages, they began some time between 300 and 500, for example, with Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as Roman state religion in the early fourth century, with the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455 or with the deposition of the West Roman Emperor in 476.1 The Middle Ages are usually defined as ending around 1500 or 1600, with the Renaissance (in the midfourteenth century), the invention of print (in the mid-fifteenth century), the Fall of Constantinople (1453), the discovery of America (1492) or the start of the Reformation (1517). The Middle Ages begin whenever antiquity ends, and end whenever modernity begins. Instead of continuities, this view of history sees radical breaks between those three eras. If there is any continuity, it is from the modern to the ancient era, with the Middle Ages as a very different period wedged in between. Moreover, both positive and negative evaluations of the medieval period – the Middle Ages as heaven, hell or paradise lost – are based on the same three deeper assumptions about the Middle Ages: that they were allegedly less reliant on linear time, on writing and on individualism than modernity. Medieval people, so the stereotype goes, used vision rather than writing (whether this is interpreted as illiterate and ignorant or as more holistic and embodied), did not think of time as linear (whether this is valued negatively as chaotic and irrational, or positively as freer) and were not interested in human individuality (whether this is seen as dangerously undermining modern subjectivity or as avoiding human-centric egotism). I happen to doubt that the Middle Ages can be characterized as an era in which perception was more visual, time was less linear and people not yet individuals. But this is beside the point I want to make here: this is not a book about the Middle Ages, it is a book about film; and films – as well as much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture and thought in general – see the Middle Ages that way. As a consequence, many medieval films firstly show alternatives to the pervasive view of time as linear, through the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities. The Blind Director, for example, breaks with chronological sequence as soon as it cuts from the medi eval scene to the contemporary film set: what we had taken within the filmic fiction to be the past turns out to be the present. This is not

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simply an issue of narrative ordering, but part of the film’s overall strategy of making time strange. Rather than moving constantly at a set pace, as we take for granted, time in plot and dialogues of The Blind Director and many other medieval films can slow down for some characters, or become a whole where past and present can no longer be clearly separated.2 Secondly, films also often show the Middle Ages as a culture before the fall from grace through print, and reflect on the way in which filmic representations of the past differ from written ones. Writing is, in general, treated as the most easily manipulated and most dangerous form of communication, while vision is privileged as being more reliable. In Kluge’s film, for instance, the fact that the journalist has read the medieval story in a book hinders rather than helps his understanding of the film scenes. Vision, on the other hand, has the potential to allow a fresher, less prejudiced approach to the past: the film-within-the-film’s director aims to destroy clichés through his cinematic images. Finally, it is common in medieval films to dissolve the idea of the human being as an Enlightenment subject, and show humans to be no longer strictly divided from animals and objects, and from one another. Instead of being modern individuals, medieval characters are often part of wider collectives, or lose their individual distinction in other ways. In The Blind Director, it is the difference between the human subject and a dead object that is undermined in the figure of the waking corpse. So in cinema, a fairly consistent concept of the Middle Ages emerges that unites the seemingly opposed traditions of Romantic idealization and Enlightenment demonization, and much of the rest of this book will be devoted to analysing how this shapes medieval films. The concluding chapter will show that similar stereotypes underlie much of film theory; and that the production and aesthetics of film in general – not just of medieval films – are surprisingly often understood as a return to the culture of the Middle Ages.

Medieval Film as a Genre: The Scope of the Book Since the turn of the twenty-first century, medieval film has emerged as a rapidly growing area of significant academic interest.3 As witnessed by this recent wealth of publications, academics as one set

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of film consumers perceive films about the Middle Ages as constituting an identifiable group. But most of them have been reluctant to call medieval film an independent genre, and instead argue that they partake of other genres like historical film, epic, swashbuckler, film noir or musical.4 The term ‘genre’ is a loaded one in film studies (much more so than in literary or medieval studies), and ‘genre film’ carries with it connotations of populism and conservative ideologies. If I here propose, in order to provoke rather than close down further discussion, that films about the Middle Ages can be considered a genre, I am using ‘genre’ in the sense of a cluster or corpus of films that share certain features and raise certain expectations because they are, to some extent, modelled on each other. In terms of motifs, for instance, armour, castles with parapets, dirt, bad teeth and crosses can be expected; in terms of themes, Christianity, chivalry and violence are all-pervasive.5 As suggested above, the less obvious genre features include a playful, experimental approach to time both in the plot and in the narrative structures; the presentation of vision and materiality as superior to writing in both plot and filmic technique (often coupled with a reflection on the distinctive properties of film as a medium); and a search for alternatives to modern subjectivity and a privileging of ‘post-human’ identity both in the plot and the aesthetics of film. This understanding of genre is closest to Steve Neale’s classic concept of genre as process.6 Neale argues that in order for a genre to exist, it crucially has to be perceived as such by filmmakers, by the industry and by the media. The main reason for referring to films concerned with the Middle Ages as a genre is because there is so much evidence that filmmakers, studios, critics, academics and other viewers perceive them as belonging to a coherent filmic tradition; the genre has long existed in practice. Simply in order to attract funding and an audience, films have to be based on a good knowledge of previous similar films so that they are viewed as sophisticated and up-to-date. If filmmakers or studios decide to produce a film on Robin Hood, say, they will research not only other films on Robin Hood, but also on King Arthur or the crusades, because they are set in a similar period.7 Certain medieval films are part of the canon to such an extent that they will be consulted more often than others and have therefore had a greater influence on the genre. Lang’s Nibelungen (1924), The Seventh Seal, Rashomon (1950), El Cid (1961), Robin Hood: Prince

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of Thieves (1991) and Braveheart (1995) are perhaps among the most well-known films about the period and frequently act as reference points for other medieval films. Once a film is produced, advertising, media reports and its critical reception will often emphasize its setting in the Middle Ages and compare it to other such films. The blossoming academic interest is not cut off from these perceptions, but contributes to the identification of films about the Middle Ages as a coherent tradition. It is time for academic discourse to explore the uses of treating medieval film as a genre. A transnational genre that spans ‘popular’ and ‘art house’ cinema, as medieval film does, will always be less formulaic than Hollywood genre cinema.8 While the features that characterize medieval film are not as clear-cut as those of the most circumscribed genres – the western, the musical and the horror film – they lend it at least as much coherence as characterizes the genre of historical film, which also has few defining features apart from the fact that it is set in the past. That films about the Middle Ages can range from representations determined by anything from Romantic idealization to Humanist demonization is one of the factors that has made critics doubt their coherence as a genre, but in fact, as I have outlined, both extremes are based on a shared view of the Middle Ages. While necessarily broad, the genre definition is precise enough to describe cinematic practice and to have great heuristic value: understanding films within the context of this genre gives new insights into their workings at the current moment of academic endeavour. Calling this genre ‘medieval film’ avoids the unwieldy and imprecise label ‘films about the Middle Ages’, as well as the negative connotations of ‘medievalist film’.9 The term ‘medievalism’ relies on a postulated strict break between the object of study or representation (the Middle Ages) and the following period: Arthurian stories written in the Middle Ages, for example, are medieval literature, those written afterwards are medievalist literature. Medievalism is usually and unfairly seen as derivative and as less noteworthy than the ‘original’ medieval tales or artworks.10 This ignores the fact that many medieval tales and artefacts themselves come from a long tradition of rewritings and variations rather than being ‘original’. By contrast, the term ‘medieval film’ aims to dissolve the demarcation between the two eras, and to sidestep the negative connotations of ‘medievalism’.

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In any work on genre, and especially in a first attempt at delineating a genre, there is a risk of selecting only films that will fit one’s description of the genre, and thereby arriving at a tautological definition. To minimize that risk as much as possible, this study includes both films that are set in the Middle Ages and films that are understood as medieval in the film industry and reception (usually, but not always, both criteria coincide). My definition is based on close analyses of a corpus of about 200 films and their paratexts (such as marketing, reviews and audience responses). In theory, not every film set within the time period of 500–1500 has to be a medieval film, any more than every film set at the Western Frontier has to be a western. But in order to avoid bias, I have included any film set between 500 and 1500, and understood any unusual features as variations and creative play with the genre rather than as completely external to it.11 One reason why most academic publications to date have tended to see medieval films as rather stereotypical, composed of the same few semantic elements, is that they have focused on a certain kind of film, set in the courtly or religious world we readily associate with the Middle Ages, such as First Knight (1995), The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), A Knight’s Tale (2001), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) or King Arthur (2004). A wider generic definition, based on the features mentioned above, suggests a much broader range of films, including some without a single castle, suit of armour or tonsure in sight, such as Destiny (1922) and Waxworks (1924). Most of these films, however, are still set in the European Middle Ages, but I have made a point of discussing some films about the medieval Orient in order to acknowledge the overlaps between medievalism and Orientalism.12 In addition, the corpus of films from which I have derived my genre definition includes a number of films not set between 500 and 1500, but nevertheless labelled medieval by their makers and viewers. To gauge this perception, I have relied on promotion material, statements of the filmmakers, contemporary critics, amateur critics’ Internet reviews and scholarship. Ferryman Maria, for example, is a 1935 film whose plot takes place in a timeless period, an unspecific past, and whose mise-en-scène is broadly pre-industrial. Nevertheless, it was marketed and received as specifically medieval: it opened away from the usual metropolitan flagship cinemas in the medieval town of Hildesheim, and was hailed as a link to the medieval past.13

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Johannes Kepler (dir. Frank Vogel, 1974), a biopic about the astronomer (1571–1630) who discovered the elliptic movements of the planets, though largely set in 1620, is also described as medieval by the director and many reviewers.14 So is The Treasure (dir. G. W. Pabst, 1922), whose plot an inter-title expressly places in 1683, but, as Bernhard Riff rightly observes, ‘its fairytale and dreamy nature and historical timelessness . . . caused many critics to move the story to the Middle Ages’.15 Moreover, many medieval films are adaptations of medieval literary texts – of courtly romances, epics and fabliaux, story cycles and saints’ lives – that can be transferred to a more or less modernized setting. In fact, because of their experimentation with chronology, medieval films regularly involve ‘anachronisms’ and time-travel; an introduction of modern characters to a medieval location or a transferral of medieval characters or elements into a modern or future time.16 As a further strategy to counteract a biased genre corpus as far as possible in this book, I have included films from throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Academic work on the invention and reception of the Middle Ages commonly articulates its own timeliness and relevance to contemporary debates by proclaiming a ‘current wave’ of films about the Middle Ages and then proffering explanations for this.17 It has mostly focused on recent popular films at the time of publication (such as those mentioned above), with a few older classics such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) thrown in. But when considering representative examples of films from the beginnings to the most recent past, it becomes clear not only that the Middle Ages have always been en vogue in the cinema, but also that there are persistent patterns in the filmic depiction of the Middle Ages throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.18 Although there have, of course, been changes in the cinematic as well as other popular and academic conceptions of the Middle Ages over the past century, my focus is here on the continuities that, in often disturbing ways, bind together films from the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and contemporary Hollywood and Europe. The wide chronological range of the present book is balanced by a relatively narrow focus on narrative feature films intended for cinematic release (about 180 films in my corpus). Although a strict demarcation of cinema from television and digital media, of shorts

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from feature films and of documentary and docudrama (including recordings of plays and operas) from narrative is impossible, I have tried to respect the fact that such distinctions remain important to medieval films themselves, in their reflections on visuality, time and fiction: that cinema is transmitted in a different way than tv and video plays a significant role in medieval film’s self-reflection on visuality; short and non-narrative films also have a different relationship to time that affects medieval film’s self-conscious play with chronology; and documentary films have different standards for a responsible approach to the past. But it is not helpful here to distinguish ‘art house’ from ‘popular’ medieval films. Studio productions are usually at least as complex as independent films, because of their large teams of artists and experts, their genre and production memory of tried-and tested methods and their frequent reliance on great myths and stories. When we underestimate Hollywood as ‘mere popular entertainment’, we risk falling into the trap of its publicity machines, which precisely underplay the political and intellectual ambitions of its products. The genre of medieval film was moulded in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919–33). I thus deal with this period in particular detail. Apart from Weimar classics, my corpus comprises films from Nazi and postwar Germany, New German Cinema and contemporary German productions and co-productions (about 120 ‘German’ feature films in total).19 But it would obscure the transnational nature of the genre of medieval film to include only German national cinema in a narrow sense; instead, attention is paid to international films, too. In any case, the notion of a purely national cinema has been thoroughly criticized in film studies, to the extent that it is useful here to consider films with a significant input by German residents, citizens or companies to belong in a German context. German cinema was transnational in its mode of production from the start anyway, with film technicians and artists of all nationalities working in Germany. Many Germans made films in London and Hollywood, especially as a result of the waves of emigration during the Third Reich. Current film production and funding often traverse national boundaries. Moreover, from the point of view of film reception, German audiences are and usually have been at least as familiar with representations of the Middle Ages made in Hollywood and in successful independent films as with those of

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German-produced films. The focus on the (transnationally) ‘German’ elements of the genre contributes to a fuller impression of what medieval films are and do than the usual academic restriction to Hollywood films (and a few British, French, Japanese and American independent productions). In assembling my corpus, as well as selecting the films discussed in more detail in this volume, I have not aimed to create an exhaustive list of medieval films, but to give an impression of the range of the genre as regards subject-matter, time and mode of production, intended audiences and agendas. Although I ferreted out a large number of neglected and forgotten films, my main examples are, wherever possible, relatively well known and available on dvd or video. No prior knowledge of the films, nor any specific knowledge of film and medieval studies, is assumed, so that this volume should be accessible across and beyond the two disciplines.

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The Affinity of Medieval Film to Fantasy and the Issue of Historical Accuracy One reason why medieval film is not just a part of historical film is that representations of the time before and after 1500 – and to a lesser extent the time before and after 500 – tend to be very different. A medieval film presupposes other genre expectations in its relationship to reality than a film about modern history does. While it is plausible that a character will spontaneously burst into song mid-conversation in musicals, the same behaviour would normally disturb viewer expectations of realism in a western.20 Similarly, while audiences will not expect a magic potion or dragon to appear in a film set during the American Civil War, such as Gone With the Wind (1940), they will not be surprised to encounter them in a medieval film. Medieval films have a greater tolerance for miraculous or supernatural elements than those set in later historical periods.21 In Tzvetan Todorov’s terms, they frequently belong to the mode of the marvellous, where the supernatural is accepted as existing within the world of the fiction by both characters and recipients (as opposed to the uncanny, where the supernatural turns out to have some natural explanation, and to the fantastic, where both options are kept open).22 Genres that lack ‘realism’ are often perceived as being of an inferior quality to

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those that offer greater verisimilitude.23 This goes some way towards explaining the low regard in which medieval film is generally held. The association of medieval film with fantasy, however, is not just an issue of genre, but also of wider cultural attitudes to premodern (that is, ancient and medieval) as opposed to modern history. Appositely enough, it finds a precedent in a certain kind of medieval literature, the heroic epic. In this genre, the past is turned from historical, actual events into legend. The disastrous sixth-century defeat of the Burgundians by Roman armies, for example, is, by the thirteenth century, no longer described as a real event and more as a legend set during a prehistoric, heroic age. The Song of the Nibelungs, first written in circa 1200 but most likely based on a long tradition of oral tales, depicts the historical agents involved, like Theoderic the Great and Attila the Hun, as the larger-than-life legendary heroes Dietrich and Etzel. While in reality, the men lived several decades apart, they are in the Song of the Nibelungs part of the same prehistorical time.24 Supernatural creatures (like a dragon and dwarves) and magical props (like an invisibility cloak) are not out of place in this epic world. What has been happening in many medieval films (but not in academic history) throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, too, is that the Middle Ages are represented as prehistory rather than part of our history, as a supernatural rather than real period.25 When cinema shows the Middle Ages, it will depict literary inventions like the Arthurian knights or the Song of the Nibelung’s hero Siegfried as often as historical figures like Charlemagne or Saladin, and especially those literary characters that are based (however remotely) on historical figures, like King Arthur or Robin Hood. Not much separates the setting of films like the Sword of Xanten (2004) about Siegfried, or Excalibur (1981) about King Arthur from that of the Harry Potter (2001–) or Lord of the Rings (2001–3) films: both are full of dragons, magic and mystery. The current cut-off point for this prehistorical time is the change from the Middle Ages to modernity – what comes after that, as Arthur Lindley has observed, is ‘history’, what comes before is ‘dreamland’.26 Much of the popular perception of the Middle Ages as irrational and superstitious is not so much due to medieval events or mindsets as to the fact that we consign the Middle Ages to mythical prehistory. What becomes worthy of study is then not how a past period is represented on film, but simply what

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it can allegorically say about the time of its own production – precisely that which The Blind Director warns against.27 The mythologization of the Middle Ages does not, of course, mean that this period is seen as irrelevant; in fact, pseudo-historical versions of the crusades and medieval nation-building have been used to justify a range of political agendas in and outside the cinema.28 Moreover, many medieval films – however fictional in their stories or historical details – nevertheless claim to give an accurate representation of the past. King Arthur (2005) and Robin Hood (2010) are two examples of films that market themselves as showing the ‘untold story of how the man became the legend’, as the tagline for Robin Hood puts it. Historical accuracy is a production value, something that adds credibility to a film. It says as much about cinema as about historical studies that it is the ‘antiquarian history’, the period details – especially armour and weapons, but also costumes, utensils and buildings – that filmmakers and audiences are most concerned with, as opposed to, say, an accurate portrayal of the mentality, human behaviour and world view of the time. Audiences will enjoy a film more if it looks authentic to them, if they can imagine the stories told to have really happened; and especially if they can have this confirmed by experts. However, they will also enjoy a film more if it offers a satisfying artifice with a star adding contemporary or monumental grandeur, beautiful images and exciting narratives – features that draw attention to its filmic nature rather than simulate transparent access to the past. The demand that film be historically accurate often assumes that there can be such a thing as a complete fit between reality and its representation within a filmic or written genre. Cinema to some extent – and only ever to some extent – indulges this fantasy of being a transparent window into the past.29 But there is, of course, no such thing as an absolutely right or wrong representation of the past, only a more or less probable, sophisticated and responsible one. The criteria for that are different in academic writing, in school textbooks, journalism, documentary and fiction films, and arise from the standards of verisimilitude that the genre sets. As will become apparent in the case studies that form the following chapters, there is more to responsibility than accuracy. The balance between the empathic involvement of the audience and the alienating devices that reflect and refract film’s own modes on transmission is a crucial

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criterion for a responsible involvement with the past. Matching the representational strategies to that which is represented – using a visual, collective, achronic film to characterize an age perceived as visual, collective and achronic – can contribute to that. Even films that blatantly attempt to give a manipulated or totalizing representation of the past often achieve the contrary, in part thanks to the fact that most viewers, while happy to suspend disbelief for the duration of the film, will not accord the same status of ‘truth’ to film as to academic representations of the past. The films that most accurately and unbiasedly stick to the verifiable facts about events are not necessarily the most responsible, insofar as they may lay an impossible claim to being a representation of the truth, to showing the events as they happened. For example, the successful German historical films about Hitler’s last days and the Red Army Faction terrorists, Downfall (2005) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) misleadingly suggest by their extremely factual approach that verifiable facts and actions are all that is needed to understand a historical event. A more responsible film might take into account that it is the strength of fiction to bring to the fore less easily certifiable factors, such as Zeitgeist, personality, experiences, moods and psychological motivations. I insist here on the subversive and critical potential of medieval film – partly as a corrective to the dominant understanding of almost all films set in the Middle Ages as conservative. Medieval film emerges as a genre that should not be measured by how close it is to a historical book. Indeed, the genre’s inbuilt self-refractivity often surpasses academic historiography, which is so long established that it no longer feels the need to routinely justify its claims of representing the truth. In any case, passing judgement on films is predominantly the business of journalists and reviewers (and audiences), while analysis and study is the main job of an academic text. While not sitting on the fence, this book, then, hopes to contribute in the first instance to a fuller understanding of medieval film. Part i, ‘Time’s Bow’, deals with the depiction and use of time in medieval film. Time tends to not progress irreversibly, constantly and unstoppably, but is characterized by the co-presence of several moments and by the sense of a short future, which often means that the dead are reanimated and that the heteronormative lifecycles and gender roles are disrupted.

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Part ii, ‘Lethal Letters’, engages with the tendency in medieval film’s aesthetics to define the genre against the written and especially printed word. Film is presented as a departure from the restraints of literature, being able to give more direct access to past worlds. In that, it is believed to be a return – with superior means – to medieval art, which is seen as part of a mentality concerned, above all, with the visual and with face-to-face communication through gestures and facial expressions. In its final part, ‘Human Limits’, Filming the Middle Ages discusses what it means to be human in medieval film. Since Jacob Burckhardt, the individual human agent is seen to be an invention of the Renaissance, while medieval identity was still bound up with a wider collective. Not only the limits between one human and another, but also between human and animal or inanimate object, and between subject and object, are often perceived to have been more permeable in the Middle Ages; and this modern and postmodern challenge to humanism has been worked through in medieval film. The conclusion widens the lens beyond the genre of medieval film to consider the relevance of medievalism to all films, not just to those with a medieval subject-matter. I shall demonstrate the extent to which film theory has claimed cinema as such to be a return to medieval forms of communication. For these theorists – from a wide spectrum of schools and periods of film theory – all film is medieval.

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Time’s Bow

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The Non-linear Time of Medieval Film Faust Destiny

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Medieval Film: A New Understanding of Weimar ‘Expressionism’ If there is one thing we think we know about time, it is that it is linear: it flows from the future via the present into the past, irreversibly, constantly, evenly and unstoppably, in a way that can be measured by clocks and calendars. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that we did not even believe Einstein when he proved the contrary, nor modernist writers, philosophers and filmmakers, who around the same time as Einstein started to imagine what it might feel like if future, present and past were no longer sequentially ordered. The moment became a particular concern in discourses from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology to film, where the now recordable moment became contingent, one in a series of equally important moments.1 Medieval film has played a significant but, so far, totally overlooked role in this modernist, and later postmodern, critique of time. Cinema uses the Middle Ages to imagine alternative, non-linear perceptions of time that prefigure those of the recent past, especially the importance of the moment and a sense of the future as so short that it is perceived as already present. (Or as Camelot [dir. Joshua Logan, 1967] and the Arthurian tradition have it: time becomes a ‘brief shining moment’ that was Camelot, and Arthur a ‘once and future king’.) In postulating such a non-linear sense of time for the Middle Ages, film draws on a historiographical tradition that maintains that medieval people already perceived time in just that way: as moments rather than continuities, and as living with a sense that

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their future was short.2 Just to reiterate: I am not claiming that this is a ‘correct’ view of the Middle Ages; I am simply observing that this perception of the Middle Ages is prevalent in popular as well as academic culture. I shall explain in detail what I mean by the emphasis on the moment and the short future below, but here are a few brief illustrations of the ways in which medieval films typically mess with linear time: In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Niklashausen Journey (1970), for example, the momentary snapshot takes precedence over narrative continuity, and the characters – the preacher Hans Böhm (d. 1476) and his contemporaries as well as 1970s communist activists – hope for a better future that never comes.3 Fassbinder resists linear time by making the medieval world contemporary too, complete with cars, newspapers, machine guns and Black Panthers, thereby refusing communism’s teleological historiography even as he presents Böhm as a communist agitator. Similarly, Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981) follows the fate of a hermaphrodite in five different historical periods (a mythical age, the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1980s), where each period is shown not in the historical past, but more as historical sediment in the present, so that (again) newspapers, leather jackets and the pervasive commodity culture of capitalism are part even of the Middle Ages, as much as apocalyptic prophecies are. Mainstream medieval film likewise revels in introducing modern elements into medieval settings, the most famous example being A Knight’s Tale (dir. Brian Helgeland, 2001) with its brand logos, stadium scoreboards and modern music.4 Medievalism is commonly interpreted as escapism, for example by Klaus Kreimeier, who detects a ‘fear of modernity’ amongst the Weimar Germans, filled with a fantasy of an ideal medieval past.5 Films like Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Faust (1926) with its stunning medievalist set are for him thus prime examples of Weimar’s medievalist escapism: Like through coloured panes of glass the eyes of the architects looked for a vague aim for their yearning in the art of the past centuries and called it ‘Middle Ages’.6

But, as I shall argue, the unmistakable reference of so much Wilhelmine and Weimar cinema to the Middle Ages is an attempt not

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to escape from the challenges of recent modernity, but to meet them, and one of those challenges was the newly problematic nature of time. It may seem surprising that German cinema during its formative period of the Weimar Republic was deeply reliant on medievalism. This medievalist nature of Weimar film has never been spelled out, but it is actually implicit in much of the critical literature on this cinematic period that refers to it as ‘expressionist’, ‘Gothic’ or ‘Romantic’.7 Studying this medievalism in detail will allow us to move beyond Gothicism, Romanticism or expressionism to grasp more precisely what the recourse to historical precedents does for Weimar films. Their foundational role for German cinema – as its constant reference point, its ‘historical imaginary’ until today – also explains some of the persistence of this medievalism in transnational cinema that started out as a marketably ‘German’ interest.8 Medieval films engage with the newly dominant perception of time – as non-linear, with special weight given to the moment rather than to temporal sequence – creatively and productively as opposed to evading the issue by escaping into a fairy-tale fantasy.9 I will analyse how this non-linear temporality works in Kreimeier’s crown witness for escapism, Faust, and then explain in more detail its relationship to narrative in Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921). While all narratives, including filmic ones, are composed of linear elements (cause-and-effect chains) and non-linear elements (moments and the overall whole), particular stories or films can choose to emphasize one or the other; and medieval film usually highlights the moment and its potential. Moreover, in the Middle Ages as depicted on film, linear time in the sense of measurable clock-time is typically placed in tension with the co-presence of past, present and future.10

Heideggerian Time-images: The Co-present Moment in Faust Faust’s shift out of linear historical timelines begins with the film’s very setting both in and outside the Middle Ages which is characteristic of medieval film, and is therefore worth some initial attention. Dr Johann Georg Faust lived from circa 1466 (or 1480) to 1540 or so, but the Historia von Johann D. Faustus, on which the most famous versions of his legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, are based,

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only appeared in 1587. Rather than as medieval, Faust is often interpreted to be the prototypical Renaissance man, prepared to break away from medieval reliance on God and the community in his search for scientific truth; and Faust films are not included in the emerging literature on medieval film. Nor does Murnau’s Faust look medieval to the expert eye. Its design has instead very much what Kreimeier calls an ‘Old German’ (altdeutsch) appearance, which denotes a traditional style more than a specific period, and is characterized chiefly by pre-industrial production – handmade furniture, clothes and books and whitewashed houses with thick walls, tiny windows, tiled ovens and fireplaces are typical attributes. But critics, filmmakers and promotion testify to the fact that Faust to them was very much a medieval person.11 Murnau’s 1926 film explicitly aims to uncover the older versions of the legend in order to reconstruct Faust. The director himself wrote:

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We have taken the old Volksbuch of Dr Faust as our basis and are looking to resurrect from the old legend and from Goethe’s work that legendary figure of the German Middle Ages who had rushed ahead of his own time in so many ways.12

However, this is not a precisely historically situated Middle Ages. Many reviewers and critics oscillate between labelling the setting ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ and ‘Reformation’, sometimes in the same sentence.13 The blurring of myth and reality typical of medieval films is also already evident in Murnau’s claim to be interested in reconstructing the historical man behind the legends, who nevertheless is still a ‘legendary figure’ and the protagonist of a film that calls itself in its title card ‘a German folklegend’. Murnau also states that he was drawn to that time of the German Middle Ages, which is among the most imaginative times of humanity, most criss-crossed by mysteries and shadows, and which has never been revived in film.14

As is typical, Murnau claims not only that the Middle Ages appear mysterious to us, but that they were themselves a period characterized by mystery and imagination, so that reality and legend were presu mably blurred even during Faust’s lifetime.

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But despite this seemingly escapist rhetoric, Faust precisely faces rather than evades 1920s experiences of time, through imagining not escapist alternatives, but historical predecessors. At the beginning of Faust, the apocalyptic riders and the devil Mephisto have been unleashed. Mephisto makes a bet with an archangel: if he can ‘destroy the divine’ in the gifted scholar Faust, the earth will be his. He strikes Faust’s town with the Black Death and then offers Faust miraculous healing powers (and all the world’s power and splendour) for a trial period of a day in return for renouncing God. Faust agrees and heals some townspeople, but they quickly work out that he is in league with the Devil, and stone him. The distraught Faust is about to commit suicide when Mephisto successfully tempts him by offering him youth for the rest of the day. He shows Faust the beauties of the world, but just as Faust is about to sleep with the attractive Duchess of Parma, Mephisto claims that his trial day is out, and Faust decides to extend the pact to eternity. He soon gets bored of a life of hedonism and returns to his hometown, where he falls in love with an innocent young girl, Gretchen. When she lets Faust into her bed, Mephisto alerts her mother, who dies in shock. Mephisto also kills her brother Valentin in a fight over Gretchen’s honour and blames the deed on Faust so that they have to flee. By winter, Gretchen has borne Faust’s baby, but the community refuses to grant the ‘whore’ shelter and the baby freezes to death. As she is about to be executed for this alleged infanticide, Faust finally notices that she is in trouble and asks Mephisto to take him to her. He can only approach her on the funerary pyre, and they kiss one last time. The angel tells Mephisto that one word means that he lost his bet: ‘love’. My first point is that Faust’s representational strategies privilege the moment, and the co-presence of different points in time, over linear temporal sequences in a way that anticipates the ‘time images’ that Gilles Deleuze has observed. Deleuze is adamant that cinema before the Second World War showed only movement in time, while later films like Citizen Kane (1941) can directly represent the modern experience of the flow of time by means of what he calls time-images.15 Drawing on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, he claims that this contemporary experience of time is characterized by the sense that the present always has to be in the process of passing into the past in order to make room for a new present to arrive. Each

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moment has one eternal component that is preserved as the past, and one chronological component that is always passing on; in other words, the past does not follow the present, it co-exists with it in each moment. A ‘crystal’ time image in Deleuze’s sense makes both the past and the present aspects of each moment visible in one frame or sequence. But while the present may be real and the past virtual, they will morph into each other and exchange places, like a photograph coming to life and reality retreating into a photo. Long before the Second World War, this is precisely what happens in the scenes of Faust’s temptation by the devil Mephisto. At the end of his disastrous one-day trial pact with the devil, old Faust is about to kill himself. As he raises a shallow bowl filled with poison, we see from Faust’s point of view a close-up of his hand holding up the bowl, in whose dark reflective surface a young man’s face appears, giving him a ‘come hither’ look by raising his eyes to look straight at the camera and lifting his chin in a way at once flirtatious and challenging (illus. 6). Old Faust asks whether this is the seductive face of death, but Mephisto explains that it is life in the shape of Faust’s own younger self. So the image of the old man’s hand holding the bowl with the young man’s face first of all reveals the past, Faust’s youth, as still present: the eternally preserved past is visible, exceptionally, in the present. But as Deleuze demands of a crystal image, the past now becomes real and the present virtual: the old man is turned into his younger self by magic. Faust drops the bowl in shock, but Mephisto shows him his young face once more in a hand-held, round, somewhat concave mirror, from which the young man again in an almost identical pose looks out coquettishly, and now Faust is so impressed that he begs Mephisto to give him youth. Mephisto obliges with some pyrotechnics and then triumphantly withdraws his cloak to reveal a rejuvenated Faust. But another close-up, this time from the devil’s point of view, shows that past and present Faust have changed places: it is now the image of the old Faust that is reflected (or rather caught) in Mephisto’s magic mirror; the past (youth) has become real and the present (age) virtual (illus. 7). Mephisto’s mirror and the bowl of poison thus figure as visualization tools for the copresence in each moment of past and present, and virtual and real in Deleuze’s sense. But these time-images show not only a Bergsonian present in the process of becoming-past, but also a future. After Faust has seen

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6 Faust (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1926), young Faust (the past) reflected in a bowl of poison.

7 Faust, old Faust (the past) caught in Mephisto’s magic mirror.

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8 Faust, Faust’s destiny revealed in a bowl of poison.

his young face in the bowl of poison, there is another apparition in the bowl, shown in an almost identical close-up from Faust’s perspective: a skull that is immediately legible as the death that awaits him if he drinks the poison (illus. 8). This is Faust’s future, not past, copresent in the same frame as his hand. Deleuze acknowledges that there are time images that show the presence not only of the past, but also of the future, but he never quite manages to explain this in his Bergsonian framework.16 I suggest that this presence of both future and past in each present moment is closer to Heidegger’s than to Bergson’s view of time. Heidegger sees time not as a pre-given essence, but as the experience of a human being who at each moment is ‘always already’ born or thrown into a pre-existing world and ‘always already’ bound to die. An awareness of the fact that one is born and will be dead is essential for creating the impression that time is divisible into past, present and future. This Heideggerian idea of time as future, present and past co-existing and as derived from human experience rather than pre-existing it, challenging the commonsensical perception of time as a linear progression, had recently come to the fore in 1926. It has even been claimed to be

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characteristic of Western Zeitgeist precisely in the year 1926, when Being and Time was written and Faust was made (although similar ideas are of course age-old).17 This sense of time is visualized in the Heideggerian time images of the mirror scenes. Yet Murnau’s film also presents this understanding of time as typical of Faust and the medieval world he lives in: we are confronted with a non-linear, medieval experience of time that is characterized by being an extension between birth and death when past and future are present in each moment rather than linearly ordered. The mirror scenes are likely to be based on medieval and early modern vanitas, danse macabre and ‘death and the maiden’ imagery (just as the film’s landscapes and chiaroscuro are demonstrably modelled on medieval and early modern painting).18 These images represent looking into a mirror as both an opportunity for narcissism (often portrayed as a beautiful youth) and for self-knowledge, for becoming aware of one’s mortality (often depicted as a skull in the mirror). Faust shows both options – the young beauty and the skull – but interprets them as the past and future of Faust that become spectrally and then really present. In representing time as time ‘directly’ rather than as action and movement, Faust resists a certain kind of narrative logic. Murnau’s films (and Weimar cinema in general) have often been observed to invite contemplation of each image over and above narrative coherence.19 Faust’s plot certainly does not easily make logical sense. Much like medieval heroic epics, it is composed of familiar mythical elements – chiefly the pact with the devil signed in blood leading to fantastic adventures; the bet between an angel and a devil; and the seduction and downfall of the innocent girl crystallized in impressive scenes of the devil’s humiliation, of the lovers’ reunion, of the pact being signed or of the tempting spectacles of youth and life. But their connections are not necessarily logical, especially as regards the primary plotline of the wager between Mephisto and the angel, and the ambiguous ending: why would an angel be able to gamble away the earth? And why would we then trust his interpretation that love has saved Faust? Why can Faust die just because in the end he curses his youth that has brought Gretchen so much suffering; could he not live eternally as an old man? The plot makes sense as a mythical struggle between good and evil, between Mephisto’s belief in the corruptibility of humans and the angel’s belief in the human ability to do the right thing, but it does not pay close attention to the connection between the scenes.

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What is unusual about this form of narrative is that it privileges the present, the explanation of a character’s actions through one momentary impulse rather than continuity of personality. For example, Faust’s instantaneous desire for youth, for the beautiful Duchess of Parma and for young Gretchen as soon as he sees them seems quite uncharacteristic of the unworldy, selfless scholar to whom we had been introduced; similarly Gretchen’s instant greedy desire for a necklace with which Mephisto presents her comes as a surprise in the shy and withdrawn girl. Like the time images of Faust’s life, the plot does not offer a smooth succession of past, present and future, even though the sequence of events is entirely chronological. Faust, whose experience of time is given the most weight, turns from old to young by magic, then old again at the end when he curses his youth, then almost immediately young again on the funerary pyre. These shifts cannot even be adequately understood as a sequence of present, past, present and past.20 Faust displays not so much a neat division between conservative, linear, melodramatic narrative and disruption by time-travelling technology, as an emphasis on the moment that pervades narrative and spectacle.

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The Hourglass: Apocalyptic Living and the Short Future in Faust But we can define the non-linear sense of time in Faust even more precisely than by its experimentation with Heideggerian time images that unite past, present and future in each moment, and its plot structures that pay closer attention to momentary impact rather than long-term consistency and that rearrange the chronological sequence of the life-cycle. It is no coincidence that the swapping of Faust’s present and past happens in the face of death – Faust’s intended suicide attempt and his death with Gretchen – as this is when the future open to experience is shortest. The film’s depiction of time is an apocalyptic one in the sense of an expectation of a short future, which encapsulates both Heidegger’s view of being-towards-death as an essential contemporary condition and the common stereotype that medieval people believed that the world would end soon. The future is envisaged as so short that it is perceived as already part of the present. The film opens with an apocalyptic scenario that suggests

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futurity despite the medieval topic, and that is itself not ordered into a clear causal sequence: a title card states that the gates of darkness have been opened, followed by images of three horsemen of the apocalypse riding out, of an angel quizzing Mephisto about why he haunts the earth and then of Mephisto gambling for the earth and unleashing an expectation of the end of the world in Faust’s town by striking it with a catastrophic plague. Encapsulating this apocalyptic backdrop, the concept of time dominating Faust is best embodied by the hourglass, which plays a prominent role in Murnau’s film, especially during the first trial pact, which Mephisto measures out with his hourglass. As opposed to the clocks and calendars that are the principal modern tool of time-keeping, an hourglass measures time in the sense of a short duration, but cannot relate this span to a wider chronology. Unlike the clock, it can only tell time absolutely (how much time has passed since it was last turned), not relatively (what time it is in relation to the day as a whole). Because the amount of sand is visibly limited and lasts for hours rather than months or years, it gives the sense of a finitude and brevity of time; as well as of the fact that the time span measured is embedded in a much wider magnitude. It carries with it at each moment an expectation of the end of the time measured by it, a deadline. This is a view of time often described as typical of the Middle Ages.21 It is again borrowed from medieval and early modern vanitas and memento mori iconography and perhaps also from the Historia of Dr Faustus, where the hourglass frequently serves as a reminder of the brevity of life.22 But it is also a very 1920s conception of time: if the hourglass could be said to stand for human life, this is how Heidegger understands time: any moment, any grain of sand passing through the neck, is always part of an amount that extends forwards and backwards. It has always already begun and is always already destined to run out, and also finds itself thrown into a pre-existing mass of time, which continues beyond its parameters. This is visualized in Faust, where the hourglass is always seen side-on, with a rounded cone at the bottom (the past, filled with the sand that has already passed through it), an inverted rounded cone at the top (the future) and a narrow middle in which they converge (the present, see illus. 9). The fact that it is encased in an octagonal wooden holder with late-Gothic columns reminiscent of a church emphasizes that the limited time it keeps is enclosed by Christian belief, and surrounded by eternity. Unlike

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Bergson’s model of time, which depicts only the past as a cone narrowing into the present, the hourglass balances it with a representation of the future. The hourglass’s function as an embodiment of the brevity of time is apparent even in the way in which it enters and exits the film at the beginning and end of the pact. Unusually for Faust, it ‘magically’ appears and disappears not through a lap-dissolve, where we see two images from different points in time superimposed in one frame, but through editing: Mephisto raises his arm and in the next frame already holds the hourglass. This is not an excess of time as in a lap-dissolve, but a lack of time, where several points in the recorded time have been edited out. The sense that time is short captures precisely what the hourglass itself shows, and what is presented as the key feature of the filmic world’s experience of time. Although an hourglass might seem to be a more natural, less rushed way of relating to time, it works mainly as a threat in Faust. The one day measured by the sand is an apocalyptic time: a short period during which Faust’s soul is in peril before he has to decide between good and evil. In this way, it is no more than a dramatic condensation of the human condition in the medieval Christian world view. But at the same time, it encapsulates the human condition according to Heidegger, for whom a human being has to be aware of the fact that their days are numbered in order to live authentically. Mephisto tempts Faust with what might seem like a suspension of the short future – the return to youth – but, through the hourglass, paradoxically only makes Faust, and the viewer, more aware of it. Ascribing the awareness of the limitedness of life to the Devil is a typically medieval way of thinking about Heidegger’s condition. Or, in other words, making the Faust myth about being-towards-death is a characteristically contemporary way of casting it. Even when the hourglass is not visible, in the later stages of the pact, Mephisto becomes its embodiment. Not only is he the only character who handles the hourglass and imposes deadlines on Faust, but he also begins to look like an hourglass himself, in a film that carefully composes the formal arrangement of each shot. Emil Jannings’s eyebrows, nose and upper lip creases are often made-up, lit and filmed in such a way that they resemble an hourglass shape (illus. 9). Insofar as he embodies, like an hourglass, a sense of the short future already bearing down on the present, it is fitting that he is also visible in Faust’s

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9 Faust, Emil Jannings’s face as an hourglass.

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10 Faust, old Faust (the past) approaches young Faust.

time images. He is briefly shown in a lap-dissolve behind Faust’s young face in the bowl. A similar image occurs for a longer duration when Faust is tempted to extend the pact to eternity (illus. 10). Super imposed on the Duchess of Parma’s bed curtains, the old Faust (by now the past) walks from the background towards the camera, while the young one (the present) recoils in disgust beneath him and Mephisto stands to one side, holding the hourglass of the limited future next to his face. The brevity of the future, as well as the co-presence of past, present and future in each moment, works to compress time and unhinge its linear progression.

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The Wreath: Circular Time and Experience in Faust Faust’s sense of the future as short and of the future together with the past being present in each moment is thrown into even sharper relief when contrasted with the circular sense of time associated with Gretchen’s town. When Faust has extended his pact, he experiences eternity, not as an absence of time, but as a boring weight of unlimited time, a repetition of the same – one orgy, gamble, erotic encounter after another. This lack of change throws him into a melancholy state, from which he seeks relief by regressing into his personal past, returning to his home town. This town with its picturesque little houses, narrow alleys and large greens looks very different from the plague-ridden town dominated by wide squares, staircases and archways where the old Faust lived – perhaps it is the place where he was born, or an idealized version of his home. When he enters it with Mephisto during an Easter procession to the church, he has to ask what the special occasion is and can then re-enter time, but not in the sense of historical, linear time, simply in the sense of a liturgical cycle.23 Faust does not ask for a date or even year, only for the feast day; he is excited to note that it is ‘as if life always stands still: everything is still how it used to be’. The time of this small town to him is presented as a prelapsarian Eden without change, progress or death. While Faust in his eternal youth had been bored by repetition, the innocent townsfolk, seemingly untouched by death, unselfconsciously enjoy it. If Faust experienced time mainly as that of an hourglass, Gretchen’s town perceives it as a cycle, symbolized by the wreath that Gretchen and the children wind in several scenes from flowers, twigs and straw. The wreath is at first that of the virgin and children, assembled from flowers in an Edenic spring. The children playfully use it as a mock-bridal wreath for Gretchen and Faust to mark the passing of another stage of the lifecycle. But it turns out that there is death and change in this town of cyclical time, too, partly – but not exclusively – induced by Faust and Mephisto: through seducing Gretchen, Faust brings about the death of her brother Valentin and her mother that evening, and of Gretchen and her baby by winter; and his own time begins to run out, too, despite his eternal youth. He works against the clock in order to escape after Valentin’s murder and later as he tries to reach Gretchen before she is burned, and ends up dying with her. In her dungeon, Gretchen now winds a

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wreath from straw that looks more like a crown of thorns than a flower garland. One way of reading Faust’s attempt to escape his short future that ends with him inflicting a short future on others is as an allegory of our relationship to the Middle Ages. Faust in this reading would be a ‘modern’ character, whose experience of time was that of a struggle against a relentlessly forward-moving linear time, against a deadline, trying to escape it by moving into the static medieval time of the liturgical and seasonal cycle, where he hopes to be able to stay eternally young. But, by entering this world, he alters it by bringing his sense of a finite future into it. This would find its analogy in modern viewers attempting to recapture a medieval, cyclical sense of time, but altering this prelapsarian world through merely accessing it, as we cannot imagine the Middle Ages without being aware that it is past.24 But the film complicates this reading of modern Faust as corrupting medieval innocent, natural time by presenting Faust’s and the plague-torn townspeople’s own sense of a short future implied in each moment as not only modern, but typically medieval, too. The apocalyptic time of the town during the plague is as much part of the stereotypical view of the Middle Ages as the cyclical, idyllic time of Gretchen’s town is; indeed, even in the plot, the two towns may be one and the same. More than as allegory, I suggest, the film works as experience. While allegorical readings do not quite tally, it offers not only interpretative but also empathetic possibilities to understand these non-linear senses of time. This quality of experiencing different points in time as well as different historical perceptions of time is presented as a unique ability of film, in contrast to the more limited, more imaginary options of medieval myth to do so. Many perceptive critics have presumed that Mephisto can time-travel.25 But, in fact, Mephisto cannot time-travel; he can neither speed time up, slow it down nor jump to different points in time. His inability to manipulate time is clearest when he cannot accelerate Gretchen’s funeral procession to prevent Faust from getting there in time and overcoming his pact by the power of love, nor slow time down or even just get Faust there in an instant in order to meet his demands: they have to travel on his steed down from their location above the clouds. That he is bound by time is a prime condition for the pact to work; otherwise Mephisto could

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foresee and prevent the pact’s failure, or turn back time to corrupt Faust, for example, by giving him a horrible childhood; or Faust could rightfully demand that his ‘servant’ turn back time in order to erase the murder of Valentin, the death of the baby or Gretchen’s verdict. Mephisto can only manipulate the spatial location of his own body by ‘beaming’ himself very quickly across space, create spectral images of apparitions (the Duchess’ naked body, the exotic servants, Faust’s faces) and, with considerable effort, change Faust’s body to look and feel younger, and ride or fly quickly through space. But none of their trips extend into the past or future. Mephisto’s hands are showcased in the time images, but they can only do what the hands in the fairground shadow-play at the beginning of the film can do and what hands in pre-industrial production can do: manipulate bodies and appearances, manipulate the tools for measuring time but not time itself. But Murnau – often dubbed the ‘Raphael without hands’, the painter whose medium is perceived as technological not material – can do what Mephisto cannot. Like all historical film, Faust creates the illusion that the audience can time-travel into the past, recapturing the sixteenth-century past as if it is still unfolding. We are entering an inverse future perfect, a point in the past whose future is short and apocalyptic. So if the film is ambiguous in its attitude to Meph isto’s tricks – presenting them with obvious enjoyment in plentiful abundance, but also as pedestrian and, in plot terms, devilish – it is not because film is fascinated with them underneath its conventional narrative, as Frances Guerin suggests, but because it can do so much better. Through encouraging empathy with the characters, especially Faust, by a sympathetic portrayal, subjective shots and emotional scenes, it allows us to experience non-linear time from his position: his desperation at the early deaths of the townspeople, his awareness that he can end his own life, his own chance to be young again, his moments full of possibilities, his disappointment at eternity, his fantasy of cyclical time. Moreover, the co-presence of past, future and present in each moment is emulated in the aesthetic of the film that emphasizes each image rather than quick editing and narrative continuity. But the film not only encourages us to experience alternative time, but also to reflect on this experience.26 As has often been observed, the film tricks that show Faust’s ages and Mephisto’s magic look impressive as well as drawing attention to their nature as

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tricks – the team that created Nosferatu five years earlier could have been much more subtle if it had wanted to.27 The film does not let us forget that we are watching an artifice, while also stimulating our emotional involvement and enjoyment of experiencing non-linear time.

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Potent Moments in Destiny Destiny is one of the early collaborations of Fritz Lang as director and Thea von Harbou as scriptwriter, both of whom had a strong interest in medieval film settings.28 Time here is also non-linear, with an emphasis on the moment, and I shall now show how this changes the function of the film narrative. Destiny’s setting is again not medieval in an academic sense, but the same slightly fantastical vague ‘Old German’ past that, as we know from Faust, was used to depict the Middle Ages and is often understood to be medieval by reviewers and audiences.29 The frame narrative takes place in an archetypal small town where pre-modernity survives into modernity (this is probably not a village, as has been claimed, as it is large enough to have a mayor, a council, a pharmacy, a school, a hospital, an inn and a notary).30 No year or date is given for the setting; the English inter-titles specify the location as ‘a little town lost in the past’; the mise-en-scène is characterized by handmade wooden furniture and clothes, and transport by horse-drawn coach. Within this frame narrative, there are four embedded tales taking place in equally unspecific, fantastical medievalizing settings: in the realm of Death, which looks like a Gothic cathedral with columns and arches filled with candles that could belong to any time from the thirteenth century onwards; in an Orientalist Arabian Nights fantasy; in an Italian city during a carnival, with people in Renaissance costumes, that looks closest to a historical pre-modern town but also straight out of a Shakespeare play; and finally in a China far removed from realism in which magic is possible diegetically, that is, within the plot and the rules of the story-world. Destiny tells the story of a young woman who arrives with her fiancé in a small town, where an uncanny stranger, Death personified, takes him away. The woman desperately looks for him, but cannot get into Death’s plot of land, surrounded by an insurmountable wall. But when she tries to poison herself in the local pharmacy, the

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wall opens to lead her into a Gothic cathedral of candles, each of which represents a human life. Death takes pity and strikes a deal with her. If she can save one of three people whose lives are about to flicker out, he will return her lover to her. In three embedded tales, we see the woman transformed into first an Oriental princess, then an Italian noblewoman and finally a Chinese magician’s daughter. In each case, after a few frantic hours, she fails to save her lover (played by the same actor as her fiancé in the frame narrative, Walter Janssen) from a different malignant older man: her brother, her betrothed and the Chinese emperor. Death gives the woman one last chance: if she can within one hour find someone willing to give her their life before it has run its course, he will return her lover. A cut back to the pharmacy shows the cup of poison being knocked away from the maiden’s lips, and she now desperately searches for someone to give up their life, but in vain. When she manages to rescue a baby from a fire, rather than give it to Death as a substitute for her lover’s life, she returns it to its mother, and perishes herself. Both lovers are reunited in the realm of death. The film pivots around one moment, which in its twisted outcome makes immediately clear that moments are more important here than long-term causal sequence: the moment when the maiden lifts a poisonous drink to her lips. Does she drink and die, or not drink and stay alive? Destiny gives a paradoxical answer: both. Just as the cup reaches the woman’s mouth, the image is lap-dissolved into one of her standing outside the wall of Death’s realm with her hand in front of her mouth (illus. 11–13). The fact that she can now get inside, talk to Death and strike the deal with him clearly suggests that she has drunk and died. But after the embedded narratives, a cut back to the town shows the clock still striking eleven and the nightwatchman continuing his chant (in inter-titles) that had been interrupted, suggesting that no time has passed here. The maiden is still just about to tilt the glass and the apothecary knocks her drink from her mouth (illus. 14). So we are shown that she has not drunk, and not died. Indeed, although it initially looked as if she had drunk – and many viewers have interpreted the scene as such – frame-byframe analysis reveals that the film does not in fact show it to have happened, and instead cuts to the realm of death before the woman can start drinking. So we are left to presume that she has not drunk and not died after all. And yet, crucially, she must have drunk and

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11 Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921), the woman lifting the cup of poison.

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12 Destiny, the lap-dissolve.

13 Destiny, the woman appearing outside Death’s realm.

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14 Destiny, the alternative outcome: the apothecary knocks her drink away.

died in order to have done the deal with Death that now sends her searching to deliver a substitute life within the hour. That the girl went into the realm of Death and made a deal with him cannot be dismissed as her fantasy or a dream either, because within the diegesis (the fictional world of the plot), Death is real and continues to interact with the maiden according to the deal they struck.31 So, paradoxically, she has to have died before she can be saved from suicide. In other words, the potential of each moment is emphasized to the extent of combining two mutually exclusive potential outcomes for one moment. Although this is a logical impossibility, the narrative still makes sense because it works on the basis of short-term logic rather than long-term consistency. Within each sequence, one act or image leads to the next quite plausibly, without necessarily adding up to a psychologically motivated wider whole. The apothecary knocking over the poison and the woman thus staying alive follows a standard cause-and-effect chain, as does her initial drinking and therefore dying; but the two scenes do not fit together. Time still follows a linear sequence, but only in the short term – if we look at the narrative as a whole, time has split into two potential outcomes that cannot be ordered into either a fork indicating simultaneity or into a straight line indicating sequentiality. Time has become non-linear. The potentiality of the moment, the trying out of different possibilities of reacting to the same situation, is also explored in the embedded tales, adding further layers of time. In each embedded story, the maiden has to save her fiancé from being killed by a tyrannical older man who wants the girl for himself, once by trying to hide him

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(from the caliph), once by trying to kill his enemy (in Italy), once by fleeing with him (in China) and once by negotiating with Death and sacrificing herself. Again, the temporal succession is unhinged – these tales could be perceived as happening both simultaneously and consecutively with each other and with the frame narrative. Instead of reaching into periods that are clearly historical, as some scholars believe, each of the tales is set in the same vague semi-fantastical time as which the pre-modern is often represented, and in which the framing narrative also takes place. Like Mephisto, then, Death cannot time-travel. He transposes the maiden not into different times but into different places, or rather, narratives (each of the episodes is called ‘the story of the first/second/third light’). The three stories are set up as happening over the course of a day or two and end during the night. While we initially experience the first story as following the death of the girl in the frame narrative, the return of the parallel moment of death – in the second story even precisely given at 10pm – suggests that they might have taken place simultaneously, with time having been rewound by a few hours. The fact that at the end of each tale, the candle that had previously been a small stump has burned down and flickered out contradicts this by suggesting that time has passed in the frame narrative. Similarly, while the days of the embedded tales first seem to be compressed into a few minutes of film, the return to the small town of the frame narrative makes them uncannily appear as having in fact been expanded from the moment of drinking. The cathedral of candles thus offers less the possibility of time-travel into the distant past than of experiencing the different potentials of each moment. But the relationship between moment and narrative progression is more complex in this film than a simple contrast. Narrative – filmic or otherwise – is usually taken to fix time into a steady, linear flow by connecting moments into a chain of cause and effect. But actually, every narrative is in itself of at least a three-layered temporality consisting of moments, sequentiality and an intelligible whole, as Paul Ricoeur observes.32 In order for narrative to work conventionally, it must first be told as a process that is still unfolding, a series of moments that could develop in different directions, secondly be a causal chain of events, and finally also be a finite whole that can be summarized. Even in the simplest narrative, the moments, the linear chain of cause-and-effect and the tale as a whole stand in a temporal

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tension with each other: the moments suggest an open future; the story links them into a teleology; and the complete tale ties each moment into a coherent whole of time that is already known. Tom Gunning, in his powerful interpretation of Lang’s films, contrasts ‘allegorical moments’ (the maiden’s visions that foreshadow death and reveal the being-towards-death of human life) with the linear narrative of what he calls a ‘destiny-machine’: the sense of an inevitable, automatic unfolding of linear time that is imagined as a modern machine, typically as clockwork.33 But I suggest that even these moments do not stand outside the narrative chain, do not pause time, but are connected to the narrative in a short-term logic. For example, the allegorical moment when the maiden sees her first vision of death at the inn where she and her lover have just arrived – a beer glass turning into an hourglass through lap-dissolve, with the shadow of Death’s skeletal walking stick (illus. 15) – sets in motion the chain that sees her startled and breaking the special love cup they have been trying to drink from, going into the kitchen to clean herself up and get something to clear the shards on the table, allowing her lover to disappear with the stranger who turns out to be Death. Like the hourglass in Faust, it reveals a sense of a short future more than a stopping of time. The other two moments described by Gunning – when the woman sees the empty chair at the inn as an emblem of death, and when she notices the dead walking through the wall into the realm of dead – likewise further the narrative by provoking her to start her search for him, respectively around the town and behind the wall. So the allegorical moments not only resist, but also contribute

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15 Destiny, a beer glass turns into an hourglass.

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to narrative progression. This is not a case of non-linear moments that oppose linear time, but of a film that mixes linear and non-linear elements so that the entire narrative can no longer be described as linear. What the film emphasizes rather than allegorically pauses is the potential of each moment, its different possible futures. In Destiny, the moment is not only more important than the chain of cause and effect, but also more important than the third element of narratives: the coherent whole of the story that can be summarized in what Ricoeur calls a ‘message’ or ‘point’; the fact that once the story exists as a story (that is, with an end that is already present when it begins to be told), the course of events is predetermined. This element plays a subordinate role, as is usually the case in medieval film: the film works hard to keep up viewers’ hopes that the maiden can beat death for once if the film is fantastical enough. Although it is likely that the outcome in each of the embedded tales is the failure of the girl to save her lover – especially if we take the tales to be set in the past, where the outcome is already known – the film encourages viewers to get caught up in the suspense of what might happen next, by staging action-laden plots with deadlines. Moreover, in order for Death’s deal with the maiden to work, there has to be genuine potential for the girl to save her lover in each of the tales and thereby in the frame narrative. Crucially, the end leaves it open as to whether or not the woman has actually won her deal with Death: she decides to save a baby from a burning hospital rather than hand it to Death as a substitute life, but sacrifices herself; as in Faust, it is unclear whether the lovers – shown walking off up a hill – are united in life or death, and thus whether the linear chain that always leads to death has been interrupted for once, or not. As the viewers’ and critics’ disagreement over the interpretation of the ending shows, Destiny frustrates expectations of a coherent ‘point’. This narrative structure that emphasizes non-linear moments rather than its ‘point’ or causal coherence is precisely the modern experience of momentary intensity over long-term consistency that also characterizes modernist narrative. But through the setting, it is here presented as typically pre-modern, too. The cathedral of candles, perhaps the most clearly medieval-looking location of the film, at the same time transmits the ‘peculiarly modern’ sense of a switchboard that connects different places, as Gunning observes.34 Instead of seeing all history as one, the hall of candles transmits first and

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foremost the sense that a moment encompasses a multitude of possible futures. The non-linear narrative time of the film, moreover, mimics the emphasis of pre-modern epics and fairy tales on the moment rather than on the ‘point’ or causal sequence. Heroic epics, such as the Song of the Nibelungs that Lang and Harbou made into a film three years later, work precisely through impressive individual scenes rather than a coherent overall plotline. Fairy tales such as the Grimm’s Godfather Death, the sixteenth-century folktale that inspired the hall of candles in Destiny, are similarly characterized by a ‘dream-like’, short-term logic.

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Phenomenological vs Linear, Measurable Time in Destiny The tension between linear narrative on the one hand and non-linear moments and the ‘point’ of the story as a whole on the other percolates into the diegetic world, too: in the plot, linear time also clashes with a view of time as a whole, of the co-presence of past, present and future. This conflict has often been used to characterize modern understandings of time: the tension between the increasing conception of time as a measurable commodity – set in contrast to a less rigid, pre-industrial sense of time – and the recent phenomenological perception of time as an indivisible whole of past, present and future. Cinema partakes in this tension as, on the one hand, it uses time as a measurable commodity to sell 90-minute slots of entertainment, and on the other, it can transport a non-linear view of time and an illusion of reanimating the past that encourages a holistic sense of time. This conflict is staged in Destiny, too, but again portrayed as characteristic of its pre-modern setting as much as of modernity. In the small town of the plot, there does seem to be a unity of past, present and future, with the cyclical rather than progressing time usually attributed to the Middle Ages: little seems to change from one hour to the next – all is well, the night-watchman announces every hour, despite the young man’s disappearance and later a major fire. The dignitaries meet ‘every night’ to gossip; and the individual life span is extended by the fact that the inter-titles and camera positions present some of the action from the perspective of an ‘ancient figurine’ at the inn and of the old pharmacy that regards its owner as part of itself. This is not a town that perceives a break between its past and

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16 Destiny, the clock tower off the main square.

present, nor expects the future to be any different. But even in this stereotypically static Middle Ages, time is to an extent a measurable commodity. The main square features a clock tower (illus. 16), and the close-ups of the clock striking together with a night-watchman announcing the hour forms a major part of what the film shows us about this town. The commodity of time is even sellable (in the sense of usage rights over time) when the town council leases land to the stranger for 99 years. Likewise, the townspeople hold on to time as if it were a commodity when everyone whom the maiden asks to sacrifice their life for her lover says they will give up ‘not one day, not one hour, not one breath’. Interestingly, not even Death stands outside this tension between measurable and non-linear time. Personified Death of course epitomizes Heidegger’s view of a lifespan as always born and always mortal, and is unlikely to lose sight of this unity of past, present and future. His realm is not so much eternal as tied to human time by the candles, each of which burns in the ‘real time’ of a life in the human world. It seems to exist on earth, as part of the human world, merely spatially separated (and even that only imperfectly so, as the wall is penetrable to the maiden and she can also see the dead wandering in the world of the living). Death also sees time as a measurable commodity both when he counts out the coins he pays for the 99-year right to use the land and when he offers to trade the time left in someone’s lifespan for the young man’s life. This conception of Death as a worldly, historical person brings us back to narrative: while many stories (in Benjamin’s novelistic mode of storytelling) deploy death to give a life

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meaning and to offer closure, the lover’s death here precisely does not turn his life into a meaningful tale, but instead seems reversible and undoable. While there are universalizing elements in this film – the generic roles rather than individual names, the obviously allegorical rather than realistic modes of storytelling, the anonymous settings – Death is primarily treated as a unique, historical person. It is not so much that Death in Destiny allows a satisfying closure to narrative, but rather that it is a historical event that highlights the transitory nature of life. So, the time of Destiny’s and Faust’s plot structure, as well as their diegetic time, is typical of medieval film insofar as it is non-linear: linear cause-and-effect chains, overall summary and the moment stand in productive tension with each other, with the emphasis on the potentiality of the moment, while cause-and-effect chains tend to be short and the overall ‘summary’ of the film remains open. The time of the diegesis is likewise non-linear, which does not mean that there is no linear time, but that it stands in tension with the cyclical time of a largely static town: however relentlessly the hand on the clock in Destiny moves forward, it only ever describes a circle. As is typical of medieval film, this sense of time as non-linear is characteristic of the 1920s, but in Destiny and Faust is also attributed to a fantastical Middle Ages.

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The Medieval Dead Reanimated

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Golem Hard to Be a God Waxworks The Seventh Seal Siegfried

‘Medieval’ is often used as a by-word for brutality, torture and violence, as in the infamous American threat to ‘get medieval on your ass’, brought to international attention in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994); and medieval films abound with battles, brawls, dungeons and death. Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007), for example, revolves around three attacks by a monster on the Danish royal settlement in 507 ad, fights whose participants are slaughtered, crushed, ripped apart and even eaten en masse. But scarily, the dead return. The humans try to forget and burn them as quickly as possible, but this does not prevent them from coming back. Although Beowulf had maimed and wounded the monster so badly that it could barely drag itself away to die, it refuses to stay dead and forgotten. It breaks back into the hall and wreaks havoc among the unsuspecting Danes. (The logical explanation for this seeming reanimation is that there is not one, but two monsters, mother and son; and it is the mother who now returns to avenge her son upon Beowulf.) Such a representation of the dead as – to some extent – reanimated and encroaching upon the living is typical of medieval film. One reason why Beowulf and many other medieval films raise the issue of the dead is to explore the practical, ethical and affective consequences of the genre’s conception of time as non-linear, as analysed in the previous chapter: if past and future are seen as co-present, then the past dead and one’s own future death would also be co-present, and thus have much stronger affective relevance. Just as medieval film oscillates between linear and non-linear time in a way that makes it impossible to describe its conception of time as a whole as linear, so

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it oscillates between depicting the dead as present and as absent, which makes it impossible to assign the dead purely to the past or future and thus gives them some co-presence, which is often depicted as physical presence. In historiography, haunting has become a dominant, even clichéd metaphor for the relationship between present and past.1 In medieval film reanimation, rather than haunting, is used to depict the presence of the dead and its affective consequences. The dead return not so much as immaterial ghosts but as animated, solid or at least visible bodies. In the magical realist mode of many medieval films, the reality of the dead and of death is visualized on the diegesis through magically reanimated corpses or statues or through personifications of Death. But other reanimations are more realistic in that they happen in the imagination or turn out to have natural causes, like that of the monster’s return in otherwise fantasy-dominated Beowulf. Another example is Crusade in Jeans (dir. Ben Sombogaart, 2006), in which a boy is catapulted from the future into the year 1212 by accident and manages to reanimate a child by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to the medieval onlookers’ astonishment. Just as it is difficult to imagine a sustained presence of the past, however, these films will more often than not shy away from showing the dead of the past as remaining alive in the long term. Beowulf lets the monster return from the dead only to give a reassuring logical explanation; then repeats the whole process with a third monster and leaves the ending wide open. Conventionally, the destabilizing tension between linear and nonlinear time that characterizes medieval film is even more clearly resolved in favour of the former: the dead are shown to be temporarily present, but to disappear again in time for the end of the film. Alongside reanimation, a second frequently used visualization of the presence of the dead is that they physically approach the living, often in the direction of the camera and sometimes even stepping outside the diegesis. In the commonsensical concept of time as progressing in a linear and irreversible fashion, people and events seem less significant and have less power to affect us emotionally if they lived or took place a long time ago. The past, understood as severed and safely removed from the present, can gradually be forgotten and ‘put in perspective’; and the dead, who are consigned to the past and referred to in the past tense, recede into the distance. The dead in medieval film reverse the usual movement of retreating into the past.

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17 Tristan + Isolde (Kevin Reynolds, 2006), ancient Roman couple looking back at the present.

The encroachment of the dead is, in most cases, only shown up to a point: the dead approach the living, but they are either not really dead or never quite reach the living – that would represent a full collapse of past and present too horrible or unthinkable to depict and understand. Sometimes, this approach can be a mere appellative gaze into the camera, such as that of a Roman couple painted on the wall of Tristan and Isolde’s secret meeting place, an ancient Roman bridge, in Tristan + Isolde (dir. Kevin Reynolds, 2006, illus. 17). The couple stare at the living, both within and without the diegesis, and offer a screen for projecting wishes about a lost paradise, but they never quite come alive. Beowulf’s monsters often fly or run, open-jawed, all the way into the camera, but only when the audience knows them not to be dead. This chapter shall explore both the reanimation and the approach of the dead, with Golem and Waxworks as main examples.2

The Animated Dead of the Past Strike Back: Golem Golem: How He Came into the World (dir. Paul Wegener, 1920) allegorically reflects on modernity’s relationship to the medieval dead. It shows the ancient, pre-medieval dead being reanimated and approach ing the living in the Middle Ages in the shape of a clay figure and a moving spectral image, to suggest that as the ancient dead were to medieval people, so the medieval dead are to modern people. The

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setting in the Jewish ghetto and the Holy Roman Emperor’s court in Prague around 1600 is understood again as medieval by the filmmakers and most critics.3 As in most medieval films, the plot does not work through sustained causal logic and psychological consist ency, but is here propelled by the short-term logic of several crises demanding immediate resolution. The film opens with Rabbi Löw who, on the basis of his astrological observations, predicts misfortune for the Jewish community of Prague. To protect it, he creates a massive clay figure, the Golem, following ancient instructions and using an ancient model. He animates the Golem with the magic word aemeth (Hebrew for ‘truth’) divulged by a demon and contained in a capsule on the Golem’s chest. The Rabbi’s prediction of doom soon comes true when the emperor sends a message that all Jews are to be expelled from the ghetto. At a celebration at court, to which Löw manages to get himself invited as a magician and entertainer, he presents the Golem and then makes moving pictures of the patriarchs appear on the wall. However, when the courtiers violate his demand that no one speak a word or laugh, the ceiling of the great hall begins to fall down. The emperor offers to revoke the decree of expulsion if the Rabbi can save him, and Löw makes the Golem hold up the ceiling and save everyone’s lives. But, upon their return to the ghetto, the Golem stops following orders. Meanwhile, the Rabbi’s nubile daughter Mirjam has spent the night with the emperor’s messenger, Florian. The Rabbi’s jealous assistant orders the Golem to chase away Florian, but the clay figure is by now out of control and not only throws Florian from a tower, but also abducts Mirjam and starts a fire that quickly spreads through the ghetto. The Rabbi manages to extinguish the fire by magic and finds Mirjam safe. The Golem is stopped outside the ghetto’s gates when a Christian child accidentally disables the capsule. In the end, in one day, the Jewish community has been saved from three concrete dangers – the decree, the fire and the Golem. Most of the existing interpretations of Golem have focused on its portrayal of the medieval ghetto’s threatened status within the Christian empire as an allegory of the ‘Jewish question’ in 1920s Germany, and rightly criticized the film’s anti-Semitic clichés of the dark, mysterious and old-fashioned ghetto underpinning a superficially sympathetic narrative from the Jews’ point of view.4 Medievalism is in fact disturbingly often combined with anti-Semitism in

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films, especially when Jews are presented as more old-fashioned and archaic than the more modern gentiles.5 But I suggest the temporality involved in Golem is more complex than an analogy between 1600 and 1920. Instead, Golem depicts the relationship of the medieval city to its own ancient dead as an image of our relationship to the medieval dead. It shows the distant dead as reanimated and approaching in the plot, but makes clear that such a visualization of the co-presence of the dead can only ever be temporary and has to be balanced by a linear view of time where the dead become inanimate and recede into the past again. Although Golem claims quasi-historical status as ‘pictures after an old chronicle’ centring on the historical person Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel (d. 1609), it is based on a legend and set in a dream-like, marvellous world featuring fanciful architecture and costumes.6 This magical realism was intended and widely understood to give an impression of the Middle Ages that may not be superficially realistic, but that captures the spirit of the Middle Ages. Leading Weimar film and theatre critic Herbert Ihering, for instance, observes admiringly that ‘Golem: How He Came into the World is the first film that overcomes the history [Historie] of the Middle Ages and presents its atmosphere’.7 This marvellous stance allows the reanimation of the dead to be literally shown in the plot. Wegener often commented that he specifically chose the Golem material and similar stories because he believed that it was the special potential of film to show such marvellous things not normally visible.8 What the film makes visible is the presence of the dead. The plot centres on the reanimation of the Golem, who is portrayed as an embodiment of all the ancient dead, rather than as an artificial construction or an individual dead person. Although the Golem is formed of clay, he has the taut, rigid features of an embalmed corpse or mummy, with his distinctive clay headpiece, wide chest, stiff legs, heavy boots and slightly larger-than-life size giving him the contours of an upright ancient Egyptian sarcophagus; when he is first brought up into the Rabbi’s house from the underground chamber in order to be reanimated, he is even wrapped in strips of cloth (illus. 18). The inter-titles, too, consistently call him ‘dead’ rather than manufactured, and refer to the magical process as one of ‘bringing him to life’.9 A page from one of Löw’s manuscripts informs us that the Golem figure dates from ancient Greece, and another shows how to

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18 Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920), the Golem looking like a mummy.

recreate it. (The Rabbi has another clay figure in his basement, but it is unclear whether this is an old figure whose clay he reuses, or whose shape he recreates. In any case, if not the material, then at least the form is ancient.) While God made Adam from inanimate clay and animated him, the Golem had already been animate before and is now reanimated from the ‘dead’. That the Hebrew word ‘golem’ is sometimes used to refer to Adam’s body before God animates it increases the impression that the Golem is Adam’s dark counterpart, the ancestor not of all humankind, but of all human dead.10 While the Golem is the main example of the reanimated dead in this film, other ancient characters are animated, too, even if only as optical illusions. This occurs in an extraordinary scene when the Rabbi is invited to entertain the emperor’s court with his magic tricks. After showing off the Golem, Löw agrees to educate the emperor with his moving picture show, but stipulates like a strict teacher that nobody may interrupt: Let me show you the patriarchs, mighty emperor, so that you recognize our people better. But my condition for this is: nobody may speak a word or laugh, otherwise a terrible disaster might occur.

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19 Golem, a march in Löw’s film-within-the-film.

With some expressive gestures and smoke, Löw superimposes onto a Gothic wall a long shot of two processions of people slowly marching along a bleak incline from left to right (illus. 19). In the foreground, first a group of a young couple with a donkey, a boy and two older men go past. But then, a single man steps out of the line of our ancestors, and, as we shall see, out of linear time, when he walks into the frame from the left and then towards the camera (illus. 20). He is identified via inter-title as ‘Ahasver, the eternal Jew’. Like the Golem, these spectral animations are not so much of dead individuals as of ‘our’ ancient dead ancestors in general. It is unclear whether they are meant to depict the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), as the Rabbi had promised; the archetypal biblical couple with a donkey, Mary and Joseph; Moses and the exodus, as many interpreters believe; Ahasver, as the inter-title announces; and/or a line of our ancestors stretching back through linear time.11 Ahasver is, in any case, an undead figure, an invention of medieval anti-Semitic legend who in punishment for not having helped Christ during his passion is condemned to eternally wander the earth, and thus in himself bridges different historical and mythical times and embodies all Jews.

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20 Golem, Ahasver steps out of line.

21 Golem, Ahasver gets close to the camera.

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This reanimation of the ancient dead as a clay figure and as visual spectacle could be seen as an ethically positive step of acknowledging their presence rather than repressing them. But the film makes clear that the animated presence of the dead cannot be tolerated for long either by the living or by the dead. Apart from the Rabbi and to some extent his attendant, all the characters adopt the commonsensical stance of distancing themselves from the reanimated dead, either by shying away from the Golem or by treating him like a museum piece, a curiosity or ‘illusion’ rather than an animated being. From the Golem’s point of view, being animated is not a state he can bear for long either.12 His frustration at being treated like a servant by the Rabbi and his attendant, and as an object of curiosity by the courtiers, adds to his explosiveness and shows in his face and his barely restrained forceful acts. Both his sudden rebellion and his ‘death’ are not tightly causally motivated in the plot, but make sense on an allegorical level. That the Golem turns against his master is explained through the deus ex machina of a change of astrological constellation, but cannot really be quite so exclusively due to external causes because we have also witnessed his pent-up aggression and frustration; his ‘death’ is due to a coincidence in child’s play, which highlights both its contingency and its inevitability on an allegorical level. The Golem has to run out of control and stop ‘living’ not for any particular reason within the plot, but because neither the living nor the dead can cope with an animated presence of the dead for any sustained duration. There is one factor, however, that seems to speed up the breakdown, and that is the Rabbi’s attempt to turn the Golem into a tool. It is only when the Rabbi has finally used him for his aim – to spare the Jewish community from eviction – that the Golem rises against his master. This again makes more sense on an allegorical than on a diegetic level: the rebellion of the Golem suggests that the dead will not remain under the control of the living; instead, acknowledging the presence of the dead will have unforeseen consequences. Similarly, the animated presence of Ahasver cannot last, because the presence of the dead can never endure, and the Rabbi’s attempts to control it only exacerbate the situation. Diegetically, it is again unclear what precisely goes wrong to cause the collapse of the picture show and of the ceiling.13 Even before the jester’s comments that make the court laugh and break the order of silence, some courtiers

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22 Golem, Ahasver starts walking towards the camera again.

are whispering, a few stones rain down in front of the guards, Ahasver already looks around agitatedly and begins to walk towards the camera (illus. 20–21). After a cut to the court breaking into laughter, Ahasver is shown again, but located much further back in the middle ground of the shot and once more approaching the camera, perhaps aiming to leave the frame (illus. 22). While there is always a risk that available versions of silent films do not reflect the original editing, the images in this case could not possibly be arranged into a seamless continuity, as there are two mutually exclusive takes of Ahasver walking towards the camera from different starting points. The ceiling crumbles not because the audience laughs or because Ahasver threatens to step out of the frame; and the collapse is unlikely to be caused by the shocked Löw. The most likely inference is that it is not any particular act in the palace that sparks the catastrophic situation but the very act of reanimating the dead, especially as a tool to teach a history lesson. Golem simply stops short of letting the past dead enter the same spatio-temporal point as the present of the diegesis. The classic horror moment of the spectre approaching the camera is not given its conclusion – Ahasver cannot, and must not, step outside the frame, just as the Golem cannot be allowed to

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23 Golem, Löw inserts a magic word into the capsule.

survive. The palace, which would not yet exist if the biblical past were really present, is not allowed to disappear into the ground. The episode of the Rabbi’s picture show is, of course, a selfreflexive allegory of the power of Golem itself as a film about the past. That film can reanimate the dead was an important figure of speech in the cinema debates of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany as well as of the 1950s, and revived more recently in the theories of Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey.14 Carl Hauptmann, for example, wrote to Wegener in 1915 on film’s ability to show not only living creatures, but also inanimate matter in lifelike motion: The bioscope can do more than painting and sculpture. Its unique, very specific ability is to objectify absolutely the process of all significant movement, the living gesture of all creatures, of the living and the dead things.15

While, diegetically, Golem stops just short of letting Ahasver inhabit the same spatiotemporal location as his audience, outside the plot and more subtly, a metaleptic moment does take place, a moment that crosses the divide between the fictional world of

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medieval Prague and its filmic representation in the present by letting the past dead intrude directly into the audience. This occurs when the inter-title identifying Ahasver in the ‘film’-within-the-film appears to be addressed as much to the spectators outside the film as to those within in it, and in the restored version is shown in the same screenfilling format as Golem’s other inter-titles. Suddenly, the Prague ‘film show’ directly interpellates modern viewers. A similar subtle metaleptic moment occurs during the reanimation of the Golem, too. Löw does not let the Golem approach the camera, but walks towards it himself until his torso and hands fill the screen for several seconds while he inserts the paper with the magic word into the capsule (illus. 23). In the meantime, the Golem statue is carried out behind his back and the real actor, Wegener, steps in its place, so that when Löw walks back to the statue and fixes the capsule onto his chest, the actor opens his eyes. The Golem himself does not approach or even look into the camera, but this moment has metaleptic potential for the audience outside the plot to feel interpellated by the dead anyway. This was intended (or at least teased out retrospectively) by co-director Carl Boese who describes this sequence as

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the most unusual trick . . . that perhaps has ever been done in film – unusual especially because the viewer himself participates in it – every viewer! Strange, isn’t it?! The subject of the scene: the awakening of matter to life.16

The spectators can here understand themselves as partaking in the reanimation of the Golem even as they are screened from it. Film, then, can go beyond the Rabbi’s tricks in reanimating the dead and bring them closer to the presence of the viewers. Moreover, there is a suggestion that even in the plot the dead cannot fully be kept away from the present of the living. Despite a superficially happy ending, which sees the palace saved from collapse and the Jews protected from eviction and from the Golem, the film leaves one plot thread open that suggests that the dead cannot be so neatly wrapped up and will return: the case of Florian. Mirjam, who has shown her attraction to Florian in very explicit scenes, is initially distraught when she sees the Golem killing him, then faints and is dragged away by the Golem. But as soon as she has been found safe and is alone with the attendant, he suggests that they keep silent

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about the love affair and murder since Florian’s corpse is firmly buried under the rubble: ‘Can you forgive? The Rabbi’s house is in ruins. Every trace of the stranger has been erased, nobody suspects anything, I will remain silent.’ Mirjam instantly agrees and cuddles up to the attendant instead. The emphasis on the moment typical of the genre here leads Mirjam to forget her beloved within hours and move on to the next partner. This approach may be successful in the short term, but that the dead can be quite so quickly forgotten is an illusion: the body will surely be found and the court will miss its knight when he does not turn up among the victims of the palace collapse.17 So even after the happy ending, at least one dead person is set to intrude upon the living, and there is no way either to make him fully present again or to deny his death completely. This return of the dead and the Rabbi’s futile attempt to appropriate the dead for his history lesson raises questions about the ethical involvement with the medieval dead that are an undercurrent of many medieval films. Hard to Be a God (dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1990) even makes these questions explicit. This film is set in the distant future when emotions and violence are a thing of the past and a mirror planet has been discovered that is like the earth used to be around the year 1000 or so, so that from the perspective of the main characters, the medieval dead have come to life again.18 A spaceship of historians in white lab coats has been dispatched to observe the medieval humans to find out more about our species’ past. One of them is sent down to earth to record events from close proximity and himself becomes a kind of reanimated dead man when he poses as the recently deceased medieval noble Romata of Esturia. (In a later scene on earth, ‘Romata’ seems to have died but jumps up again, provoking jokes about his resurrection.) The film is explicitly concerned with the ethics of how to treat the dead of the past. The ethical code of the historians is to interfere as little as possible and in particular not to kill anyone. But it becomes clear that a reanimation of the past – an encounter with one’s historical ancestors while still alive – will affect the present, too. The film makes very clear that there can be no such thing as a neutral observer, even across time. Not only does ‘Romata’ find it increasingly difficult not to intervene in the cruelty and barbarism he witnesses, but it also turns out that the historians themselves are the objects of an experiment, set up to test whether witnessing violence can incite one to violence.

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As ‘Romata’ indeed becomes able to kill for a greater good and only narrowly escapes death himself, it is clear that the past dead can never be the passive objects of observation; in this film, they are not even really dead. Like Golem, The Blind Director and other medieval films, Hard to Be a God shows that the medieval dead have as much power to affect the present as if they were alive.

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The Lure of One’s Own Future Death: Waxworks Perhaps surprisingly, medieval film tends to show a return into the distant past as a way not of escaping or delaying death, but of confronting it. I suggest that this is due to its unusual view of time. If the model of time in medieval film is co-presence instead of linear succession, then not only the past, but also the future is no longer strictly separated from the present. This is another way of expressing the sense of the future as short and the preoccupation with imminent death that characterizes so many medieval films. If time is no longer safely linear, then one’s own death can be no more ignored than that of previous generations. While time understood as linear would allow the past to be an escape from the present and a delay of one’s own future death, medieval film’s model of time as co-presence removes such security by bringing past and future into much closer proximity with the present. One of the films that influentially contributed to the widespread view of the Middle Ages as a world of death is The Seventh Seal, directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1957. The plot revolves around the protagonist playing a game of chess for his life with the personified Death, who threatens the characters. It features not only many dead characters being reanimated, but also many living characters dying or turning out to be dead so that it seems to be as much about the expectation of a future death (the future being co-present) as about the past dead (the past being co-present). Its opening makes clear that films set in the Middle Ages are all to some extent about the dead being reanimated: it starts with long takes of two seemingly lifeless bodies stranded on a rocky beach, lying in distorted poses open-eyed and motionless, who begin to move one after the other and turn out to have merely been sleeping. This is only the first of a series of impressive scenes showing moments in which the dead are reanimated and the living become inanimate

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through natural or supernatural causes: a seated man in a hooded cowl whom the squire asks for the way turns out to be dead; a skull on a living body is revealed to be a masked actor; crucifixes show Christ as dead, but according to the ‘ghost story’ of his resurrection he is also alive; the seemingly dead actor Skat, it emerges, has only faked his suicide, but is then immediately killed by the personified Death cutting down the tree on which he sits; the dance of death painted in the church shows Death as animated and the living as moribund, and itself comes to life in the final scene of the deceased protagonists dancing with Death. The co-presence of past dead, present and future death is here allowed to progress to such an extent that death is ever-present, even at the very end. Similarly, numerous films like Hard to Be a God and The Blind Director that are not set exclusively in the Middle Ages, but also feature contemporary (or future) characters, show a concern with future as much as with past death. Rather than allowing modern characters to escape into the past, as one might expect, the concerns of the present and the threat of future death bear down on them in these films with special force. Waxworks, for instance, written by Henrik Galeen in 1920, filmed in 1923 under Paul Leni’s direction and finally released in 1924, tells a story of the reanimation and approach of the historical characters Haroun al-Rashid (763–809), Ivan the Terrible (1530– 1584) and the nineteenth-century murderer Jack the Ripper. On the plot level, these characters are introduced as figures in a twentiethcentury waxworks, who are then reanimated in a young man’s imagination; on the level of filmic mediation, they are played by actors standing still in the introductory shots, and moving in the embedded imaginary scenes from their lives. As is typical of medieval film, Waxworks owes its impact not to a particularly convincing narrative arch – indeed, the complex episodes were rearranged and reduced during the rocky production history – but to scenes that are in themselves impressive and allow the expression of deep-seated fears.19 In the early twentieth century, a young poet starts an advertising job in a fairground waxworks writing sensational fictive stories about the lives of the historical people whom the wax-figures represent. The largest part of the film is devoted to dramatizing his two stories about the medieval Caliph Haroun al-Rashid and Tsar Ivan the Terrible. In both narratives, the poet imagines himself and the enticing daughter of the waxworks’ owner in period dress as lovers,

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who are threatened by reanimated versions of the wax-figures. In the first story, the poet pictures himself as the baker Assad and the daughter as his wife Zarah. The caliph randomly orders his vizier to kill the baker, but the vizier is distracted by Zarah’s charms and lets Assad live. But Zarah now envies the vizier’s riches, prompting Assad to attempt to steal the caliph’s magic wish ring for her. While he sneaks off to the palace to do so, Haroun decides to see Zarah’s beauty for himself, leaves a wax-double of himself in his bed, tricks Zarah into letting him into their house and then flirts with her. In the palace, Assad kills a figure who he thinks is the caliph (but which is in reality the wax double). As he arrives back at home, chased by the palace guards, Haroun quickly hides in the baker’s oven. When Haroun crawls unharmed out of the oven, Assad narrowly escapes arrest and execution. The second story envisages the poet and the daughter as a couple in Tsarist Russia on their wedding day, waiting for the bride’s father to arrive with the Tsar. On the way, the father is assassinated instead of the Tsar by mistake. The sadistic Ivan attends the wedding triumphant, demanding that everyone enjoy themselves and the bride sleep with him. He abducts the couple to his palace, torturing the man and attempting to rape the woman. They narrowly escape their fate when Ivan is suddenly told that he had been poisoned and, although this turns out to be false, goes mad. The poet then falls asleep and dreams of the third wax figure, Jack the Ripper, coming to life in a fairground and again threatening to rape the girl and kill him. Just as he stabs him, the daughter wakes up the young poet from his nightmare and passionately kisses him for a happy ending. While waxworks used to be seen as the best technology for bringing historical characters to life, this film shows that although it only uses two dimensions, and actors that do not necessarily look like the historical people they impersonate, its reanimating effects have a superior impact. This is because, crucially, film can represent the dead as moving, which is the defining characteristic of lifelikeness here: it depicts the dead perhaps not as they looked, but as if they were alive. Unlike Golem, Waxworks is not a marvellous film where magic is possible; instead, the seeming reanimation of the dead is given a natural explanation from the start: it takes place only in the poet’s imagination and dreams. Nevertheless, this is not simply a realist film either, as its clearly non-mimetic architecture and costuming as well as the somewhat implausible storyline even in the frame narrative

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indicate. As the publicity material highlights, this is a film about historical characters, but one that goes beyond realist history to ‘reanimate’ the famous men of the past.20 While in Golem, the dead of the distant past enter into the diegetic present, the movement here is reversed: the living return into the past, when the dead were still alive. To the poet, immersing himself in the past initially seems to be a welcome escape from the present, which in the brief opening episode is characterized as disorientating and oppressive. The setting is established through confusing double exposures of moving fairground carousels; the poet has trouble finding his way; he moves very little and in a stiff and restrained fashion (like the waxworks’ owner); respite is provided only by the lively daughter, who instantly attracts the poet. As the poet imagines the first tale of caliph Haroun al-Rashid, the Orientalist Middle Ages are introduced as freeing the characters from the constraints of the present, giving them greater vitality. By lap-dissolve, the poet and the daughter transform into livelier, sexier versions of themselves, who show more skin and exude more energy (illus. 24– 5). In a flirtatious baking scene, they begin to move in their medieval setting much more freely than they did in the frame narrative. Haroun al-Rashid, too, is returned to life and physical integrity: his arm, which his wax figure had lost, is still attached. The editing and camerawork (which, in the frame story, was dominated by long takes, frontal shots and frequent inter-titles) contribute to an impression of greater vitality by becoming faster and by using more unusual positions. This is a typical imagination of the Middle Ages as a time of lost vigour and fullness. But death quickly intrudes into this fantasy of the Middle Ages, through the figure of Haroun al-Rashid himself. The return to the Middle Ages, rather than providing an escape from mortality as one’s death date moves into the distant future, in Waxworks brings a greater awareness of death instead. If the past is no longer in the far distance, then neither is the poet’s own future death. The presence of his death is visualized when the dead of the past try to kill the living. While Haroun’s reanimation at first appears comforting in the sense of giving him a new lease of life, the spooky aspects of a ‘dead man walking’ soon come to the fore. The poet imagines Haroun as a purveyor of unexpected death when the caliph randomly orders to kill him, and again when he fears that he killed Haroun and now

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24 Waxworks (Paul Leni, 1923), the daughter in the present.

25 Waxworks, the daughter in the past.

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26 Waxworks, Assad lustfully succumbs to his capture.

faces execution. The reanimation of the seemingly dead Haroun as a wax figure, imagined as coming to life in the frame narrative and then appearing from the oven as a reanimation-within-the-reanimation, has the structure of a nightmarish return. But the threats are averted and this episode is primarily played for comic effect, which allows more positive feelings towards death to emerge, too. The poet not only fears, but also desires death. Assad does not resist his slide towards execution when he is suddenly and stupidly willing to risk his life by killing Haroun, and almost lustfully succumbs to the guards when they catch him (illus. 26). Moreover, the poet projects his desire for death onto Zarah when he imagines Death, embodied by the jolly rotund caliph, as a potential and not unwelcome lover for her. But whether welcome or not, the approach and animation of Haroun as the dead harbinger of death are safely removed into the realm of the imagination again when the poet finishes his story and begins a new one. The second episode, which takes place in Ivan the Terrible’s Russia, is much darker and replays the connection between an awareness of the dead of the past and of one’s own future death in a horror register.21 Even more clearly than in the first episode, a return into the

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past is also a fast-forwarding to death. Ivan’s Russia is characterized entirely as a realm of death: the settings are the palace as a series of warren-like underground corridors with a prominent torture chamber, the sledge ride with the assassination and the wedding that turns into a mockery of a celebration. The characters all move like the living dead do in later zombie films, stiffly and mechanically. The life of the poet’s character is threatened even more so than in the first episode, and here is less a wishful fantasy than a much-resisted danger. Ivan comes far closer than Haroun to killing the man through torture, and to raping the desperate girl. Both characters are narrowly saved when Waxworks, like Golem, stops short of allowing past, present and future to really collapse into one for the living, but does allow this to happen for Ivan instead. The moment when the future becomes fully present, when there is no future left, would be the moment of death for the poet and the moment when the girl would have to succumb to Death as her lover. It is not only because the ultimate point in the future for each individual is death, but also because life is usually understood as a succession of moments, that such co-presence is imagined as death. But the film does not go quite so far towards co-presence as to allow the reanimated dead to kill the living. Instead, it steps sideways to make Ivan, rather than the poet, experience the full consequence of co-presence, which for him is not death, but madness, a madness prompted by the fact that the reversibility of time destroys the reign of common sense. Just as he is about to rape the girl, Ivan is called away with the news that he has been poisoned: his name has been found on an hourglass that had been set and inscribed by his chief poisoner in the same way that he had done for his other victims to predict their time of death. Ivan reacts by turning the hourglass that measures the time until his death upside down, thereby visually and in his mind reversing time and saving himself from his imminent death (illus. 27). Because he had not been poisoned, he does not actually die either. He instead continues to turn the hourglass from side to side to constantly reverse and thereby ‘suspend’ time. An inter-title tells us that he goes mad and keeps turning the hourglass until the end of his days. This vignette powerfully shows that a full suspension of the succession of past, present and future time would be nothing other than madness. This is the furthest that Waxworks goes in visualizing such a suspension of chronology, but because it

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27 Waxworks, Ivan madly reverses time.

disables the tyrant, the horror of this scene is mitigated. At the end of this tale, death is again safely in the future for the alter egos of the poet and the girl. In the third story, it is the approach as well as the animation of the dead that is visualized and, unlike in Golem, it is directly connected to an approach of one’s own death. The past comes ever closer to the present anyway in the temporal progression of the stories presented in Waxworks from the distant medieval past to more modern times. In the poet’s nightmare of the couple trying to escape Jack the Ripper, the murderer repeatedly steps towards the camera and towards the poet through moving, abstracted and often doubly-exposed backgrounds, appears in multiple locations and finally actually stabs him on screen and ‘steals’ the girl from him. The moment in which the animated dead man is nearest is also the one in which death comes closest. But again, the approach of the dead is halted when the girl in the frame narrative wakes the poet up and then passionately kisses him: a sense of the linear time of the frame narrative is thus reintroduced. But, as in Golem, the happy ending only superficially resolves a film whose bulk has been taken up by glimpses of the co-presence of the past that are much more threatening.

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28 Siegfried (Tom Gerhardt, 2005), Siggi’s pet pig saves his life.

The disruption of linear time and the reanimation of the dead are such a characteristic part of medieval films that they have even been parodied.22 In Tom Gerhardt’s Siegfried (2005), the eponymous protagonist (nick-named ‘Siggi’) is here a good-hearted, supernaturally strong, but very stupid anti-hero. Evil Hagen and Alberich attempt to kill him several times, and finally succeed when Siegfried bends down to drink at a spring and Hagen in slow motion throws his spear into the cross marking the vulnerable spot on his back. The voice-over narrator correctly explains that this is how we have always been told that Siegfried died. But the film then ‘rewinds’ (looking and sounding like a video being rewound and briefly showing in reverse order the images of Siggi being hit by the spear and falling down). The throwing of the spear is then replayed with a crucial alteration: Siegfried’s speaking pet pig jumps into the spear’s path, saving Siegfried (illus. 28), and then dies in his arms. But even this version is revealed to be an illusion when the pig opens its eyes on its funerary pyre to reveal that it had only pushed the spear out of harm’s way – which is shown in a third version of the scene – and pretended to be dead in order to test Siggi’s friendship. The reanimation of the dead Siggi and of the dead pig and the disruption of linear time are here played for laughs, and to turn this into a family-friendly feel-good movie in which death is powerless and Siegfried escapes the many threats to his life to wander off into the sunset with his pig and his girlfriend. In this chapter, then, I have attempted to illustrate that medieval film often shows the dead – especially, but not exclusively, the

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medieval dead – as reanimated and approaching in various ways. This is linked, perhaps counter-intuitively, to a concern with, rather than escape from, one’s future death. A wide spectrum opens up as regards the extent to which medieval films allow co-presence and imagine the past becoming present and the dead becoming alive: from the death-embracing The Seventh Seal (as well as the previously discussed films Faust and Destiny) to Golem, Waxworks and Sieg fried, which return back to linear time and inanimate dead in the end. Whatever the outcome, the reanimated dead rarely remain passive objects of the concerns of the present, however hard the living are trying to forget them or use them for their own ends. By contrast, an extremely caring attitude to the dead is displayed by the monsters’ mother in Beowulf, who grieves heart-wrenchingly for her sons, takes the bodies into the water (which she embodies as a water spirit) and lives only to avenge them. But this approach is not particularly successful either: she is locked in a cycle of grief and revenge that rules her life. As is typical of medieval film, Beowulf does not give a comforting answer to the question of how to best deal with the dead, but it does raise the question.

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3

Queer Time Hamlet Lady Venus and her Devil Dreamship Surprise Abelard Joan of Arc Ferryman Maria The Immortal Heart

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Straight Timelines and Straight Sexuality One the most famous cross-dressers of all time, Joan of Arc, lived in the Middle Ages; and a significant number of medieval films feature her or other women in drag. Not by coincidence, these characters suspend the heteronormative lifecycle at the same time as undermining their gender roles. Queer theory has begun to show that the all-pervasive idea of time as linear is linked to normative gender roles and sexuality. Sophisticated theories of ‘queer time’ are being developed that do not postulate that gay people experience an alternative time, but reveal the ‘queerness’, the sexual and temporal instability inherent in all concepts of straight time.1 The discourse of modernity contributes to shaping straight time, and pre-modernity can be imagined as providing an alternative.2 Medieval film has always gone beyond conceiving of time as the span of an individual lifetime, on which even Heidegger’s idea of the co-presence of past, present and future in the moment relies, to include the distant past. As I have argued, this in itself seems to have unlocked the potential to expose linear time as a construct, but it is worth exploring the link between straight sexuality and straight time lines in some detail, as it allows a more exact characterization of medieval films’ concept of time as well as of gender and sexuality.3 In the following, I shall sketch four ways in which linear time supports straight sexuality and gender: the performance of gender, the devaluation of cross-temporal affective links as queer, the normative concept of patrilinear succession and the suppression of the melancholic assumption of gender. These are

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frequently disturbed in medieval film.4 My chief example is a German version of Hamlet from 1921 (dir. Svend Gade and Heinz Schall), which explicitly claims to return to Shakespeare’s medieval roots and stars a cross-dressing Asta Nielsen as Hamlet. A Danish actress who predominantly worked in Germany, Nielsen founded her own German production company in order to make this film, which paid off when the film became a great financial (and to some extent critical) success. My discussion of this film’s queer time is embedded in a general overview of medieval film’s queer conception of time, with comparisons to Lady Venus and her Devil (Frau Venus und ihr Teufel, 1967), Abelard (1977), Dreamship Surprise – Period I (2004), Joan of Arc (1935), Ferryman Maria (1936) and The Immortal Heart (1939).

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The Drag King-to-be: The Disrupted Gender-time Continuum Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with its famous ‘time-is-out-of-joint’ formulation and its even more famous homo-social protagonist, is a text that has long been suspected of displaying both queer sexuality and resistance to linear time, and recently been shown to do so. As in reality, time and sexuality are linked in the Hamlet story first of all through the performativity of gender. If gender is, in Judith Butler’s formulation, ‘an identity tenuously constituted in time’, then the successful performance of gender supports the idea of continuous, linear time.5 This is usually overlooked, because time is taken as the given and gender as the construct: we think that time supports gender because repetition of gendered behaviour over linear time suggests that there is a stable gender underneath the repetition. But in a Foucauldian inversion, I would here like to show that this substantiation also works the other way around: the stability of gender sustains the illusion that time flows in a constant, linear fashion; a seemingly stable gender identity creates the impression of a continuous line out of repeated moments. Drag performances, on the other hand, draw attention to the temporal discontinuities of all gender performances: if a (cross-dressing) woman can interrupt her performance of femininity to perform masculinity, this highlights that gender performances can be, and always are, incon sistent. Just as film creates the illusion of continuity out of a series of still images and black screens, gender is created out of a series of gender performances that are not constant.

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While some films act to confirm the linearity of time and the stability of gender by insisting that a biological essence persists even underneath drag performances, others allow a destabilizing both of gender and of time. Shakespearean theatre provides precedents for drag performances, both in the all-male casts of Shakespeare’s time who also played the female roles, and in the theatrical tradition of actresses as Hamlet, which had already continued into film.6 However, in the 1921 Hamlet, Nielsen goes one step further by being neither a man playing a woman nor a woman playing a man, but a woman playing a woman playing a man. This complicates the tension always present in historical film between the famous character and the actor.7 As the initial title cards correctly inform us, one Edward P. Vining argued that in the original legends on which Shakespeare’s play is based, Hamlet was a woman.8 Despite his lack of historical evidence, Vining is convinced by this because it explains Hamlet’s famous dithering and weakness as feminine traits. So in the film version, the Hamlet drama has a prequel: Gertrude, having been told that her husband has died in battle, gives birth to a girl and, desperate for a male heir, decides to pass her off as a boy; when it turns out that the king had survived after all, the royal couple stick to the lie so as not to lose face and the people’s trust. As in the play, the king’s younger brother Claudius then has an affair with Gertrude, kills old Hamlet and usurps the throne while young Hamlet is away at university with Horatio and young Fortinbras of Norway. Hamlet is too weak to kill Claudius and feigns madness to plot a more subtle revenge. The relationship between him, his friend Horatio and Ophelia (the daughter of Claudius’s right hand, Polonius) becomes a love triangle: for appearance’s sake, Hamlet dallies with Ophelia, but can of course not marry her, and instead secretly loves Horatio, who in turn loves Ophelia. Hamlet eventually kills Polonius, who had been eavesdropping behind a curtain. Ophelia is driven to madness and death. Claudius meanwhile sends Hamlet to King Fortinbras to be killed, but Fortinbras takes Hamlet’s side and follows him back to Denmark to help him claim the throne. Hamlet now kills Claudius, but is challenged by Ophelia’s brother Laertes to a duel for having caused her and their father’s death. As he kills Laertes, he dies, poisoned by Gertrude. Fortinbras is set to ascend the throne instead. The plot asks us to accept the idea that a woman – the nameless princess – could have passed as a man – Hamlet – so that Nielsen

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is in fact playing not a man, but a cross-dressing woman. It thus does not allow viewers to simply disregard her gender as an accident of casting, and instead forces them to acknowledge both genders of Hamlet (so I shall refer to Hamlet as both ‘he’ and ‘she’ in the following). When the young adult Hamlet is first shown sitting on a wall outside Elsinore castle, the camera lingers for several seconds in two separate shots to give viewers time to see the prince, with leggings, tunic and a Prince Valiant haircut; as well as the woman who impersonates him; and the 1920s ‘new woman’ Asta Nielsen who plays him, in a mini-dress, tights and her trademark bob haircut (illus. 29). The weight of tradition pulls spectators towards seeing Hamlet as a man – one of the most famous men in theatre – and so does the plot, which tells us that Hamlet has been passing as a man. But the film also encourages audiences to see a woman here, both through the plotline stating that this is a biological woman, and through the fact that this woman is instantly recognizable not only as a woman, but as Nielsen, the heavily promoted star of the film, looking very much like her existent, somewhat androgynous star persona. So the figure on the screen is at the same time Nielsen, Hamlet the woman and Hamlet the man. This move towards a gender-ambiguous Hamlet is made possible by a resistance to linear time, too, which is implied even in the film’s explicitly medieval setting. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet rewrites medieval stories, here those recorded in the thirteenth century by Saxo Grammaticus and others, which themselves probably draw on much older oral tales. However, Shakespeare (like Dürer, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci) is not usually seen as part of medieval traditions but as breaking away from them to pioneer modernity and epitomize the independent, secular, inquisitive spirit of the Renaissance. However, Nielsen’s film announces that it is not based on Shakespeare’s version, but on ‘the original medieval legends’, thereby already resisting the dominant narrative of progress that severs Shakespeare from such sources. By radically rewriting the famous play and challenging us to rethink it, the film also refuses its own epigonal status at the end of the timeline and instead reorganizes the tradition.9 Besides, while the play is often staged as if it were set around the time when it was written (1600), the film places it in what looks more like an unspecific late Middle Ages of (neo-)Romanesque and Gothic castles and a university.10 The film’s

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29 Hamlet (Svend Gade and Heinz Schall, 1921), young Hamlet/Asta Nielsen.

self-conscious medievalism in one fell swoop frees it from the fidelity paradigm of expected faithfulness to its Shakespearean source and allows it to picture a pre-modern world with a different sense of time and of gender. Straight, linear time, as Tom Boellstorff emphasizes, ‘cannot conceive of co-presence without incorporation’, cannot imagine that one object can exist in the same space and time as another without subsuming it.11 But here, modern audiences have to think co-presence of different points in time and of different genders: we are asked to see Nielsen the androgynous new woman, Hamlet the early modern man from Shakespeare’s play as well as Hamlet the medieval woman-as-man. Drag disturbs not only traditional gender roles and conceptions of time but also straight sexuality as soon as another person is involved. When Hamlet flirts with Ophelia, this can be viewed as ‘lesbian’ because Hamlet and Nielsen are biologically female, or as ‘heterosexual’ because Hamlet has assumed the male gender and is traditionally male. His intimacy with Horatio can be interpreted as ‘male gay’ on the basis of Hamlet’s assumed and traditional male gender, or as ‘heterosexual’ insofar as Hamlet is biologically female. Sexuality becomes queer in the sense of irreducible to the categories of straight or gay. Drag and queer performances are frequent in medieval film, and often connected to a disruption of linear time. But they usually reinstate temporal and sexual order in the end. A typical case is Lady Venus and her Devil (dir. Ralf Kirsten, 1975), where one of the protagonists falls out of chronology and out of gender at the same time.

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Maria visits Wartburg castle with her commitment-phobic boyfriend Hans Müller, and the resident Lady Venus decides to teach him a lesson by sending him through a magic door into the year 1200. The devoted Maria jumps after him, and re-enters the plot having been found by one of the medieval Wartburg residents, who has mistaken her for a boy and wants her to work for him. No explanation is given for the change of gender that is connected to the turning back of time – perhaps it is due to a different perception of her short hair, her trousers and her confident cheekiness – but it allows Maria not to be recognized by her own boyfriend and become his squire ‘Moritz’. However, this drag performance and return to the Middle Ages are only an intermission that confirms the normativity of linear time, essential gender and heterosexual marriage.12 We are told at the outset – in a metaleptic address to the camera and to the audience outside the plot by Venus – that the jump into the Middle Ages is only aimed at teaching Hans a lesson, and thus we rightly presume that it will only be a temporary intermission in the linear flow of time, with Venus whisking them back into the present when he has learned to commit to Maria. Nor do the characters let themselves be touched by the past and their modern superiority be challenged. While women often put on male clothes, male-to-female crossdressing is rare in medieval film. That cross-dressing is the only way for medieval women in these films to gain some of the rights that modern Western women take for granted demonstrates how much progress now has allegedly been made since the Middle Ages; and it allows for the action-laden plots that most medieval films prefer. But Western societies are less proud of the emancipation of men, and showing medieval men being allowed access to domestic roles, emotions and interests that used to be the prerogative of women would neither confirm the narrative of historical progress nor produce heroic plots. That medieval film for all its queer potential prefers macho roles for men is made clear in the blockbusting success Dreamship Surprise – Period 1 (dir. Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, 2004, illus. 30).13 This parody of medieval films (as well as of science fiction films and westerns) derives much of its humour from the fact that what today counts as an alpha male would look rather camp in a medieval film. It casts the most stereotypically heterosexual German actor of its time, Til Schweiger, as a tough but soft-hearted ladies’ man, Rock, who ends up cross-dressed not as a medieval woman, but as a camp

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30 Dreamship Surprise (Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, 2004), the camp knight Sir Frombehind.

knight. In the frame narrative, set in the year 2304, Rock navigates the highly camp team of the Dreamship Surprise in his space taxi through missiles, and instantly falls in lust with Queen Metapha. As the motley crew time-travel on a sofa by accident back to 1304, they enter into a Middle Ages that, within a few minutes, runs the gamut of all the clichés of medieval film: knights and ladies, commoners being knighted, a tournament, witch-burning, the Black Death, bad eating habits, dungeons, jesters, brutality and women traded as prizes. That these are not so much clichés of the Middle Ages as parodies of medieval film is clear when the tournament is staged à la Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale as a modern sports contest with cheerleading and stadium score boards, and when Rock introduces himself to the medieval lord William the Last as ‘Til Schweiger’. Schweiger sticks to playing his emotionally-bumbling-but-thus-irresistibly-cute star image, which in the context of a medieval film suddenly appears rather camp. In a gay innuendo-fest between Mr Spuck and Rock, featuring what looks to the distant observer like a hand-job (but is not), Rock makes clear he has no luck with the ladies and lets Spuck touch his wrinkly pink . . . pig. As the ‘pink knight Sir Frombehind’ (‘der rosarote Ritter von Hinten’), Rock is defeated and only saved by Queen Metapha’s cunning. The team then time-travel to the Wild West of filmland rather than of history. Rock (still in his pink armour, and still Til Schweiger playing his own persona) already looks much more heterosexual and heroic, getting close to Metapha and giving chase on a horse to recover a time-travelling motorbike, although not so much his behaviour has changed as the expectations of hero in a

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western as opposed to in a medieval film. When the team is finally beamed to 2004, Rock’s immature masculinity is at last appropriate and he enjoys Schweiger-style heterosexual success by getting Metapha (to the disappointment of Mr Spuck) and naturally takes the leading role in destroying a ufo with his laser pen-knife. While masculinity is camply undermined throughout the film, the medieval episode does so especially. The disruption of gender roles and straight sexuality falls together with a return to the Middle Ages; and queer desire is playfully encouraged, but heteronormative order is reinstated in the end.14

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Queerly Historical Desire Normative sexuality aims to keep romantic relationships limited not only to heterosexual couplings, but also to contemporaries; loving or fantasizing about dead people is seen as deviant in itself. In this respect, all cross-temporal romantic or erotic desires are in some way queer.15 Films are often explicitly aimed at creating empathy and sexual desire in the viewer across time and space. All films ask us to suspend disbelief and conflate several distinct points in time into one: the time in which the story is set, the time of the shooting and the time of the viewing: we are to imagine that events filmed in the past and set at any possible point are unfolding before our eyes. Normally, this blurred chronology is not made explicit, in order to sustain the pleasurable illusion; medieval film, as we have seen, however, often draws attention to this co-presence. Here, this happens through the cross-gender casting, which constantly reminds us that we are seeing the historical moments of medieval Denmark and 1920s Germany both present rather than in temporal succession: both Nielsen and Hamlet. Rather than smoothing over the temporal distance, as cinema normally does, Hamlet even encourages affective, metaleptic connections between different points in time while constantly reminding us of the temporal distance. It does so by displaying Nielsen/Hamlet as an object for our affections and desires quite prominently: by making Hamlet a very likeable, funny and warm character, by showing him in erotic scenes with Ophelia and Horatio (illus. 31–2), and by making Nielsen look alluring through make-up, costume, lighting and cinematography (illus. 33). But by casting the gender and the

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historical situatedness of the desired object as allusive, as sketched above, Hamlet does not allow viewers to sustain their desires for one gender or the other, for one historical point in the past or the other. The Hamlet-material is ideal for such cross-temporal desires, because Ophelia and Horatio provide ready identification figures for viewers of either sex to desire Hamlet temporarily, in the knowledge that both of these love affairs have no future. What we may feel for this figure is a queer affection in the sense both of reaching into the past – the distant past of the character as well as, for twenty-first century viewers, the distant past of the filming – and of the gender of its object constantly blurring. What is most subversive is that metalepses, the crossovers between the levels of plot, of filming and of viewing, are identified as such and encouraged rather than glossed over, allowing us to transcend chronological progression: the point of time of viewing, filming and the plot are brought into direct contact in the response of the viewer. Abelard (dir. Franz Seitz, 1977) also defends not just non-hetero normative desire, but queerly historical desire for the Middle Ages within the plot. Two women, in what is presumably the present of the film’s release, begin to desire not so much a medieval person as what they see as a medieval concept of love: that between Abelard and Heloise, which to them is characterized by unconditional love independent of traditional heterosexual constraints. They find out about Abelard and Heloise (from visiting their graves, from academic seminars, an Egon Schiele painting, listening to Abelard’s music and reading his autobiography in depth) that they were undaunted in their love by their vows of celibacy, their teacher-pupil relation and even Abelard’s loss of ‘masculinity’ due to his castration. This film destabilizes historical progression in making clear that the medieval writings of Abelard can explain modern behaviour – that the girls end up castrating a man who has cheated on both of them – better than the modern truth-finding methods of a legal case with a psychologist as expert witness can. At the same time, it challenges straight gender and sexuality. The young women resist the aggressive courting behaviour of the men around them. Listening to Abelard’s music allows them to practice unconditional love irrespective of their partner’s gender when they begin to have sex with each other without that – to their minds – constituting a couple relationship or questioning their heterosexual orientation. When they castrate

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31 Hamlet, Erotic scene with Ophelia.

32 Hamlet, Erotic scene with Horatio.

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33 Hamlet, the alluring Nielsen looking pensive.

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the cheating boyfriend, they take on the role of Heloise’s bishop uncle rather than of a wronged woman. The affective links that the young women establish to medieval people are ultimately shown to be more fulfilling than any of those among contemporaries.

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Patrilinear Time out of Joint: The Absence of Succession Heteronormativity supports the concept of linear time not only through regarding gender as essence and trans-temporal desire as queer, but thirdly also through the patrilinear system by which power is passed from father to son (or son-in-law) through giving daughters or sisters away as brides. In Gayle Rubin’s classic analysis of gender, this exchange creates the gender of its participants: the subjects of the exchange are defined as male, its objects as female.16 Gender turns out to be not a pre-given essence, but attributed through the exchange. Women convey status and the right to exchange objects to men and thereby make them masculine, but they do not hold this power themselves; in Lacanian terminology, they are the phallus (the symbolic power of masculinity, the right to possess a woman), but cannot have a phallus. Linear time, the temporal succession from one generation to the next, is again usually seen as the stable pole, around which gender is then created, but I would here once again suggest reversing the argument: a gendered system of generational progression consolidates the idea of linear time, and resistance to it messes with temporal flow. In Hamlet’s drag performance, the dissolution of gender also destabilizes patrilinear progression. Both Shakespeare’s and Nielsen’s Hamlet resist the patrilinear system of exchange and thereby traditional gender roles, straight sexuality and straight time. Even more so than in Shakespeare, the crown is what symbolizes the continuity of patrilinear time in the film: the passing of power from father to son or from older to younger brother, which ensures continuity even over generations. Like the Lacanian phallus, this crown can only be owned by men, but is transferred through a woman – through possessing Gertrude as either a wife or a mother – and thereby sutures one generation to the next. When the funeral of the king should be followed in due course by the coronation and wedding of the son, the king’s younger brother Claudius usurps the crown and the status it confers, crying ‘now the crown is mine!’ as

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soon as he has acquired some serpent’s poison to dispose of the present king. He compresses the sequence of succession, as is highlighted by the fact that Hamlet is shown to receive a letter with the news of his father’s death and, after the act break, the next cut is immediately to the wedding feast. The haste is stressed in three inter-titles, including: ‘Prince, you have come just at the right time. Up there it’s the funeral and wedding feast at once.’ Thereby, Claudius shows the cruelty of progression that is normally masked by decent grieving periods: the fact that any linear progress to some extent entails a betrayal of the previous generation’s memory. If Claudius speeds up and appropriates chronological succession, Hamlet resists it.17 He is born just too late (after the old king is presumed dead) and just too early (before the old king has recovered) to be accepted either as a girl or as a successor to the throne. As a woman, Hamlet cannot really own the crown; his gender disrupts patrilinear succession. ‘Woe! The crown is lost!’ is Gertrude’s concern at the news that her newborn is a girl. Even when his father is dead, he is both too late (in his killing of Claudius and Laertes) and too early (in his killing of Polonius and his rushing ahead of the Norwegian army) to ascend the throne. Instead, he unmasks the crown as the status symbol it is, showing that it holds no guarantee of temporal continuity. In his feigned madness, he forms a crown from clay and squashes it (illus. 34), emphasizing to Claudius its temporal fugitiveness: ‘With nimble fingers a crown can easily disappear in Denmark.’ Linear time is also explicitly aligned with the pursuit of heterosexual partners in the ‘traffic in women’, and again Hamlet stands outside this progression. Shakespeare’s Hamlet had wished that he ‘with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge’ (Act i, Scene v), thereby associating love with speedy progress. But Nielsen’s Hamlet is left standing as the ever-penniless Laertes, his fellow student at Wittenberg, borrows some money and nimble-footedly runs down into the street to chase women. Again money, the ability to ‘buy’ and entertain women, only passes through Hamlet from her father to Laertes; like the phallus, she cannot possess it. In contrast to Shakespeare’s swift wings, the inter-title card reads ‘clipped wings’. The image of the caged bird is reinforced by the shadow of the window falling onto the wall behind Hamlet like the bars of a prison window; the static camera lingers and allows

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34 Hamlet, Hamlet squashes the crown.

35 Hamlet, Hamlet as a caged bird.

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36 Hamlet, Hamlet as a dead bird.

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him no escape (illus. 35). This Hamlet cannot race to the girls, cannot be caught up in the linear time of heterosexual desire; her thoughts of love are not swift but cut short. The same image of broken wings is used by Fortinbras in the final scene, when Hamlet dies at the foot of the throne as another symbol of the continuity of patrilinear power: ‘I wanted to help you onto the throne, but even its steps have broken your wings.’ Here, too, Hamlet looks like a dead bird with broken wings, with her chest pressed out and arms twisted back (illus. 36). Hamlet escapes being part of the patrilinear economy, as a man and an heir, through her queer gender, queer sexuality and queer time. It falls to Fortinbras to ensure some kind of succession, even if not from father to son or son-in-law. Although heteronormativity is reinstated in the end – Hamlet is identified as female, Horatio can admit his love for her, Fortinbras will be king – it is again too late: the destabilizing work of the film has already been done.18 Other medieval films are not quite so radical: they open up the potential for queer disruptions to patrilinear succession only to forcefully reinstate linear time in the end. Nazi medieval films particularly liked to take women out of the chain of marriage and make them cross-dress, only to serve the higher good of the nation and its men. Joan of Arc, Ferryman Maria and their male counterpart in The Immortal Heart illustrate this. The paradigmatic medieval crossdresser, Joan of Arc, has the potential to destabilize gender roles and heterosexual desires as well as straight time. The defining Joan of Arc film, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), went far in its subversion of gender, sexuality and time: it allowed Joan to appear gender-ambiguous and to be attractive to viewers in her ambiguity; it is set in the suspended time of her trial and imminent death and dominated by long drawn-out takes and lingering close-ups rather than a continuous narrative. Gustav Ucicky’s Joan of Arc (1935), by contrast, confirms that gender is a biological essence through Joan being clearly a woman to all characters and to viewers despite her male clothes; it suppresses sexual desires for an androgynous figure by desexualizing her as a saint who neither sexually desires nor is desired by any character and is not glamorized to appeal to spectators’ sexuality either; and even her death is fitted into a linear chronology. In Ucicky’s film, cross-dressing does not take Joan out of the linear sequence of being passed on as a wife so much as insert her into

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a different patrilinear succession, that of the fatherland. The succession to the crown is contested at the outset for reasons not detailed; and the film tells the story of Joan’s mission to reinstate Charles, an unmarried, effeminate man, as the legitimate king. As befits a woman, she plays the role of the king-maker, conferring the power to take the crown onto Charles without ever actually holding it herself. She never steps out of the cycle of exchange, but remains an entirely passive object of exchange between men. Helplessly and often almost robotically, with a fixed and empty facial expression and rigid gestures encased in her solid metal armour, she follows what God, the archangel Michael, Maillezais and the king tell her to do (illus. 37). She does not resist her role as the phallus in patrilinear succession so much as sublimate it to a higher level, ‘marrying’ the king and thereby conferring his power upon him. Unlike normal women, this cross-dressing virgin holds some of this power herself, which she gets not from her father, but from ‘the people’, whose loyalty she represents, and from God. That what she does is equivalent to, rather than resisting, marriage is made clear again through the motif of the crown and the female equivalent, the bridal wreath. The wreath first appears as an image superimposed on a crown on a neutral background, showing that the crown, the power to assume one’s role in succession, is linked to the wreath, the power to own women, to turn a virgin into a wife. Joan gives the wreath, the ‘phallus’, to Charles and he becomes king – not in the coronation, which is not shown, but in a potent scene during the celebrations. Joan and the king walk into the banquet hall, her with her wreath, he with his crown, not unlike a married couple. When they sit together, she asks him to take the wreath from her, and he does so – symbolically taking her as a virgin, taking up the phallus and assuming the power of a king. That her power has now been fully transferred to him is evident when her fate immediately turns and she is accused of being a witch, having brought the Black Death into town, and finally burned. But unlike women in a normal marriage exchange, she can give him more: not only her value as an object of exchange, but also her life. Her death will confer the power that she represents – popular support and confidence – onto him in the longer term, as it will make her into a martyr and encourage people to fight even more for her cause, for the king. The power of the wreath to signify her life rather

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37 Joan of Arc (Gustav Ucicky, 1935), the robot-like, empty-faced Joan.

than just her status as a woman is already indicated when she tells the king at the banquet that according to the local custom in her village, a wreath worn on St John’s Day that is still fresh by midnight means that the girl wearing it will be married within the year, but a wreath that droops before midnight means death within the year. She then looks at herself wearing the wreath in the mirror (in an image reminiscent of Faust’s mirror scenes, illus. 38). Although the wreath seems fresh in the brief shot and even in the still, she sees the wreath drooping in the mirror and hysterically begs the king to take it from her, which he does. The wreath, now bare twigs without flowers, next appears in the hands of the king, who contemplates precisely turning Joan into a martyr by allowing her to be burned, thus further associating the wreath with her life. He muses about how easy it is to die for a greater cause, and how difficult to live for it as he has to. Joan’s individual sacrifice is thus shown to be only supplementary to the greater path of the king: although she is not a wife, Joan still takes on the role of helpmate. But the film makes clear that hers had been a worthwhile sacrifice for France in that it restored the linear time of succession for the fatherland: 25 years later Charles vii is

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38 Joan of Arc, Joan looks at herself wearing a wreath.

still king and has Joan’s reputation restored as having sacrificed herself for a liberated fatherland. Her martyrdom, as Charles predicted, seems to have united the people behind his cause more than she could have done in life. The final image confirms this by showing a crown of thorns that turns into a flowering wreath: her suffering and death has made her the bride with the ultimate ‘phallus’ or wreath of virginity and people’s support that gave Charles not just male, but royal power. That this sacrifice of an individual life-line for the greater good of the life-line of the fatherland and its Godlike king is depicted as positive, bracketing out individual pain and doubt, is the most crucial National Socialist message of the state-controlled film. (The fact that Joan is French is of relatively minor importance – like Wilhelm Tell, Friedrich Schiller’s plays had made her an honorary German anyway.)19 This is different in other versions of the Joan of Arc story, which tend to explore the potential of cross-dressing if not for genuine confusion of gender or time either, then at least present ways in which cross-dressing can empower women by giving them the agency otherwise reserved for men. The Canadian 1999 Joan of Arc

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version directed by Christian Duguay, for instance, clearly draws out the human cost that the legitimate pursuit of fighting for a higher good entails. The Immortal Heart (dir. Veit Harlan, 1939) shows how different a man’s temporary resistance to linear time and linear sexuality looks from that of a woman. This film depicts the last few weeks in the life of the historical figure Peter Henlein, inventor of the pocket watch. Old Henlein rightly suspects his young assistant Konrad to be in love with his very young wife, Ev. During an argument about this between Henlein and Konrad, a bullet is accidentally fired and buries itself near Henlein’s heart. His friend Dr Schedel wants to operate, but Henlein is eager to develop a clock for his friend, the explorer Martin Behaim, which can work at sea independent of weights, and postpones the dangerous operation so that he can leave his ‘child’, the clock, as a legacy. Despite the attempts at sabotage by his wife, who wants him to have the operation and share his remaining time with her, he finishes the egg-shaped clock a few weeks later. It is now too late for surgery, but Henlein is proud to have ‘given birth’ to his invention, makes Konrad and Ev promise to stay together and dies as an honourable citizen. Unusually for a medieval film, the plot is tightly narrated, linking major historical figures of scientific, rational and technological progress – Behaim, Schedel, Henlein, even Luther – together in a story of causal links and strict chronological progress. The shortness of the future – the fact that Henlein knows he has only a few weeks left to live – here works as a deadline that binds the plot closer together rather than stressing the potential of each moment to combine different points in time. Nevertheless, patrilinear succession is disturbed through the childless marriage of an old man, who is very close to his own mother and his male friends, to a much younger woman, whom he treats more like a daughter than like a wife, not taking her seriously as an adult, calling her ‘child’ and refusing to have sex with her. This is a queer situation, destabilizing not only temporal flow from one generation to the next but also Henlein’s masculinity. Although Henlein does not cross-dress, he begins to cast himself as a woman when he develops fantasies of giving birth, saying he wants to leave his invention as a child and legacy, and in the final episode bringing his ‘egg’ into the world in a painful birthlike situation. But patrilinear succession is reinstated when Henlein

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effectively marries his ‘daughter’ to a man of her own age, a couple whose evident mutual sexual attraction will surely bear children. Again, Henlein’s resistance to generational succession as a husband has been justified by him ensuring generational succession of the new technology – precisely aimed at measuring linear time – in the wider nation, in which he orders Konrad to spread the manufacturing innovation. The medieval setting, too, helps not to question linear time, but to confirm ideas of progress. Although it is set in a very medievallooking Nürnberg of 1517, this is here part of a trajectory towards modernity, rationality, scientific curiosity and invention that allegedly still makes the German nation great.20 How the self-sacrifice of a cross-gendered woman for a higher good also encouraged an exploitation of the medieval past itself for the nation is suggested in Ferryman Maria (Fährmann Maria, dir. Frank Wysbar, 1936). The young woman Maria arrives without papers in a village and begins to work as a ferryman. Though not cross-dressing, her male role as ‘ferryman’ is stressed in the plot, and she does not succumb to the sexual advances of a local man. A young man arrives from the other side of the river, wounded in a struggle to free his homeland, and Maria nurses him. When the personified Death arrives to pick him up, Maria sacrifices herself for him and leads Death into the moors where she expects to die, but instead of her, Death sinks into the ground. The happy couple leave together for the young man’s country. Most interpreters have seen this as an allegory (even a ‘medieval’ allegory) promoting a woman’s sacrifice for the men fighting for their homeland.21 But more than this, it is also an allegory of medievalized eternal cyclity being submitted into the service of modern progression. Maria lives in and embodies a land of eternal stagnation, of virginity rather than patrilinear progression, in which her admirer gets nowhere; a violinist who always aims to leave ‘tomorrow’ finds himself stranded; day or night makes no difference to Maria’s working hours as she is told to ‘always’ be on call; the ferryman’s clock has stopped; and the children sing songs about fairy tales set in this moorland which are ‘without beginning, without end, all called “once upon a time”’. Her male role serves simply to preserve Maria’s timeless virginity rather than inserting her into the linear time of marriage and procreation. In this land, time does not pass so death

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has no power. The old ferryman only dies once he succumbs to a different sense of time as countable by trying to buy his ferry with his wages, saved up over fifteen years; as soon as he has earned the last coin, Death comes to get him. On the other side of the river lies the young man’s land of historical struggle, linear time and death. He wants to return to linear time so that he can change history and free his homeland. While on the timeless bank, death cannot kill the girl in her purity; but in the end she leaves her eternal life with her mortal man for love, and succumbs to playing her role as helpmate. The timeless setting is, however, identified with the Middle Ages not only through the convention of seeing the Middle Ages as outside linear time, but also explicitly in the marketing. Each screening of Ferryman Maria was preceded by the short documentary The Thousandyear-old Hildesheim (dir. Emil Schünemann) about the historical architecture of this medieval town in the Northern German heath in which the film is set. Giving the film its premiere in Hildesheim also paid off when the metropolitan reviewers were impressed by the town’s timeless but also medieval atmosphere, waxing lyrical about its ‘medieval gables’ where ‘something of the mystical approach to life is still alive, which can also be felt in this film that originates in the same landscape of Lower Saxony’.22 In heavy allegory, then, the film suggests that it is worth drawing on the resources of the premodern past that survive in the rural German countryside to take them into the present struggle for German supremacy. That cross-dressing ultimately serves the reinstatement of patrilinear succession despite having introduced disturbance during the bulk of the film is not exclusively a feature of Nazi films. The Jew of Mestri (1923), a version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice directed by Peter Paul Felner, which like Hamlet claims on its initial English inter-titles to be adapted from the medieval ‘fourteenth-century story by John of Florence’ rather than from Shakespeare, features a Jewish daughter cross-dressing to escape from her father’s house to her Christian lover Lorenzo.23 Wearing male clothes allows her to sidestep patrilinear succession in the sense of rejecting the husband to whom her father has promised her in protracted dowry negotiations, but serves to insert her into a new chain of marriage. Another cross-dressing woman, Beatrice, Lady of Belmonte, has the financial power and familial independence to trade herself as a wife. This rejection of the traditional female role is visualized when she disguises herself and

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assumes the authority of a doctor of law at the trial for a pound of Lorenzo’s flesh. But she, too, willingly uses her power merely to free her lover from the Jew’s claims and to submit to him in marriage, reinstating generational succession and traditional gender roles.

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Is it to be or is it not to be? Co-presence vs Future Orientation More so than most other medieval film plots, Hamlet’s story also reveals a fourth way in which linear time and heteronormativity are based on each other, by unmasking the melancholic standstill underneath the ostensibly straight time of gender assumption. Freud famously postulated that in the Oedipal drama, a boy has to renounce his mother as a love object. But as Butler points out, Freud does not even mention that he also has to disavow his father as a same-sex love object. In Butler’s analysis, gender itself is melancholic because this entirely unacknowledged lost same-sex love object is incorporated into the body. In a normal process of mourning as described by psychoanalysis, any traumatic loss of a love object would be recognized after such an initial melancholic incorporation; the incorporation would be understood as being merely symbolic and the lost object gradually expelled through talking. But the taboo on homosexuality means that the loss of the same-sex love object remains totally unconscious and the lost object is literally sustained in the body rather than expelled; the bereaved person remains stuck in what Butler calls a ‘state of disavowal and suspended grief’.24 In the medieval and early modern period, however, the incorporation of a lost loved one is not conceived of as merely symbolic. As mentioned above, according to Boellstorff, modern people cannot think co-presence without incorporation or absorption. But medieval people thought even of incorporation as co-presence: the lost or dead love object was perceived as physically residing in the bereaved person without being replaced or subsumed by him or her.25 Both lover and object in this understanding existed in the same point in space and time: precisely what Boellstorff would call co-presence rather than incorporation. Accordingly, the lost object could not be expelled on a simply symbolic level through the talking cure, but only literally through revenge: through creating another dead body in another person. As if there was literally

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only one pain and one dead body, it was passed onto another person through revenge, and the avenger thereby freed him – or herself of the lost object. Where melancholia in the modern sense is only a symbolic taking in of one’s lost love object, this pre-modern understanding is a physical co-presence of two people in one spatiotemporal spot. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s loss of his father as same-sex love object is revisited when his father actually dies. Hamlet incorporates the lost object without absorbing it. In the words of Stephen Greenblatt, ‘it is as if the spirit of Hamlet’s father has not disappeared, it has been incorporated by his son’.26 But he then does not want to expel this lost object, and this is why he refuses to avenge Old Hamlet: revenge would be, in the pre-modern understanding, an expulsion of the lost object, transferring the loss onto another person. Instead, he insists on their co-presence in himself. Thereby he raises the ethical issue of the duty to remember the past rather than forget and get over it, which concerned me in the previous chapter.27 In the pre-modern sense of revenge, the ghost’s twin commands to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ and to ‘remember me’ (Act i, Scene v) are contradictory, because the first would mean forgetting and moving on; and indeed, Hamlet’s memories of his father seem to fade despite his best intentions as soon as he attempts to take revenge by stabbing Polonius. Hamlet’s melancholic reaction to the loss, wanting time to stop, re-enacts the initial melancholic sustenance of the lost same-sex love object in one’s gender. By drawing attention to the importance of same-sex love, there is thus something queer even in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We could see him as a hero of queer time: he tries to resist the flow of linear time crashing past his ears, not to live his life-cycle according to the demands of inheritance and marriage and eventually death. The archetype of a ditherer and delayer finds many reasons not to avenge his murdered father, not to marry his girlfriend Ophelia and stay close to his male friend Horatio.28 Hamlet is always already too late: a man past his peak, a Prince Charles figure, a king-to-be already doomed never to make it. The ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy gets a new meaning in this context: ‘to be’ in the future sense of whether he is to be king, to be future-orientated, or not? Of course not: his future is foreclosed because he refuses patrilinear progression and refuses to forget the dead. He privileges co-presence over future orientation. Unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nielsen’s achieves a different kind of co-presence: she cannot even begin to incorporate and then expel

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her father – because she is not a man. Ostensibly, this is because she is too weak to avenge him as a woman. But in my interpretation, it is because the loss of her father does not repeat the melancholic loss of the same-sex love object for her. She has already incorporated her father and assumed the male gender in a way that makes it co-present with her own female personhood. But she is not allowed to get over it and expel it because this could unmask her as a girl, or worse, androgynous, and this is not possible for reasons of state. Even less so than for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is no linear chain from loss to incorporation to expulsion in revenge for her. She would dearly love to take revenge and attempts to do so, but this would mean shedding her assumed male gender, too. It is no coincidence that the moment in which she does finally take revenge and defends herself against Laertes is the moment in which she dies and is unmasked as (or becomes) a woman. By showing that generational progression is impossible to achieve unless through traditional gender identity and heterosexuality, this film reveals to what extent straight time relies on straight sexuality. In the film version, Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’ question has consequently been replaced with a different dilemma in an inter-title: ‘I am no man and must not be a woman.’ For Nielsen’s Hamlet, the question of whether she is to be someone or not, whether she has a future or not, is inextricably bound up with her gender, and a future is clearly impossible for her because of her ambiguous gender and sexual orientation. For her, the progression into the future has been replaced by a co-presence of her loss in herself. Rather than showing radically new ways of time, which would be impossible to imagine, Hamlet subtly exposes the gaps that exist in our concept of linear time, and in particular demonstrates several ways in which it needs heteronormativity as its support by exploiting pre-modernity as an alternative. In this, it shares the concerns of many medieval films with a queering of time, but takes it further than most others dare.

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Part II

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Lethal Letters

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4

The Dangerous Power of Writing

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The Secret of Kells The Passion of Joan of Arc Pope Joan Sign of the Pagan

In Hard To Be a God (1990, mentioned in chapter Two), set in the distant future, humanity has discovered a planet that is the mirror image of what earth was like in the Middle Ages. A human scientist, sent as an observer into this backward culture, is eager to help it out of its barbarism, and teaches one man how to build a printing press. The press is used to print one excitingly enlightened book before the existing dictatorial regime gets wind of it and kills the inventor by squeezing his head in the apparatus. Print is an essential instrument of progress in this film, here suppressed by the evil elite, who works with manuscript archives instead. By contrast, The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, 2009), an animated children’s film about the production of the gloriously illustrated eighth-century Book of Kells, seemingly eulogizes handwriting rather than printing. A young novice spends much of the plot defending why it is worth writing and decorating books even in the face of constant danger of invasion by the Norsemen, and finally convinces even his austere abbot, who realizes that books bring beauty in dark times. The film culminates in a sequence showing pages from the actual manuscript of the Book of Kells (illus. 39). The manuscript is here not so much a written text but a beautiful thing. But the pages are not simply shown, they are animated: the ornamental circles begin to spin, snakes begin to crawl and figures to move. Film thus emerges as superior even to handwriting insofar as it can bring the illuminations to life by animating them. Medieval films to a surprisingly large degree have something to say about writing, and Hard to Be a God and The Secret of Kells are

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39 The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, 2009), the medieval manuscript of the Book of Kells becomes animated.

two ends of the spectrum of writing as depicted in this genre. On the one hand, medieval films like Hard to Be a God follow conventional narratives of progress, whereby the spread of literacy and then the invention of print were great steps forward towards a more educated, civilized and rational culture. But on the other, as is to be expected of a largely visual medium, films constantly show the greater immediacy and impressiveness of visuality, the power of cathedrals, illuminated manuscripts and medieval visual arts, and of course of film – this is the case in The Secret of Kells.1 This ambivalence also reflects historical film’s love-hate relationship with written historiography, which is still almost exclusively the dissemination medium of academic research. Film often attempts to borrow some of the authority and kudos still reserved for printed histories, by using written paratexts setting out the historical background in introductory titles, programmes, advertising material or dvd special features. But it also tends to question the greater claim to truth made by written evidence, by contrasting such texts with images and, in the plots, by showing written documents to be dangerous instruments of power, often in the hands of self-interested elites. In Hard to Be a God, the printing press physically becomes such an instrument of oppression for its poor inventor. Medieval films most often cast themselves as a departure from modern print culture and a return to the medieval

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culture of more direct communication, to the extent that one of the genre’s defining features is its sceptical stance towards writing. In this second part of the book I shall discuss medieval film’s depiction of handwriting, print and cinema as regards their relative claims to truth and immediacy. The present chapter is concerned with handwriting and its relationship to power. It centres on a film that dramatizes the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages in terms of a change in forms of communication: Sign of the Pagan (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1954). Chapter Five, the second in this section, will focus on print, using as its chief example a film that depicts the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age as a change from visual communication to print: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). The third chapter in this part, finally, will show how much medieval films like A Canterbury Tale (1943) and The Name of the Rose (1986) reflect on the way a medium affects its message about the past, in detective plots that precisely aim to find out the truth about the past. Medieval film’s ambivalence towards writing as regards both its claims to historical truth and its immediacy is often expressed through a distinction between handwriting as a visual, material object and as its content or text, or in linguistic terms between a signifier and a signified. The former – a manuscript in all its sumptuous, tangible glory as ink on parchment where the script is part of a material image created by a physical hand – is often valued positively and can help to preserve the truth about the past in a material form. In medieval film (for example, in The Secret of Kells) as well as in modern scholarship, medieval handwriting is often placed more on the side of the material and physical signifier than print is: the ‘hand’ in handwriting is stressed.2 Writing as content, that which is signified in language, on the other hand, is in medieval films usually portrayed as more dangerous and susceptible to manipulation: they abound with written death sentences, intercepted and manipulated letters, forged contracts, treacherous invitations, eviction notes and arrest warrants, usually used unfairly by those in power (often Church officials). In The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), for instance, writing is systematically abused by the clerical elite to ensnare the illiterate Joan: the judges forge a letter by King Charles to make Joan trust one of them; a priest guides her hand to make her sign her forced confession (illus. 40); her written death

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40 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Joan is forced to sign her confession.

sentence is based on an unjust trial; and a written sign on her stake likewise unduly identifies her as a relapsed heretic. The viewers know that vision, especially the impressive faces on which the film’s impact relies, communicate Joan’s true innocence much more accurately (although the film still draws on written authority by claiming to be based on the actual court papers recording Joan of Arc’s trial).3 Apart from the contrast between the material signifier and the abstract signified, another important distinction which plays a role here concerns two different kinds of relationship between signifier and signified: symbolic or direct. In language, the association between signifier and signified is arbitrary and based entirely on convention; there is no reason why the letters and sounds ‘read’ rather than ‘bead’ or ‘lesen’ should mean deciphering letters, or to use a less selfreflexive example, why ‘sky’ rather than ‘fry’ or ‘Himmel’ should denote the blue above. In visual images, by contrast, their relationship is one of similarity: a painting or film of a sky normally looks like the sky. Language’s intermediate step of abstracting the sky into a combination of letters that then has to be decoded is removed in

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the case of visual images. It makes sense, then, that a favourite early metaphor for film was that it was hieroglyphic – a pictorial form of writing, a universal language where signifier and signified were no longer arbitrarily, but intimately and obviously related.4 There is another way in which filmic and photographic images are usually believed to have a closer relationship to what they signify than writing. This is due to the fact that what is seen has once been directly in the presence of the camera (semioticists call this an indexical relationship, where the physical presence of the signified object leaves a trace on the film stock). Film thus allegedly reclaims some of the materiality that has been lost in a print-dominated culture and preserves the memory of the past better than writing had ever done.5 Although images are in theory just as open to manipulation as writing is, they are normally presented as less mediated and closer to reality. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, writing is precisely used to misrepresent reality – the letter is not really from the king, the confession does not really mean that Joan is possessed by the devil. The images we see – her face, the scenes of the trial – are meant to be a more accurate depiction of historical reality. In Till Eulenspiegel (dir. Rainer Simon, 1975), the medieval jester Till exploits the arbitrariness of the ling uistic signifier to humorous effect when he teaches a donkey to read the Bible. Normally, reading is an oppressive tool of literate clerics to Till: ‘Who reads the Bible is always right.’ But if the verb ‘to read’ (or in German, ‘lesen’) is not taken as that which it conventionally signifies, but as a combination of sounds that can also mean something else, its power can be undermined. In this case, ‘lesen’ has a rarer meaning of ‘to pick grain’, and this is precisely what Till teaches the donkey to do by strewing grains among the pages of the book. When writing is positively represented in medieval film, it is either because it is a visual signifier – as in The Secret of Kells – or because it overcomes the usual arbitrariness of writing, the gap between the written word and reality, signifier and signified. The latter is the case in Pope Joan (dir. Sönke Wortmann, 2009). This film is the tale of a woman trying to make reality conform to writing because she believes in the power of the written word. As a child, Joan is enamoured by books and manages to be taught to read and write and study the Bible, against the will of her father. When she is given a manuscript of the Odyssey, she refuses to scrub out what her father considers ‘pagan’ writing. It becomes clear that writing to her

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is a blueprint for reality when her life becomes an odyssey itself as she travels through Europe, using cunning and disguise just like Odysseus. Johanna makes reality conform to writing four more times: when a letter inviting Johanna to attend the cathedral school allows her to do so despite her father’s attempts at manipulating it; when she and her mentor and lover Gerold construct a ‘miraculous’ machine according to the instructions depicted on a Greek manuscript page; when Gerold’s wife makes Johanna scribe a letter allegedly expressing Gerold’s wish that she marry a local boy, and a heartbroken Johanna does so; and most crucially when Johanna uses a letter by their father recommending Johannes to the bishop in Fulda for herself by dressing up as a man and purporting to be Johannes for the rest of her life, even when she is offered the papal throne. But the attempt to give writing the power to create physical reality is ultimately unsuccessful. Physical reality, epitomized by blood, turns out to be truer than writing. Johanna lives in constant fear that her menstrual bleeding will betray her biological gender, and she is thwarted in the end by the public spectacle of the blood of childbirth running down her legs during the Easter parade, and dies in disgrace. So ultimately, reality wins out against writing once again. Both scepticism towards the signifier and mistrust of the arbitrariness of writing are reasons why writing is so often claimed to be entirely extraneous to film, and film is perceived as a predominantly visual medium.6 Hugo Münsterberg, as early as 1916, demanded that film should ‘be freed from all the elements which are not really pictures’, just as painting learned to do without the medieval convention of putting ‘in the picture itself phrases which the persons were to speak, as if the words were leaving their mouths’.7 Of course, I do not agree with this view of either the Middle Ages or of film as purely visual: medieval people communicated through sound as much as vision; and music and performance were as important a part of medieval culture as the visual arts. Film is an audiovisual medium that communicates not only through images, but also through music, sounds, spoken and written words, and in fact almost all films involve a large amount of writing, for example in scripts, project outlines, credits, subtitles, reviews and marketing. Nevertheless, the dominant self-perception of films, and the dominant way in which they have been theorized, distances film as far as possible from writing, and that has to be taken seriously. Medieval films often even aim to

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demonstrate in their plots and aesthetics that they can replace writing’s arbitrary relationship to its content with a more immediate connection of similarity.

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Arbitrary vs Physical Signification in Sign of the Pagan Sign of the Pagan (1954) is a classical Hollywood historical epic directed by German émigré Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck).8 Sirk was a successful film and theatre director in Weimar and Nazi Germany before moving to Hollywood, and was steeped in the German perception of medieval visual culture. He studied art history at the University of Hamburg in the 1920s and claimed to have been taught by the great theorist of medieval and Renaissance art Erwin Panofksy, and to have written a seminar paper for him on ‘the relations between medieval German painting and the miracle plays’.9 It was Panofsky who, in 1934, famously compared cinema to medieval cathedrals in their collective production, and also claimed that writing was as extraneous to film as it had been to medieval painting.10 Although Sirk may not have been familiar with this argument, Sign of the Pagan is deeply concerned with the differences between written, visual and filmic signification, and the potential for film to emulate more medieval forms of communication. The key contrast developed in the plot is not so much between the material signifier and the signified content, but between an arbitrary and a direct, physical connection between the two. Sign of the Pagan dramatizes the end of the East Roman empire, ruled by Theodosius, and of Attila the Hun’s empire, both of which are replaced by a new, united Christian-Roman Empire under Marcian. At the beginning of the film, Marcian is a lowly Roman centurion sent by the West Roman emperor Valentinian with a message to urge Theodosius to be loyal to Rome in the face of barbarian onslaughts. On his way to Theodosius, Marcian is captured by Attila, but escapes and makes it to Constantinople. After claiming another prisoner, Ildiko, as his wife, Attila also rides to Constantinople for his own talks with Theodosius. The East Roman emperor rejects Marcian’s plea and instead makes a treacherous pact with Attila against Rome. Marcian, however, gains the ear and heart of Theodosius’ sister Pulcheria, and with the support of the loyal General Paulinus they manage to expose

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Theodosius’ treachery, overthrow him and institute Pulcheria as empress. Marcian then sets off again to protect Rome against Attila’s attack and is left in charge of the city when Valentinian flees. Attila amasses his troops to march on Rome regardless, but then hesitates, because he and his seers have been having portentous visions. Attila’s daughter Kubla, who has fallen in love with Marcian and secretly converted to Christianity, tells the Romans of Attila’s warning portents. Enraged and shaken, Attila kills her and finally decides to abandon the attack. Marcian nevertheless arranges an ambush in which Attila’s retreating troops are eradicated and Attila is killed by the long-suffering Ildiko. The film ends with Marcian marrying Pulcheria to become Roman emperor. While the East Roman culture is depicted as overly dependent on writing as a way of maintaining power, Attila’s exclusive reliance on visual, face-to-face leadership and his inability to master symbolic communication are his downfall. Marcian supersedes both by imbuing symbols with the immediacy of face-to-face communication. Sirk’s favourite, typically melodramatic concern with surface and reality here plays itself out through the gap between the signifier and that which it represents. Writing is clearly established as East Rome’s chosen instrument of power from the start. When Marcian initially arrives at Constantinople, all those in power – General Paulinus, Theodosius, Pulcheria – sit behind their desks, surrounded by scrolls and quills. Theodosius looks the most imposing due to the camera position and his impressive, huge, ornate desk on a marble pedestal (illus. 41). Pulcheria uses a letter to Paulinus to order Marcian to become the head of her personal guard. Later, the eventual change in imperial power is also ratified through writing. After Theodosius’ army commanders no longer obey him as he orders them to defend him, the emperor signs his abdication papers standing up. Despite portraying Paulinus and Pulcheria as stereotypically positive characters, Sign of the Pagan is more equivocal about their written communication. Although Pulcheria’s order and Theodosius’ abdication help to further positive plot developments, writing is shown to manipulate and control humans against their will, Marcian as well as Theodosius. Indeed, our main hero Marcian is never quite part of this circle of writing of the powerful, never behind the desk, but communicating orally with Paulinus, Pulcheria and Theodosius.

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41 Sign of the Pagan (Douglas Sirk, 1954), Theodosius and the authority of writing.

He does not know that the letter he himself is delivering to Paulinus contains the order to make him the head of the Pulcheria’s guard; he only stands next to rather than behind the desk when Theodosius is made to sign his abdication; and even his message from the West Roman to the East Roman emperor is not written down, as the East Romans expect: ‘I had no written despatch. I fixed it in my memory’, he says, emphasizing his preference for face-to-face communication. He even mocks Theodosius’ belief that the Barbarians will honour their pacts not to attack Constantinople, asking the East Roman emperor whether he thinks he is ‘safe behind a shield of parchment’. It turns out that Marcian’s scepticism towards writing is justified: despite all his written documents, Theodosius is impressively shown to hold no real power in a face-to-face encounter with his generals, who simply refuse to obey his spoken orders. This display of disloyalty is what forces him to sign the abdication document. Attila, by contrast, asserts his power not through writing but through visual displays of his own physical presence. When the East Romans attempt to exert their power for once not through writing but in a physical display (by inviting the barbarian kings to a banquet showing them the strongman Herculanus bending a massive candelabra with his bare hands, and bribing them with gifts), they are easily upstaged by Attila. He strides unbidden into the feast – an unusual medium shot of his legs shows that it is his body that does the talking here – and easily overcomes Herculanus in a spectacular fight. Moreover, he manages to establish a direct, physical relationship between signifier and signified even in his use of language. While

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42 Sign of the Pagan, ‘I am Attila’.

personal names are normally the paradigmatic examples of arbitrarily chosen labels or signifiers, Attila here makes names directly represent reality. Asked to name himself by Theodosius’ adviser, he responds by calling the other barbarian kings by their names so that they all stand in deference to him. Naming is here not aimed at labelling a person, but a performative act of showing his power over that person. A name is not so much an arbitrary label of a signified, but is a signifier that has power in itself. When he finally says ‘I am Attila’, language has been rendered superfluous as his actions have already expressed this more eloquently (illus. 42). When he later tells Theodosius, ‘What are words? A little noisy breath, spoken and forever gone. Your gold is a greater security’, this again expresses his preference of physical matter over language. But Attila is undone by his inability and unwillingness to deal with signs, even if they are visual. This is most evident with respect to signs that are explicitly defined as such in the film: ‘signs’ seen in the stars or in visions that predict the future, that which ‘is written’, as Attila puts it. Attila relies on such portents and their disputed inter pretation to decide on and justify his attack on Rome, but he never manages to read them convincingly. When Attila tries to persuade the Barbarian kings that they should march on Rome, two seers recount two different prophesies: that Rome will last either for twelve centuries ending the following autumn (because twelve vultures landed on its twelve hills when it was founded) or for fourteen centuries (because seven vultures landed on its seven hills and then flew away again). Attila sides with the former opinion because he

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wants to attack that year. But just when he raises his sword above his head in a triumphant gesture and shouts ‘there is but one God who can lead us to victory and this is his sign’, a thunderbolt hits a bent tree so that it crushes the seer who has prophesized that Rome would fall that autumn. That this is a sign and what it means is only too plain to the assembled kings who now speak. They presume the death of the seer to have a direct, causal relationship to his prophecy: this seer was wrong, and the Christian God is giving a warning. But Attila gives another, less plausible because more circuitous reading: the seer has been struck to make this, his greatest prophesy, his last. (This reading is also less plausible to viewers who know of the Seven Hills of Rome, of Attila’s historical failure to bring the empire down and of the legends of the Christian God striking holy Germanic trees down by lightning, and who indeed perhaps themselves attribute power to God.) Attila appears not so much deluded and unable to read the straightforward signs as wilfully not wanting to do so and instead attempting to manipulate signs to his advantage. While the lightning strike may still have been open to interpretation, his readings become increasingly unsuccessful. He can read the signs, but he cannot ‘write’ them: he cannot manipulate them to such a degree that his readings are convincing to others. To Attila, all signs are symbolic and therefore highly abstract and worthless. He realises too late that some signs have a direct relationship between signifier and signified, just like his own visual performances. His seer’s vision of a holy man floating on a white cloud with many bleeding men and women who are dead yet alive turns out to be, despite its seemingly impossible content, quite physically and not just metaphorically true. As Attila’s troops are gathered outside Rome, Pope Leo arrives on a boat crossing the Tiber, surrounded by a cloud-like mist, thus turning what seems to be another abstract metaphor into reality. Likewise, the people who are dead yet alive are not a riddle, but martyrs, who in Leo’s faith are physically rather than merely symbolically resurrected. Attila holds on to the belief that there must be a different, symbolic reading of this vision until it is too late. Similarly, he tells his seer of a vision his nurse had when he was a child. She saw him as an adult lying on the ground, his blood soaking the earth, and the shadow of a Christian cross falling onto his body. This has an obvious meaning: the body does not stand for anything other than itself, this is the scene of Attila’s death. Indeed,

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43 Sign of the Pagan, Attila’s death in the shadow of the cross.

we later see it fulfilled in precisely this way, in a shot of his body, his blood on the ground and the cross-shaped shadow of the dagger with which he was killed (illus. 43). But Attila tries to give a symbolic reading to this vision after he has killed his daughter Kubla, suggesting that she is ‘part of him’ and his blood, so that her dead body on the ground is symbolically or metaphorically his body and blood and the prophecy has thus been fulfilled. This fails for the audience as an obviously contrived symbolic interpretation, even before the remaining seer tersely points out: ‘My Lord Attila, there is no shadow.’ It is the new, Christian Rome – Marcian and Pope Leo – that masters both written signification and visual immediacy and thereby surpasses both East Rome and Attila. The written word for Christians here is not the arbitrary signifier of linguistics, but the performative word of Genesis, where naming a creature is a creative act bringing forth its essence and asserting superiority. Christianity re-learns its lesson from Attila’s naming practices at the feast, and under Marcian’s rulership in Rome harnesses the power of visible physicality. The dominant Christian sign in Constantinople is the letters p and x superimposed in the traditional symbol of pax or peace; in addition, there are images and statues of saints mixed in with ancient secular figures throughout the city. But West Rome replaces this with the cross, which is seen on Marcian’s and Leo’s chest as well as in and on the churches. The cross is not so much an abstract, arbitrary signifier like the letters p and x, but is a replica of an instrument of torture and killing that has a physical, causal connection to what it signifies: Christ’s

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sacrifice. This is emphasized when it again becomes a deadly weapon in Attila’s killing. The power of the cross lies in physically making Christ’s sacrifice present as a model and reminder of God’s support. But Attila still understands its function for Christians as merely a ‘symbol of their faith’, as he calls it in front of two pilgrims. His underestimation of the physical power of the cross gives Christians their final advantage when Attila dithers over the right reading of signs. Attila thinks that the Romans, like the Byzantines, still rely on arbitrary letters that in his experience cannot compete with his visual displays of strength. He has not understood that with the cross, they have found a sign that is invested with direct, physical power. When he shies away in horror from a cross that seems to be floating in a church (but is in fact carried by a priest in the dark), he flees from the dawning realization of this power. As soon as Attila finally admits to himself after meeting Leo and killing his daughter that the Christians no longer communicate through arbitrary, abstract signs but through signs that have immediate visual impact, he understands that he cannot win, and retreats – too late. That Attila’s death involves not a cross, but the shadow of a cross points further to the fact that he underestimated not the cross as an abstract signifier, but its materiality. A cross is a material object that can cast a shadow, not just an arbitrary sign, and this is what Attila has realized too late to survive. Marcian, on the other hand, manages to combine writing with physical immediacy by tying written signifiers into a close, non-arbitrary relationship with reality. This combination of written and visual documents with the physical world culminates in his use of a map in the final, decisive encounter with Attila at the end of the film. While in many epic films, like The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), a ruler’s desired power over an empire can be depicted by his dominance over its representation on a map, this is not the case in Sign of the Pagan.11 Here, the only map that appears in the film is directly embedded in the area depicted on it. Just before the climax, Marcian, acting in the emperor’s stead, stands on the ramparts and looks out over the countryside outside Rome, with two scrolls unfurled in front of him on the parapet (illus. 44). Several officers arrive with news that Attila the Hun is finally retreating from Rome. Marcian, propping his left hand onto the map, says that he suspects a ruse and orders that the Romans ride around Attila’s flank to join a legion already in the north, and ambush him. A commander, pointing at the map,

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44 Sign of the Pagan, Marcian using map and territory.

shows Marcian the city, previously ransacked by Attila, where the legion is supposed to group. Marcian glances at the map, nods and then looks up again into the landscape represented on it, confirming that ‘today, we win or lose all’ – promptly going on to do the former, of course. This may seem a typical depiction of mastery over map and territory, with Marcian’s hand on the map mirroring his control over the territory it represents. But it is striking that the map needs the support of the surrounding area and of the advisers to work as a planning tool for Marcian: it is his commander who primarily refers to the map, while Marcian looks at the territory, not its image, when he makes his decision. The map itself, like all documents in the film, is a small scroll with wooden rollers; it lies on the wall on top of another such map or document. It is difficult to actually see anything on the map due to the frontal camera angle.12 The curious effacing and at the same time doubling of the map draws attention to the relationship between surface and representation, between the parchment supporting the map and that which is signified by it. A map works, similarly to a film, by combining several different kinds of signification: words, labels and symbols, compass points and arrows, and icons of streets, rivers, buildings. Although it is a document on parchment, it demands not just to be read but also to be looked at; it is a visual, not just a written, document. Marcian has not only mastered the complex visual code of a map, but also sees and uses the potential of the actual geography about him, and rides into action into it in the next scene, shot from the very ramparts on which he has

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45 Sign of the Pagan, the written title and Attila’s ensign.

been standing. Cleverly using the remnants of houses and buildings of the ransacked town as hiding places for strategically positioned soldiers, as well as working with walls and stairs for his own fights, he manages to defeat Attila. He has shown that he can bring the document (the signifier) and the physical world (the signified) together to trick and overcome Attila. Rather than simply reading the map, that is, distilling its abstract message, he translates this message into the actual landscape and emerges a valiant and victorious general and warrior who is instantly crowned new Roman emperor. The film itself, too, trades for its impact on precisely such a combination of symbolic signifier and immediately visual communication. The film’s opening programmatically stages how it can go beyond the arbitrary written sign and give it some physical immediacy. The title ‘Sign of the Pagan’ is displayed in monumental letters (introduced by the more modestly sized line ‘Universal International presents’, illus. 45). The letters aim at maximum visual impact not only by their large size and bright golden and red colours but also by introducing an iconic element (which represents through similarity): a crescent on the ‘i’ of ‘sign’. This crescent is later seen on the astrological disk that the pagan seer carries around his neck, on a pagan military flag and on Marcian’s shield (it is also anachronistically reminiscent of another non-Christian religious sign, the Muslim crescent moon).13 But although writing is usually privileged over the visual image whenever it appears on film, images here augment the writing to make the frame represent reality more directly.14 The title

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is superimposed over an image of precisely what the words arbitrarily refer to: Attila’s ensign, filmed from below against a clear blue sky. Even before the title is shown, this ensign is visible as moving towards the camera and accompanied by lively, triumphal orchestral music, in the conventional manner in which an epic hero himself is introduced. This visual sign consists of a buffalo or bull skull and two human skulls mounted onto a pole with horizontal bars. It is adorned with coloured tassels and crowned by two impressive curved bull horns, which gives the whole ensign the outline of another huge bull’s skull. This multiple skull is a sign of death that has not just an arbitrary, but a direct, physical connection to what it represents. It signifies death in the sense of having been caused by death: the skulls are physical remnants of dead bodies (as regards the human skulls, at least within the filmic fiction; in the case of the animal skull and horns, probably actually so). So from the outset, the power of the filmic image is explicitly presented as imbuing the symbolic technology of writing with non-arbitrary, visual presence, which revives the medieval Christian communication techniques whose birth Sign of the Pagan dramatizes.

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The Printing Press vs the Cathedral

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame Copernicus The Adventures of Don Quixote

Literature is film’s favourite enemy, and academic history is the favourite enemy of historical film. Both literature and academic history almost always come in printed form, and it is thus no surprise that a large part of cinema’s imagination of the Middle Ages fantasizes about a time before print. One important battle in the war between literature and film over the greater power to bring the past to life was fought, for example, by G. W. Pabst’s The Adventures of Don Quixote (1933). This is an early sound film and the first sound film of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel, shot in German-, French- and Englishlanguage versions with slight variations.1 Quixote reads the printed medieval romances as if they were photographs, assuming a relationship of similarity between the content of a printed book and reality: the books bring the (idealized) chivalric past to life for him. However, even the opening sequence begs to differ: film can do more than books, it can bring images of pages from a printed book to life in a visible and not just imaginary way when they are superimposed with animated drawings of knights at a tournament created by Lotte Reiniger (illus. 46). In the end, however, it seems as if printing has won the fight to prove its power over lives and afterlives: when the Don’s books are burned in order to cure him of his antics, he breaks down dead; and over a shot of a burning book, he sings an aria from his grave, saying that he has become immortal in one book. But in a final twist, it is not literature that gives him longevity most impressively here, but film. Film not only acoustically transmits the aria by the Russian opera star Fedor Chaliapin (who plays Quixote), making the most of its new sound technology, but also, through reversal

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46 The Adventures of Don Quixote (G. W. Pabst, 1935), animated knights arise from the pages of a book.

of images, lets the burning book gradually become whole again to reveal the title page of Cervantes’ novel. So by bookending the film with sequences of state-of-the art animation and technology, film hammers home its victory over the written word, despite paying lipservice to the greatness of literature. With historiography, film equally has a love-hate relationship. As literary adaptations are expected to stay true to their sources, so historical films are expected to stay true to the past. But as Robert Stam points out, the ‘fidelity discourse’ surrounding films based on literary texts ‘assumes that a novel contains an extractable “essence”, a kind of “heart of the artichoke” hidden “underneath” the surface details of style . . . But, in fact, there is no such transferable core.’2 The same argument can be made in the fidelity discourse of history: historiography cannot lay claim to a ‘core’ of history any more than its representation in film can. Medieval films will often cite the authority of historiography and of literary sources only to debunk it, playing a complex game of drawing on its truth claims and attempting to supersede them. Such films usually profess to show a more nuanced and balanced account of a given event than print could, due to what

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Stam calls the multi-track, multiform nature of film that includes not just its often-stressed visuality, but also written and spoken language, sound and music. Copernicus (dir. Ewa Petelska and Czeslaw Petelski, 1973), a Polish-East German biopic, for instance, shows print to be the medium through which truth – Nicolaus Copernicus’ thesis that the cosmos revolves around the sun, not the earth – is disseminated, and gives it a vital role in the break from the church-dominated Middle Ages to print-dominated modernity, but also exposes it as being open to manipulation.3 Told retrospectively and non-chronologically, the film begins by showing how Copernicus’ work is finally being printed, and in an unusual technique repeats the exact same episode at the very end, but in a different, more extensive cut. It emerges only in the second version that Copernicus’ pupil Georg Joachim Rheticus is less than happy with the masterpiece being printed, as the title of the book originally was De revolutionibus (On the Revolutions), but the printer has added orbium coelestium (of the Heavenly Circles), thereby disambiguating the title to suggest that it did not refer to political revolutions. Moreover, in order to avoid censorship, the printer has inserted a preface to state that these were hypotheses, not the truth. Rheticus is so scandalized because the search for truth was Copernicus’ often repeated motto and motivation, and because Copernicus waited half his life to publish this book (even fully revising it at a late stage after gaining access to new research) until he was satisfied that it was the truth. So as is typical of medieval film, Copernicus introduces printing as a medium that is capable of spreading the truth, but that is also easily manipulated against the author’s wishes. Film emerges as somewhat superior to print in that this film represents Copernicus’ struggle for truth more accurately than the printer had done. But the fact that this point is made in an episode of which there are two different cuts makes it crystal-clear that film, too, only ever shows one truth, not the truth. Like its protagonist, then, Copernicus subscribes to the search for truth, but not to the possibility of ever finding it in any medium. This chapter discusses the representation of print in medieval film. Print is usually presented in both media histories and in medieval films as the defining medium of modernity. It is normally considered less of a visual object than handwritten manuscripts are, whose materiality, visual ornamentation and illustration are stressed. (Again, this is not my own opinion, but that expressed in the majority of medieval films.) The crucial distinction here is the one introduced in

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the previous chapter between writing as visual object, as the signifier of the ornate, handwritten letter on the one hand and of writing as text, as signified, as the abstract, arbitrary meaning of each letter on the other.4 My main example, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (dir. William Dieterle, 1939), seems to be devoted to praising print as a new medium of disseminating thought democratically, but we can also view it against the grain to reveal scepticism towards writing.

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Visual Image vs Abstract Meaning in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo’s masterpiece of romantic medievalism, has been used as a source for several films, such as Wallace Worsley’s 1923 version with Lon Cheney produced by Carl Laemmle, and Walt Disney’s 1996 animation (dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise). Like Sign of the Pagan, the 1939 Hollywood rko studios production, directed by the German émigré William (or Wilhelm) Dieterle, stands firmly in the German tradition of thought and films about the Middle Ages. As a theatre and film actor and director, Dieterle had been part of the intellectual scene in 1920s Berlin, was friends with Horkheimer and Adorno and had starred in many medieval films and plays, for example, as the poet in Waxworks (1924) and as Valentin in Faust (1926), but also in The Genoa Conspiracy (1921), The Count of Charolais (1922) and Lucretia Borgia (1922); and staged Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell with an emigré team in Hollywood shortly before shooting The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The scriptwriter, Bruno Frank, was a successful author and close to Thomas Mann and Leon Feuchtwanger, who were part of the German community in Los Angeles during the Third Reich. Many other German émigrés, like Ernst Matray, Peter Berneis, Curt Bois and Siegfried Arno, also worked on this film. The introductory title sets it explicitly at the end of the Middle Ages, when a new era of peace and enlightenment was slowly dawning (some advertising material specifies the year 1482, which is when Victor Hugo’s novel takes place.) The beautiful gypsy dancer Esmeralda arrives in Paris to turn the heads of no less than four very different men: the austere cleric and chief justice Frollo, the charming but penniless poet Gringoire, the dashing general Phoebus and the

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hunchbacked and deaf bell-ringer of Notre Dame, Quasimodo. Esmeralda seeks sanctuary from the persecution of the gypsies in Notre Dame, where secular justice does not reach. But Frollo, who brought up the foundling Quasimodo, orders him to abduct her; and Quasimodo is publicly punished when this plan is thwarted, while the instigator Frollo remains undiscovered. Esmeralda has only eyes for Phoebus, but marries Gringoire to help him out of trouble. Frollo continues to pursue her and kills Phoebus in a fit of jealousy. Esmeralda is framed for that murder and sentenced to death by Frollo. But Quasimodo whisks her away into the cathedral. The nobility tries to force the king to abolish Notre Dame’s right to grant people asylum, but Gringoire publishes a pamphlet arguing against that, and the people march on the cathedral in protest at the nobility. Quasimodo mistakenly assumes they have come to claim Esmeralda and fights them. He also manages to free Esmeralda from Frollo’s renewed attack by throwing Frollo off the bell tower. The king pardons Esmeralda and she is reunited with Gringoire, whom she has grown to love. Quasimodo is left to look on wistfully.

47 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), the manuscript-like written prologue.

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48 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Notre Dame cathedral in all its splendour.

Like most medieval films, The Hunchback of Notre Dame initially seems to buy into the Western academic preference for writing as a medium that grants historical authority. The Warner Home Video dvd’s menu is designed to look like an electronic manuscript, combining elements of film stills, of medieval ornaments from manuscript marginalia, glass windows and textiles with Anglo-Saxon font. In the 1939 film, the historical background is introduced by a title card made to look somewhat like a manuscript (illus. 47). Richard Burt observes that such an incorporation of manuscripts, typical of medieval film and its publicity materials, ‘counts as authentic because of its closeness to the historical moment being filmed’.5 But it also lends authenticity because writing is the almost exclusive medium of historiography. Many medieval films like Francesco (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1989), The Name of the Rose (1986) and Pope Joan (2009) even purport to be manuscripts, typically when a narrator from the off announces that he or she has written down the story. This has become so conventional in medieval films that it was parodied in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (dir. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1974), where the inter-titles drawn by a calligrapher

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become animated and interrupted; and in The High Crusade (dir. Klaus Knoesel and Holger Neuhäuser, 1994), whose opening credits appear to be pages from a book also called The High Crusade written by the character Brother Parvus, giving satirical descriptions of the main characters. Burt goes so far as to suggest that ‘all title sequences have something more or less medieval about them in that they combine images and texts, animate the letter’ and are closer to scrolls than to books.6 But such a generalization as regards both films and medieval manuscripts is unhelpful. The Hunchback’s opening, for example, achieves precisely the opposite of animating the letter when the camera slowly moves down to follow the ‘manuscript’ text (or the text is moved up) to make the remaining six lines visible, drawing attention to how limited the scroll is. It forces the viewer into a linear movement before the eye can feast on the splendid opening image of Notre Dame Cathedral, which we can now identify as the source as the bells that had been ringing over the opening credits (illus. 48). The authority of the written word is invoked here to lay claims to a historical depiction of the end of the Middle Ages – not a literary adaptation – only to be instantly upstaged. Nevertheless, the plot continues to explicitly promote printing. The very first scene sets the film at the point of change from an old time of visual communication to a new, promising time of printing. It turns out that the first image of Notre Dame is seen from the window of a printer’s workshop, in which the king, Louis xi, is inspecting the new invention of the printing press, together with his chief justice Frollo. Louis makes a speech contrasting printing with the old, Christian past, represented by the cathedral to which he points: To me, it is a new form of expression of thought. Out there is the old form. All over France, in every city, there stand cathedrals like this one: triumphant monuments of the past. They tower over the homes of our people like mighty guardians, keeping alive the invincible faith of the Christians. Every statue, every arch, every column is a carved leaf out of our history, a book in stone, glorifying the spirit of France. The cathedrals are the handwriting of the past. The press is of our time, and I won’t do anything to stop it, Frollo.

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49 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, manuscript and printed volume offered for comparison.

While the written prologue separates the Middle Ages from the new time on the basis of political and religious developments – it mentions the end of the Hundred Years’ War, a new king, the waning of superstition – for Louis, history is media history. Though the old visual forms are respected, he and the film seem highly progressive. The scene associates the new period of print with freedom of thought – the title of a freshly printed book by the poet Gringoire – as well as with efficient production and profit. Louis remarks how much longer his prayer book took to write than the incunabula took to print. The Middle Ages, by contrast, are shown to communicate visually: the cathedral is set up as an object for the viewers’ as well as Louis’ gaze with the window as a frame through which Louis looks and from which the camera moves away to reveal the printer’s workshop, followed by shots of the cathedral’s statues and portals to accompany Louis’ description. By calling cathedrals ‘handwriting of the past’, Louis connects them to manuscripts: we can read a cathedral like ‘a book in stone’, as Victor Hugo already formulated. But this refers to manuscripts not as texts, but as visual objects. An actual manuscript, too, Louis’ prayer book, which he compares to one

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of the incunabula, is shown to be a visual object rather than a signified text. In a medium close-up the manuscript and the printed volume are framed together (illus. 49). The manuscript is largely taken up by images (a drawing and marginalia) while the text retreats into the background in a way typical of certain pages in the most expensive books of hours, but not of manuscripts in general. The printed pages, on the other hand, consist of text only, albeit with decorated initial letters. It is no coincidence that the image on the opened manuscript pages of the king’s prayer book is a resurrection scene: in its visual, material aspect, writing can be seen to continue the materiality of the body as resurrection was believed to do, while as a printed signified, it is reduced to the immaterial word only. Communication is here and throughout the film split into two eras: the Middle Ages, embodied by the visual communication of cathedral and manuscript, and the new period of printing. Only the evil characters – first and foremost Frollo – resist the new time; the wise king welcomes its liberating and democratizing potential, so does Gringoire whose book is the first example of printed matter. Print continues to play this progressive role throughout The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Halfway through the film, a servant reads to the king from a printed book that all human beings are God’s creatures and should respect each other. Louis comments on the revolutionary potential of these words if everyone could read them, and repeats that he is glad to live in a time of new beginnings. (The enlightened spirit is humorously emphasized by the fact that in this very scene, Louis is sitting in a bathtub and promises his physician to adapt to the modern fashion of bathing more often, as much as twice a year.) Later on, print does indeed achieve a mass protest. Gringoire has a pamphlet published in which he calls the Parisians to rally in support of Esmeralda. Gringoire’s printed pamphlet, quickly disseminated by students and craftsmen, mobilizes the citizens, and they assemble in front of the king’s palace. The king, to whom the pamphlet is handed, notices with surprise how quickly it has rallied the masses and kindly summarizes: This poet is cleverer than I thought. This bold new way of appealing by printed petition is creating a sort of public opinion that is forcing decisions even on kings. Impertinent, but I like it. It’s different.

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50 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the evil nobility communicate by writing.

51 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the evil Frollo surrounded by manuscripts.

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52 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the deaf judge barricaded behind his desk.

He supports Gringoire and the citizens against the nobility and not only upholds the cathedral’s immunity, but also pardons Esmeralda. When she wants to thank the archbishop, he advises her to thank Gringoire instead, ‘whose little printed papers set you free’. Print makes you free, print is democratic, print is new, print is good – this is what the plot of The Hunchback of Notre Dame ostensibly shows. But there is also a less positive view of writing in the film, and that is that of the medieval writing technology of manuscripts. The manuscript in the first scene is a visual, material object, and as is typical of medieval film shown to be quaintly beautiful rather than dangerous. But everywhere else in the film, manuscripts are presented as texts, and are then used by the authorities for bureaucratic and violent ends. As is often the case in medieval film, these manuscripts are death sentences, arrest warrants, eviction orders and other negative, performative documents; and the desk and the lectern are the centres and instruments of power.7 The power-obsessed nobi lity, for example, handwrite their petition against Esmeralda to the king; the process of signing this document is shown extensively and in detail (illus. 50). Poor citizens have to hand in written petitions if they want to communicate with the king – without a desk and without much of a chance of getting them read. The evil Frollo is shown in his study, surrounded by manuscripts (illus. 51). Soldiers destroying the printing press have a handwritten warrant to do so. Esmeralda’s death sentence is a Latin manuscript. Indeed, the entire legal system functions via written documents only, to the exclusion of any personal, visual, face-to-face communication. This is made clear

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53 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo watches Esmeralda in the torture chamber.

54 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Esmeralda looks up at Frollo.

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55 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo turns away.

in the two flawed court cases of the plot when Quasimodo is wrongly accused of having abducted Esmeralda, and when Esmeralda is falsely convicted of murder. In the first case, the judge is unable to communicate in any other way but through writing, not visually, acoustically or physically: he is deaf, and does not glance up from the papers which surround him at his desk (illus. 52). So he does not notice that Quasimodo, who is deaf, too, cannot respond, proceeds with his interrogation regardless and in the end punishes Quasimodo’s inability to answer as if it were deliberate. The law is shown to rely exclusively on writing, and it is pointed out how unfair this is, as Quasimodo has no access to papers and no chance to defend himself. A similar limitation of the law to writing is repeated in Esmeralda’s trial. Frollo can see into the torture chamber through a hole in his lectern. He lifts the lid and sees that Esmeralda is brought in, we see that he is watching, she looks up to him and cries out, but he turns away, covers his eyes and closes the desk (illus. 53–5). He refuses to engage with her visually or acoustically, and limits himself to writing. He, too, can only see the letter of the law, but not communicate face-to-face. So if it is a text rather than a visual object, the medieval medium of manuscript

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writing is dangerous and elitist, an instrument of those in power, who routinely abuse it and refuse to communicate in any other way. The association of the visual signifier with resurrection in the opening scene and of the signified with death and destruction in the rest of the film is typical of Western culture. The signifier can be seen to preserve traces of the dead in a material form, but the immaterial signified must disappoint because it reduces the material body to an abstract meaning and thereby, metaphorically, kills it. But, on closer inspection, print is not as entirely positive as the plot superficially suggests either. The positive judgement of print, of Gringoire and the benevolent king are made so explicit that they seem exaggerated and undermine themselves, as in the king’s rather stilted comments cited above. The happy ending, for example, where, unlike in the novel, Esmeralda is pardoned thanks to Gringoire’s pamphlets; and the young couple ride into the sunset together cheered on by a delighted crowd, is so clichéd that it begs the question of whether this is meant to be taken seriously. This is emphasized by the addition of a final shot in which Quasimodo is shown watching the couple’s exit alone, sad and clearly not partaking in the overall merriment. Research, insofar as it has examined this film at all, has so far opted to follow its surface narrative of progress through print.8 Not only can the film’s exaggeration be viewed as distancing, however, but its aesthetics with an emphasis on the face and immediate visual impressions also actually undermines its insistence on the value of print. Any film trades on visuality, but this film is particularly geared towards it.9 As we have seen, even the opening scene highlights its visual effects: the cathedral and the manuscript appear here as material objects to behold, not as texts. More than that, cathedral and manuscript are rendered in moving images: the cathedral is embedded in a tracking shot; the manuscript in its entirety is moved and opened by the king. The Gothic cathedral can be thought of as a proto-cinematic apparatus, manipulating the light streaming through its windows into colours and shapes to powerful effect (as Esmeralda describes to Frollo) – like a film projector does.10 But film can go beyond this illumination of the interior space of the church by actually projecting images onto a blank screen. Visual impressions, especially those of the face, are what makes this film memorable. Charles Laughton as Quasimodo is its star. While the advertising material stresses how difficult it was to apply his make-up (five-hour-long sessions beginning

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before sunrise are repeatedly invoked), no image of his face was released so as not to spoil the visual effect of its first appearance in the film.11 This first appearance is carefully prepared within the film, too. While the bell-ringer Quasimodo is mentioned several times from the very first scene, he does not become visible until twelve minutes into the film, twelve minutes during which visual spectacle is the main theme and plot point. The second episode after the discussion of media at the printer’s workshop is a mass spectacle, a carnival with theatre, acrobatics, dancing and other visual performances, culminating in the election of the king of the fools, the man who can present the ugliest face in a frame on stage. Shots and reverse shots continuously show that not only the film audience, but also characters within the film are observing a spectacle. They even comment on the fact that they are doing so in a lengthy discussion about the visual attraction of beauty and ugliness. When Quasimodo first appears, it is as a subject rather than object of vision: hidden under the stage, he stares at the beautiful Esmeralda dancing. This sequence could hardly have been more geared towards visual effects. Quasimodo is spotted first by Esmeralda. A reverse shot shows us what Esmeralda sees and what frightens her: his eyes behind the boards. But because this is an extremely brief shot, we see nothing really. Quasimodo’s face is only properly visible when it is held up for scrutiny in the plot, too: he is dragged onto the stage and his face is pushed through the frame. Again the camera cuts across from Quasimodo to the fascinated audience, and back, to emphasize their mutual observation. This film thus seems to reinstate the face and visuality in general as the key medium of communication. With this in mind, it becomes clear that it celebrates not so much printing as the new technology most apt for spreading knowledge, but film. Like many filmmakers and film theorists, Dieterle saw the invention of the kinematograph as a media revolution equivalent to the invention of the printing press. In his memoirs, he writes: I dare say that the invention of film plays a greater role in human history than the invention of print. Not as significant a role, to be sure, but a greater role: it cannot be denied that many people unfortunately cannot read, but almost all can see and hear and are able to follow films. And while many places unfortunately still have no libraries, cinemas are found almost everywhere in the world . . .

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56 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the cracks in Laughton’s false neck.

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For the first time, one can find out about human life in distant countries not only verbally, but also visually, and draw immediate conclusions from that for one’s own existence.12

So it is the visual, more immediate knowledge of far-away places (including, one could add, those of distant times) that supersedes reading about those places. The role of film as a democratizer – a socially levelling medium accessible to everyone – mirrors that of print in the plot of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. By promoting print, Dieterle may have allegorically been promoting the idealized values of Hollywood filmmaking – global accessibility and pluralism for all. With his claim for the greater visual immediacy of film, a return to the face-to-face communication of the Middle Ages, he was part of a proud tradition of film theorists that will be discussed in the conclusion to the present book. (Other current film theorists have been more critical, however, and pointed to the illusory nature of any filmic representation of the face.)13 But The Hunchback of Notre Dame is cleverer than Dieterle’s or the film theorists’ written comments. It does not allow for the argu ment that the close-up of the face is either a reinstatement of visual

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communication or the destruction thereof. Instead, it shows dialectically that a face on the screen is neither fully there nor fully absent; that it makes the past present, but only to an extent. This film has it both ways: the faces are present, but the stress on the fact that this is a filmic spectacle undermines this effect: in a Brechtian manner, the film unmasks the visual techniques of film as well as relying on their potential to draw the audience in. Dieterle has us impressed by Quasimodo’s grotesque looks as well as aware of their performative nature, their stagedness, both on the level of the plot and on screen. Elsewhere, too, the film relies both on the visual effect of presence it creates, and at the same time on emphasizing the constructedness of this effect. The scene mentioned earlier in which audiences look at Frollo refusing to observe Esmeralda’s torture is one such example where we are both drawn to empathize with the suffering human creature, and are reminded that we are watching this scene, as is Frollo. The same is true for the sequence of Quasimodo suffering on the pillory: we are strongly encouraged not only to empathize with this bare life sweating and thirsting in the heat, but also to see through this as a spectacle set up for the mob’s consumption, and even to reflect on the fact that this is Charles Laughton acting, especially when the cracks in Laughton’s false neck are left clearly visible (illus. 56). In several cases, the filmicness of this spectacle is underlined when the static images and architecture of the Middle Ages are contrasted with the moving images of film, for example, when the king of fools Quasimodo with his fabric crown saunters past the statues of kings on the cathedral portals, his face, gestures and gait so much more eloquent than the stone figures, or when Esmeralda is moved by a rather plain statue of the Virgin Mary, whereas her own face is so expressive that it can even touch the austere Frollo, and of course the viewer. While writing – both in printed and in handwritten form – turns out to be dangerous and limited in its effectiveness, never quite fulfilling its promise of material presence, the medieval cathedral is much more impressive. But both are surpassed by film, which can show facial expressions and gestures to much greater effect because it is animated, and can simultaneously reflect on their mediatedness.

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6

Detecting the Middle Ages

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The Da Vinci Code A Canterbury Tale The Name of the Rose

‘We are very fortunate to have such snowy ground here. It is often the parchment on which the criminal unwittingly writes his autograph. Now, what do you read from these footprints here?’, asks the monk William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose (1986), trying to solve a mysterious series of deaths in a medieval monastery. If truth cannot easily be printed in medieval film, as we have seen in the last chapter, can it at least be read? Yes, it can, The Name of the Rose answers, but only by a detective, and preferably if it is ‘read’ in a metaphorical sense, like footsteps rather than books. Detective and judicial plots provide rich opportunities for dramatizing the search for truth about the past, and the different ways of mediating it, in which medieval film as a genre is so interested. Although the profession of detective emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century, medieval films and medievalist fiction have found a variety of ways to adapt narratives of detection to a medieval setting. They might feature amateur investigators like Brother Cadfael in Ellis Peters’s books or William of Baskerville; or be set in modern times where the key to solving a recent crime lies in medieval history and literature, as in A Canterbury Tale (1944), Se7en (1995) and The Da Vinci Code (2006); or dramatize a court’s attempts to establish the truth about an offence, like the films about the fifteenth-century ‘war of the oxen’, about Joan of Arc and Rashomon. Both a setting in a past and a detective story can work in comforting ways to distance the viewer from the violence of the crime, but medieval films will commonly leave a remainder of unease about how exactly to interpret the often highly complex events and the film as a whole.1

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What is admitted as proof in these films usually differs from modern (fictional and actual) legal systems. The key distinction here is between the truth claims of that which is read and that which is seen and experienced. Written evidence – especially the content rather than material existence of documents – is again treated with more scepticism than eyewitness accounts, empathy and personal observation (for example, of footprints in the snow). This is closer to what are commonly perceived as medieval legal methods of truth-finding, where eyewitness statements were given more credence than written contracts or other documents in establishing a legal situation. (Again, I am not claiming that the Middle Ages really accorded less power to the written word, simply that it is the dominant opinion in the twentieth and twenty-first century that they did.) It has been argued that the professional detective and the professional historian emerged at the same point of cultural history and with the same mission: to reconstruct a plausible chain of events in the past from clues left in the present.2 The past was seen as a puzzle that called for detection on the basis of material clues, be they fossils that tell the story of how life on earth has evolved, archaeological finds that indicate ancient settlement patterns, or traces connected to a murder that reveal the identity of the killer. From this perspective, it is not surprising that in many medieval films, the investigation of a crime in the recent past will allegorically mirror the contemporary approach to the medieval past.3 Detective films set in the Middle Ages are predisposed towards reflecting in particular on their indebtedness to and difference from historical writing (both historiography and fictional writing) as regards the kind of truth about the past that they can reveal. Many of these films are literary adaptations, too, and thus, as suggested in the previous chapter, doubly prone to self-reflexivity. Relying on written evidence alone is shown to be highly limiting also in this context; a mixture of empathy and seeing the past as part of a continuum to the present is encouraged. A good example is The Da Vinci Code (dir. Ron Howard, 2006), where the truth about the murder mystery at the heart of the plot is also the truth about the Middle Ages, or about what most people will at least have heard about the Middle Ages: about the crusades, the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail. The written word helps to solve this complicated (and quite implausible) conspiracy case insofar as it

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57 The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), Sophie sheds light on Saunière’s message in invisible ink.

is a material object rather than a text, and is experienced rather than simply decoded. Curator Jacques Saunière is found murdered in the Louvre, but before his death alerted his granddaughter Sophie and Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology. Saunière turns out to have been killed because he was a member of the Priory of Zion, a secret organization that since the Middle Ages has been guarding the Grail, a ‘vessel’ that is actually Mary Magdalene, with whom Jesus had a daughter. As Sophie and Langdon try to solve the murder by following Saunière’s clues to the Grail, they find themselves hunted by three different parties: the police under Captain Fache; the Roman Catholic church (especially its conservative arm Opus Dei, which tries to prevent the discovery of the ‘Grail’ because it might cast doubts on Jesus’s divine nature and cause upheaval in the faith); and the eccentric scholar Sir Leigh Teabing, who wants to publicize the secret of the Grail to further the spirit of enlightenment and the equality of women. In the end, Sophie turns out to be the last surviving descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but decides not to give away the secret of the Grail in order not to destroy people’s faith. Langdon finds Mary Magdalene’s grave underneath the glass pyramid outside the Louvre. This case is solved with the help of writing when writing is considered as a visual object rather than as text. Next to his body, Saunière has left a message written in invisible ink on the floor that, as writing so often is in medieval film, turns out to have been mani pulated by Captain Fache when he wiped out the last line ‘ps Find Robert Langdon’. Realizing that the message is a material object

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that can in such a way be altered – which is proven by a photograph of the original message, as if images were not susceptible to manipulation – is what gets the detective investigation under way. Treating writing as letters rather than as text with a meaning assigned through convention, Sophie works out that ‘ps’ does not mean postscriptum but ‘Princess Sophie’, her nickname as a child. This view of writing as letters rather than as text gives Langdon and Sophie their first breakthrough in the investigation, too: while the other lines of the dying message (‘O draconian devil / Oh lame saint’) mean nothing, they are anagrams that, descrambled, spell out ‘Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa’. Near that image in the Louvre they find another anagram message, written in invisible ink (illus. 57), guiding them to Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, where a key to a box that contains a keystone to the Grail is hidden. That the Grail is really Mary Magdalene, or more precisely, the fact that Jesus had descendants, is also revealed through writing as a material signifier – a two-word expression for the Grail, ‘San Greal’, if the words are divided differently, spells ‘Sang Real’, the ‘royal blood’ of Jesus’ offspring. Similarly, the clue ‘in London lies a knight, a pope interred’ has to be treated as a signifier rather than a text when ‘a pope’ refers not to a pope, but to the poet Alexander Pope: ‘a’ is the letter, not the conventional meaning of an indefinite article. In each case, the writing prompts Langdon and Sophie to physically move somewhere: they cannot solve the mystery in their heads, but have to travel through France and Britain on their quest. Visual images contain the truth somewhat more directly, but they still have to be deciphered correctly, as the professor of symbology knows only too well. Again, the trick is not to expect conventionalized content, but to look at that which is actually visible – the colours and shapes on the canvas. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, for instance, reveals that the Grail is actually Mary Magdalene through the fact that there are no cups on the table, but a very feminine-looking figure to Christ’s right, in a matching garment, and separated from him by a gap in the shape of an inverted triangle (a symbol of femininity). The clearest proof of truth is neither writing nor image, but – as in Pope Joan (2009) – body and blood: not only do blood stains on the floor of the Louvre show where Saunière went, and blood spills in the sink give Langdon the idea where to look for the sarcophagus, but the ultimate proof of Mary Magdalene’s bloodline to

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Sophie would be a dna test.4 By not providing the latter, the film leaves open whether the legend is true. But it has abundantly made clear that truth lies in physical experience and materiality rather than abstract writing, and in this way the film is actually true to the medieval Grail quest narratives it adapts.

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Truth in Writing and in Experiencing in A Canterbury Tale A quite different story of the truth about the past having to be experienced rather than read is shown in A Canterbury Tale (dir. Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell, 1944), an updated version of Chaucer’s tales about the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Historically, pilgrimage and writing were closely related; and it is in Canterbury, at Thomas à Becket’s grave, where the largest medieval collection of miracle reports is set, and where the practice of acquiring letters of indulgence through pilgrimage was developed.5 But in A Canterbury Tale, writing is a poor substitute for pilgrimage to a cathedral. The film models both approaches to the (recent and medieval) past: treating the past either as a puzzle inviting detection or as a journey inviting experience and empathy. Like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Sign of the Pagan (1954), it is very much influenced by a German tradition of medieval film, with German and Austro-Hungarian émigrés like Pressburger, Alfred Junge and Erwin Hillier occupying important positions in the production. The plot takes place in the late Second World War, but is medieval insofar as it adapts the Canterbury Tales and begins with a brief scene set in the Middle Ages. The dominant plotline is that of the solving of a crime. From a scene of medieval pilgrims on the Canterbury road accom panied by an off-screen recital of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the film cuts to the Kent landscape of the present (1943) wartime accompanied by a poem comparing the pilgrims to modern travellers. Three young people arrive in the (fictional) village of Chillingbourne near Canterbury on the same train during the blackout on a Friday night: Alison Smith, a plucky London shop-girl who has lost her fiancé in the war, has come to work as a land girl; the laid-back but brokenhearted American Sergeant Bob Johnson, posted to Britain, has got off by mistake on a weekend trip to Canterbury; and London bachelor and cinema organist Sergeant Peter Gibbs is stationed at the

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nearby army training camp. As they walk from the station, Alison is attacked by a soldier who pours glue into her hair. The trio find out that this has been the eleventh such attack that summer. Alison is immediately suspicious of the shifty local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper (so is the viewer), and enlists Bob and Peter’s help over the course of the weekend to work out the identity of the ‘glue-man’. Through interviewing the locals, speculating about the motif and collecting written evidence, they discover that the culprit is indeed Colpeper. On their way to Canterbury on Monday morning, they chance across him on the train, and he uses the opportunity to indirectly confess and explain his motif: he wants to intimidate women to prevent them from going out with soldiers, so that the soldiers will instead attend his lectures about the Kent countryside and its past. Alison and Bob forgive him and both receive good news in Canterbury: Alison finds out that her fiancé is still alive, and Bob that his girlfriend has not left him, but that her letters have merely been delayed. Peter persists in trying to report Colpeper to the police, but is distracted when he gets to fulfil a long-held dream of playing the organ in Canterbury cathedral before being sent to war. The trio find themselves at the farewell service of Peter’s battalion who are about to see active service. The magistrate remains to reflect on his behaviour, and resorts to inviting men and women to his lectures. The amateur detectives work from visual and written clues, and information gleaned from interviewing the locals. Writing is initially an unquestioned part of their world and their investigation: Alison writes to Peter to enlist his help and takes notes of the victim’s names in writing; a lecture by Colpeper is announced in written posters and flyers; the trio use an almanac and written notes to piece together the dates of the attacks. Their firmest evidence is also written: Peter steals the schedule of fire-guard duties from Colpeper’s study that proves that the dates of the attacks match his nights on duty; and Bob gets hold of the village grocer’s account book and then Colpeper’s waste paper in order to check for glue purchases, and finds receipts for large amounts of glue from Ryman’s stationers in Canterbury. Once these written receipts have been unearthed, the detective work is complete: ‘the rest is routine’, quips Bob. As so often in medieval film, writing is treacherous, here incriminating Colpeper, but it also preserves a record of the truth. Interwoven with this story of detective efforts to investigate the recent past of the summer’s crime spree

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58 A Canterbury Tale (Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell, 1944), Colpeper behind his desk.

is that of working out the medieval past of the local area. Colpeper has been elected on the bill of making sure that archaeological digs on the nearby pilgrims’ road to Canterbury are carried out, but the efforts seems so far to only have yielded an inscribed stone. But Colpeper is introduced very much in the typical style of the corrupt elite in medieval film: as writing behind his desk in the town hall (illus. 58). The desk is placed behind a beam in which the phrase ‘love and honour the truth’ is engraved, but the villain’s close association with writing – his study at home, we later find out, is also crammed full of books and papers – makes it difficult to fully believe in the truth claims of writing as evidence. And indeed, the truth at which this investigation arrives is a curiously unsatisfying conclusion – Colpeper’s motif seems too oblique to make much sense.6 He tried to prevent local girls from going out with soldiers (because any one of them might be the glue man), so that propriety would be upheld and the soldiers would attend his historical lectures instead. The film, however, does not end when the detective plot ends, and instead now models a different, empathetic approach to Colpeper’s past misdeeds and at the same time to the medieval past. The role of writing and detection diminishes, and the preferred method of understanding the past is now experiential: a pilgrimage journey that requires empathy and physical movement and that culminates at the Gothic cathedral at Canterbury. The truth is here not that which is written, but that which is experienced as a journey, and this approach arrives at a different, more convincing motivation for Colpeper’s actions as well as at a different picture of the medieval past, which highlights

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59 A Canterbury Tale, 1944), Alison hears medieval voices and music.

the continuities between past, present and future rather than treating it as a detached object of study. This new experiential approach begins with a walk to the old pilgrims’ road to Canterbury on a hill behind the village, and with the rail journey to Canterbury. After the crime is solved, Alison goes for a walk up to the bend in the pilgrims’ road where she had previously camped and conducted unofficial excavations with her fiancé. In a quasi-mystical experience, she hears voices, music and sounds from the Middle Ages (illus. 59). Colpeper suddenly jumps up from the high grass nearby where he had been immersing himself in the landscape. He and Alison bond in an unexpectedly erotic scene over their shared love of this part of the countryside, confessing to each other that they can hear voices from the past. Alison connects both with the medieval past and with the time that she spent here with her fiancé, whose soul she thinks rests in this landscape. Through this shared empathy for the past, Alison’s condemnation of Colpeper also changes. She no longer judges him according to the discourse of detection, writing and crime, but empathically, and understands that it is the love for his country that motivates his crimes. The film viewer is included in this empathetic approach to the past because he hears the voices that Alison hears, over shots of her confused face, and can recognize them as those of the medieval pilgrims from the start of the film. The trio’s train journey to Canterbury provides further opportunity for an empathetic rather than detective approach to the crime. When Colpeper indirectly confesses to the trio as they travel together

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on the train, he appeals to their wish to understand the crime rather than merely establish the chain of events. The truth that he explains here is no longer one of written evidence, but of oral testimony and experiential understanding: that he aimed not to harm women, but to share his love for the countryside in his lectures. There is a religious dimension to this journey in that Colpeper believes that he will be judged by God and have to do penance. Within this new discourse, the glue attacks now appear less as crimes than as ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, in Bob’s words: overstepping the mark in an essentially good pursuit. Colpeper wins both Bob and Alison round to viewing his past deeds not as solved puzzles, but as mysterious behaviour with which they can empathize without fully grasping it. Only Peter sticks to the detective approach and remains intent on reporting the magistrate to the police. The truth about the past, empathetically understood, emerges as part of a journey or pilgrimage. This means that the truth can never be fully arrived at, that searching for it is an open-ended process. It is the travelling that matters rather than the destination, attempting to understand the crime rather than arriving at a conclusion. The film resolutely prohibits fully resolving the motives of its central character, who cannot be pinned down and even begins to suddenly appear and disappear in a way that has often been understood as magical. This means that the role of the past changes, too: it is no longer the object of investigation, but a part of the journey that has influenced the present. Although it can never find the truth, there is more truth in sensory, physical, face-to-face experience than in writing. This model of physical experience as opposed to the detective model of writing is epitomized by the medieval cathedral, the point at which the pilgrimage – at least temporarily – ends. The truth revealed here is as much about the personal pasts of the main characters as about Colpeper’s crime and the medieval past. On their short stop in Canterbury cathedral, they are able to reconnect with their own pasts, but in a futureorientated manner in which the past is no longer gone but part of their present. Peter, who had been very vocal about the virtues of his modern London life as a cinema organist, with no ambition and no regrets, already exposed himself as actually quite melancholic about losing his past dreams of becoming a church organist. He comes to Canterbury

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60 A Canterbury Tale, Peter finds his redemptive sheet of music.

cathedral in order to find the police superintendent, but then picks up a sheet of music that the organist has dropped and follows him up to the organ to return it (illus. 60). The physical document, rather than its content, allows him to establish a link with his past dreams. As in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the cathedral is the ideal space to enable deep immediate experiences in contrast to those mediated by writing. The organist allows him to play the organ and to reconnect with his childhood aspiration. The cathedral organist’s own journey from circus musician to this exalted job suggests that Peter might be able to realize his childhood ambition to become a professional church organist, too. The fact that the service during which he plays is the farewell ceremony that marks the beginning of his battalion’s posting to an unnamed destination abroad highlights the future orien tation of this scene. Alison finds out the truth about her past when she visits the caravan in which she and her fiancé stayed during their excavation, now stored in a Canterbury garage. She does not rely on the written signs of the bombed-out sites to find her way, but asks the locals. When she arrives, she can only see the caravan as belonging to the past, and as

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having been out of use for a long time: the tyres have been requisitioned in the war effort; everything is dusty; her fiancé’s coat is motheaten. But then she hears from the garage-owner that her fiancé is still alive. Her fiancé’s father – who had initially opposed the marriage because Alison is a mere shop-girl – has been waiting for her in town for two weeks. The reconciliation that could not be achieved through writing – the father did not have Alison’s address to give her the news – can be reached through personal contact. Alison instantly begins clearing the caravan, which has transformed to her from a memorial to the past into a vehicle that can be used again for future holidays. She meets her future father-in-law in the cathedral, and his arm around her indicates that her past engagement can now lead to a wedding. Bob, too, uncovers the truth about his past in Canterbury cathedral. Although he visits the cathedral with a piece of paper that is presumably some kind of written guide, he does not look at it, and instead soaks up the magnificent architecture shown in impressive, lingering images made even more powerful by the Bach sonata played by Peter (illus. 61). But as a material object, writing helps him to reconnect with his girlfriend, who had stopped sending him letters seven weeks previously. He finds out the truth in Canterbury when he meets a comrade who has brought along the missing letters from this girlfriend, which had been delayed because she had taken up military service in Australia. It is their material existence rather than content that is their most important message: she has not left him. As Bob attend the farewell ceremony in the cathedral with his friend, he has the letters in his pocket and starts thinking about a future with her. ‘At the moment, I’ve got some trouble with the mother of my future son’, he had said outside the cathedral before he got the letters, but now the past can be reclaimed to lead into a future. Colpeper no longer hides behind his writing desk either and joins the fringes of the celebrating crowd in the cathedral. He mentioned that pilgrimage could aim to do a penance as well as to receive a blessing, and perhaps this is what he does here. At least the closing images show that he now invites women as well as men to his busy lectures. As in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the cathedral epitomizes visual communication in contrast to writing and is set up explicitly as medieval through the importance of the medieval pilgrim’s road throughout the plot and dialogues. Not only does it enable an experiential model of searching for truth for the modern ‘pilgrims’, it also

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61 A Canterbury Tale, Bob impressed by the cathedral.

can itself best be experienced rather than analysed. While the detective approach to the medieval past modelled in the first half of the film had yielded only limited results, the cathedral – and the road to it – makes at least Alison experience a profound connection to the past. The interior is shown not a monument to the past as past, but being used by many people and, with the farewell service, thoroughly future-oriented. This change from factual detection through the written word to empathetic pilgrimage to the Middle Ages (with writing in a substitute role as material object) is pre-empted in the very opening of the film. After a credit sequence accompanied by the sound of bells and images of Canterbury cathedral (closely reminiscent of The Hunchback of Notre Dame), it begins in a traditional authenticating manner by quoting from the literary text it adapts, the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. While the beginning of the prologue is read out, we see first the printed but ornate opening page of the book, then a map of England drawn in medievalist style. The camera zooms in to Kent and then moves along the drawn road to Canterbury. Next appears a drawing of medieval pilgrims on horseback, also in imitated medieval style, which changes into live-action footage of similar-looking

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62 A Canterbury Tale, medieval pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

pilgrims (illus. 62). The voice begins to read another rhymed poem, this time in modern English, describing how much the countryside has remained the same since Chaucer’s day, but that ‘we modern pilgrims see no journey’s end’. Here we see shots of roaming tanks and the ever-busy railway line. ‘Our journey has just begun’, the prologue ends. The implication is that film will be able to make the past come to life better than the written page can. But the prologue also suggests that this process of searching can never be complete, and implicates ‘us’ in having to embark on a potentially endless trip if we want to find out the truth about the past.

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Truth in Visuality in The Name of the Rose While A Canterbury Tale sets its detective plot in modern times, The Name of the Rose (1986), a highly successful international film produced in Germany by Bernd Eichinger, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and based on Umberto Eco’s bestselling book of the same name, features William of Baskerville as a medieval monk who acts as a proto-detective. The truth about a series of five mysterious deaths is revealed through writing, but, as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, only insofar as writing is considered as a visual object rather than a text, like the footsteps in the snow mentioned above. The Franciscan monk William of Baskerville arrives with his protégé, the novice Adso of Melk, in the winter of 1372 at an unnamed Benedictine abbey in Northern Italy to attend a papal dispute on the

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poverty of Christ. The monastery is in unrest because of the fatal fall of the illuminator Adelmo of Otranto from a seemingly unopenable window. William discovers that the monk in fact committed suicide by jumping from a different tower and then rolling down the hill. But more monks die: a Greek translator is found in a vat of pig’s blood, and the assistant librarian Berengar in the bath. Through logic, observation and speaking to the mentally disturbed monk Salvatore, William works out that the assistant librarian Berengar must have persuaded the beautiful Adelmo to have sex with him in return for letting him read a forbidden book. Adelmo passed the book on to the translator before killing himself in guilt and shame. The translator died in the scriptorium while reading this book, because it is written in poisoned ink, and Berengar dragged the body to the vat to avoid suspicions falling on himself. He then read the book himself and died from the poison. But the papal envoy arrives and the inquisitor Bernardo Gui surmises that the deaths are caused by witchcraft allegedly perpetrated by Salvatore and his friend Remigius as well as a young peasant girl with whom Adso has fallen in love. Bernardo accuses William of heresy for refusing to believe this theory. Meanwhile the abbey’s herbalist finds the forbidden book next to Berengar’s corpse, but the library assistant Malachius kills him in order to obtain the book for himself. Then Malachius himself dies from the poisoned ink. But William finds out who poisoned the book in the first place: the old librarian Jorge, who believes that laughing is dangerous and has therefore ordered that this book on comedy, the only copy of the second book of the Aristotle’s poetics, be written in poisonous ink. In a fire caused by Jorge, the abbey’s secret library with that book is destroyed and Jorge killed. The peasants rescue the alleged witch from the stake and kill Bernardo. William and Adso leave the abbey. The film purports to be a manuscript, written on parchment by Adso at the end of his life. This is divulged by voice-over at the beginning and end of the film (in some versions a written subtitle even identifies it as a palimpsest, a parchment page that was been scraped clean and rewritten). So writing is invoked as a reliable, historiographical record to lend the film kudos. The marketing of the film also stresses the historical accuracy of antiquarian details like clothes and buildings (although they in fact look dirty, old and worn, not as colourful as they would have been).7 Indeed, there is no doubt that Adso is a reliable narrator and that on the level of fictional mediation, this

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alleged manuscript provides a truthful account. But of course, most viewers will know that this is a fictional story, and this knowledge – more subtly than in the book but still clearly – inserts a layer of doubt into the written record’s pretence of being a truthful account of the past. Writing in many ways plays a positive role in The Name of the Rose as preserving knowledge. But the predominant role of writing in the plot, as is typical of medieval film, is that of a dangerous instrument of power. The underlying cause of the murders is, in William’s words, ‘a book that kills or for which men kill’. The film’s first image of Jorge shows him sitting at a desk surrounded by manuscripts, which in the language of medieval film clearly marks him out as suspicious from the start. He exerts power this time not so much through manipulating texts as through not allowing their dissemination. Like many medieval films, The Name of the Rose privileges writing as a visual, material object over the signifier as a means of establishing the truth – although, in contrast to some films, it is no less dangerous and open to manipulation in this function.8 A key piece of evidence is a scrap of parchment on which Berengar has written in lemon juice a coded message that reveals where in the secret library Aristotle’s book is hidden, and on which the translator has copied in normal ink some phrases from this book (illus. 63). Its materiality helps to divulge the truth when the lemony smell alerts William to the coded message. William deciphers part of it to mean ‘the first and the seventh of the four’, which turns out to refer to the first and seventh letter of the Latin for four, quattuor, engraved above the door to the secret chamber that holds the book. This phrase can only be understood if one considers writing as the signifier, the letters in a word, rather than just as its meaning. The script rather than the signified also provides a further clue insofar as it is that of a left-handed person, and the only left-handed monk is Berengar. In the case of the quotations from Aristotle, the content of the sentences about the use of comic figures does not provide a clue and even distracts William from finding the truth because he keeps thinking that this somehow refers to the killer. Only when he sees them as signifiers, as a relatively contingent sequence of words, they reveal the identity of the lethal book – not by virtue of naming it, but by being identical to passages from it. Finally, the mystery of how a book can kill is also resolved when it becomes clear that it is not the content but the material

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63 The Name of the Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986), a scrap of parchment as a key piece of evidence.

writing itself that kills when being touched. The title of the film (and the book on which it is based) hints at such issues of signification. There is no rose in either film or book, but a quotation appears in the German version at the end of the film (as well as at the end of the book: ‘Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus’, meaning ‘Yesterday’s rose persists in its name, we hold empty names’). What matters to this film is the difference between a material object and its arbitrarily given name or signifier. That it is the materiality of written documents rather than their content that establishes the truth for the investigator is accentuated when other material can be ‘read’ like writing to make even better proof. What establishes the truth more clearly than writing, as in The Da Vinci Code, are traces of blood and traces in the snow. William solves the mystery of Adelmo’s fall by observing the blood in the snow where his body fell. In the second case of death, William describes the snow as the ‘parchment on which the criminal leaves traces’, and Berengar’s shoe prints show that he moved the body to the vat (the pig’s blood initially obscures the identity of the victim, but when it is wiped away, reveals both the translator and the tell-tale black fingertips from turning the pages). The herbalist’s blood on Malachius’ shoe exposes him as the murderer – at least to the viewer, who is presented with a close-up of Malachius wiping his shoe clean and is encouraged to ‘read’ the blood to unmask this murderer

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ahead of William. So it is the materiality of signs, written or otherwise, rather than their abstract signified that unveils the truth. Even when they do not feature an amateur detective, many medieval films dramatize investigations into crimes and offences where writing can help or hinder the establishment of the facts. In The War of the Oxen (dir. Hans Deppe, 1943), truth resides in face-to-face communication rather than book learning, expressing a National Socialist scepticism towards intellectualism. It is based on a novel by Ludwig Ganghofer that fictionalizes a real dispute over grazing rights on a particular pasture in what is now Bavaria in 1421–2 that escalates into a war between neighbouring principalities due to the document granting the grazing rights being damaged. That writing can be more of a hindrance than a help when it not treated as a material, visual object is here part of a profoundly anti-modern, nostalgic agenda, but can also serve as a deconstructive critique as in The Name of the Rose, or as something in between, as in A Canterbury Tale and The Da Vinci Code.9

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Part III

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Human Limits

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7

The Birth of the Leader from the Collective

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Condottieri Luther Alexander Nevsky

If we had lived in the Middle Ages, we would have been different; in fact, even what this ‘we’ means – what a human is – would have been different. Because we believe in a clear break between the Middle Ages and our own, modern period, we can imagine them as a time before even the fundamentals of modern civilization existed, such as linear time, a script-based culture – or the modern individual subject. In the Middle Ages, according to Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal theory, ‘the human being only perceived himself as race, people, party, corporation, family or in other general terms’. Only later, in the Renaissance, ‘the human being mentally becomes an individual and recognizes himself as such’.1 This fantasy of a pre-individual society is one of the reasons why the Middle Ages are so attractive to filmmakers.2 Their perceived anti-individualism is a major feature of academic and non-academic views of the Middle Ages, and invoked in medieval film so often that it constitutes a genre characteristic. (Again, I do not claim that the Middle Ages were pre-individual, but I am simply describing a view of this period widely held since at least the nineteenth century.) Another important strand of thought that contributes to the modern stereotype that the Middle Ages were a time before individuality is the notion that the external limits of each person’s individual body were not yet clearly established. In the Middle Ages, according to this view, bodies were messy, porous, fragmented, excessive, monstrous and carnivalesque, whereas it was only later, in the Renaissance, that the ideal of a whole, classical, contained body became dominant. In academic thought, this view is often attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin.3

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In popular culture and film, it is ever-present in the portrayal of medieval excesses of food, sex and filth, encapsulated in the obligatory banquets where whole pigs and rounds of bread are ripped apart and greedily devoured by fat men and loose wenches amid much spilling of ale. Such carnivalesque bodies make humans more animallike and show the individual human to be not clearly demarcated from what surrounds her, as she is constantly exchanging fluids and matter with the outside world through eating, drinking, fornicating and defecating. In this part of the book, I shall investigate these two common ways in which film envisages the Middle Ages to provide alternatives to the modern individual subject – insofar as this is thinkable at all within the constraints of modern culture and narrative film. In this chapter, I shall give a highly reactionary, politically despicable example of how in the Middle Ages the individual was allegedly subsumed into a collective body: Condottieri (1937), about the people united under a leader embodying it. Such notions of a proto-national community become problematic in post-war German films, as will become clear in the next chapter on different versions of the Nibelungen legend. The final chapter will explore how in two animated films, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (1926) and Beowulf (2006), the Middle Ages are imagined as a time when the distinction between human subjects and animate or inanimate objects was not yet stable. Condottieri, directed by Luis Trenker, is an idealized biopic about Giovanni de’ Medici (1498–1526), also known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, Duke of Lombardy, a famous condottiere and an Italian national hero. The condottieri were the leaders of troops of mercenaries who profited from the Italian Wars between the Italian citystates, France and the Habsburg Empire that kept flaring up throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the film, not much more than the bare biographical bones of the historical Giovanni remain: early death of his father, loss of his ancestral castle and temporary separation from his mother Caterina Sforza during his childhood; formation of his own group of mercenaries (unnamed in the film, but in reality called the bande nere or black bands); marriage to Maria (Salviata); birth of a son; death in battle. In line with Giovanni’s popular image, he is depicted as a charismatic, strong and heroic military leader with a deep connection to the rural countryside and its people who strives for a peaceful, unified nation. This film offers

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National Socialism’s ideal of the human – even the exemplary leader – as primarily part of a homeland community, and legitimizes it by giving it a medieval precedent. It is nostalgic for the communal premodern past, but betrays that the ideal has always been a fantasy. Condottieri is a German-Italian co-production, released in an Italian- as well as a German-language version. It has usually been interpreted in the context of Italian rather than German cinema, as a straightforward allegory of Benito Mussolini’s leadership, with one critic even considering the historical setting so irrelevant that he takes Giovanni de’ Medici to be an entirely fictional character.4 But a more complex representation both of the nation and of the past emerges when Condottieri is seen as a medieval film in the German tradition. While the modern Italian nation has conventionally defined itself with recourse to the Renaissance, especially as recreated in cinema, Germany has done the same through medievalism.5 The prerelease promotional material for Condottieri published by its German production company, Tobis, describes the film’s setting not only as Renaissance, but also as medieval, and seems to regard the Renaissance as part of the Middle Ages.6 It also emphasizes the links between Adolf Hitler and the alleged freedom fighter and national unifier Giovanni, which were reinforced by employing ss-men (‘blackshirts’) as extras to act as black band members.7 Much of what has bemused historians of Italian cinema about Condottieri begins to make sense as part of the German-influenced transnational tradition of medieval film. If spectacular moments rather than narrative continuity dominate most medieval film, this is an extreme case, as the impressive scenes of marches, escapes, fights and rallies can barely be ordered into a coherent story, apart from the central conflict between Giovanni on the one side, and Malatesta and the council of Florence on the other. The film begins with the siege by Cesare Borgia of young Giovanni de Medici’s ancestral castle, during which Giovanni’s father is killed, and he is forced into exile with his mother. The grown-up Giovanni returns across mountains to the castle and plots to re-conquer it. He joins a company of mercenaries under the Florentine condottiere Malatesta and then sets up his own troop, which rapidly grows and wins back his castle. Giovanni now develops the vague aim of unifying Italy and is increasingly perceived as a competitor by Malatesta and the council of Florence as well as by the pope. When he is unfairly arrested for treason in Florence and banned by the pope, Giovanni

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escapes to France with his closest comrades and with his childhood sweetheart, Maria. He returns to Florence in disguise and overcomes Malatesta in a duel, but spares his life. His troops now march on the papal palace in Rome. But he stops short of attacking the holy man and instead is blessed and married to Maria by the pope. The peace is short-lived, as Malatesta attacks him one more time with hired soldiers and Giovanni dies in battle, though his forces remain victorious. The political events are kept hazy partly in order to balance the political agendas of the Italian and the German film industry, which by 1937 in both countries was much circumscribed by self-censorship as well as state regulations and interventions. By simply remaining unspecific on the factual details, the film can suggest some kind of revolution for national unity in the sixteenth century, long before the nineteenth-century unification of Italy or the Third Reich. It leaves the spectator with an impression of historical momentum cut short by Giovanni’s premature death, which can be seen to be carried on by either Mussolini or Hitler. But the very discontinuity of the plot in itself also serves ideological purposes. The film’s editing and narrative style sutures disparate elements into a seeming whole, in the same way that the plot welds different locations and individuals together into a seeming homeland community. Trenker as Giovanni de’ Medici holds together both the motherland and the film by providing the continuous element in the patchy narrative.

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Empty Signifiers: Motherland and Home The Vaterland (fatherland) and Heimat (home) in Condottieri are the unspecific aims that unite the people under Giovanni’s leadership. Ernesto Laclau has observed that populist movements tend to emerge through shared demands (for example, for health care, schooling or water), which are perceived to be equivalent and come to be summed up through ‘empty signifiers’ such as ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’. These terms are empty insofar as they do ‘not express any positive content’ but an ideal that is sufficiently vague to serve as an umbrella that can subsume the different concrete demands.8 Condottieri shows precisely the emergence of Heimat and Vaterland as such empty signifiers. These terms were, of course, an integral part of National Socialist ideology. Heimat lays slightly more emphasis on the landscape, typically

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the pastoral, traditional countryside, while Vaterland, literally fatherland, denotes more the political unit, the nation run by a patriarchal head, with a genealogical link into the patriarchal past. Both fatherland and homeland encompass a geographical area as well as people, but they are not as specifically delineated as nations. The special appeal of the particular signifier of the homeland lies in the fact that it is performative as much as referential: it not only describes an aim, but in itself goes a long way towards achieving that aim: a united people. Like ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’, it is a target that unifies a popular movement; but unlike these terms, it does not even nominally mean something beyond itself: Vaterland and Heimat signify precisely not much more than a unified community. The film deliberately keeps the locations of the plot vague in order to be able to meld them into an unspecific impression of a universal homeland associated with Giovanni. Highly unusually for a historical biopic, the viewer is left in the dark about the exact settings. The few maps that are shown – always in the hands of the evil antagonists – are not decipherable; there are no subtitles or signposts identifying the locations; only some references to Rome and Florence are in the dialogue. The real buildings and places that were filmed often stand in for others, so that even viewers who recognize them or know where something historically took place will not find orientation easier. Crucially, Giovanni can claim in the film that he ‘comes from the mountains’ because we are shown shots of the mountain castle of Torrechiara as his ancestral seat (perhaps meant to represent Forli), and of the alpine mountains of the Dolomites when he returns there from exile (presumably standing in for the Apennines). He is thus associated with an unspecific mountain landscape that both Italian and German audiences can recognize as their homeland. Luis Trenker’s star image is also integral to making this work. Trenker was famous for his mountain films, shot (like Condottieri) around his home in Val Gardena in the South Tyrolean Alps.9 Because this area is part of the contested border region between Italy and Germany, both Italian and German audiences can claim Trenker and his home as their own, and Trenker has been very careful throughout his career to appeal to each side without offending the other. Giovanni not only originates from the mountains, he embodies them. Like Trenker as described in the promotion material, his character is not so much an individual as ‘a piece of nature turned

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64 Condottieri (Luis Trenker, 1937), young Giovanni disappears into the mountains.

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65 Condottieri, adult Giovanni appears from the mountains.

human’.10 The young Giovanni is last seen going up into the mountains on his way into exile with his mother. The shot of mother and son looking out over the hilly landscape very slowly lap-dissolves into one of the adult Giovanni appearing on horseback atop the mountains, making it look as if the child disappears into and the adult grows back out of the landscape (illus. 64–5). This image is followed by a montage of footage of both Giovanni and an eagle, each filmed from below and surveying the mountains, interspersed with mountain and sky views (illus. 66–9). As these mountains are now the high Alps rather than the Apennines, the hills of his boyhood seem to have grown up together with Giovanni and turned from the pastoral to the sublime. Giovanni and the eagle watch this landscape from a superior vantage point and thus appear to dominate it. But because the

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66 Condottieri, Giovanni surveys the landscape.

67 Condottieri, mountain views.

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68 Condottieri, an eagle surveys the landscape.

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69 Condottieri, sky view.

vistas of mountains and sky are not eye-line matches, they cannot be construed as simple point-of-view shots, nor can Giovanni’s and the eagle’s relation to each other be determined.11 Rather, this montage gives the impression of a kaleidoscopic view of the elements that make up this region. So Giovanni appears not only as an observer but also as a part of this landscape, just like the eagle and the mountains. Such disjointed editing is typical of the film, and works to dissolve the individual observer not just on screen but also in the audience. Although the editing for the most part superficially follows continuity conventions of matching one shot to the next, it is extremely rapid and never quite accurate. Giovanni’s duel with Malatesta on a staircase in Florence, for example, constantly violates the 180-degree rule of continuity editing (whereby the camera never moves more than 180 degrees between cuts of two partners in a fight or conversation) as the camera position from each cut to the next changes from the left to the right at the same time as from the front to the back of the fighting men. As in the mountain sequence, subjective shots regularly cut from close-ups of a character’s face to a long shot of what he or she sees, but this is usually not exactly matched, with the camera often pitched higher or lower than the observer’s eye-line. Giovanni, for instance, like the heroic statues repeatedly featured in Condottieri, tends to be filmed from below, regardless of the point from where he is seen or where he looks. To introduce a new location, the film often replaces establishing shots with montages of panning takes both of people arriving and of what they might see, but not necessarily from a plausible perspective.

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This highly fragmentary editing style could be considered an avant-garde technique designed to snap the viewer out of complacent illusions of visual mastery and alert her to the processes of film-viewing. But the fact that the mismatches of unobstructed vistas are so frequent and so slight has not so much an intellectually awakening but a tiring effect, similar to the drowsiness that is part of travel sickness induced by rapidly and relentlessly changing vistas. It keeps the viewer under the illusion that he has been shown everything, and that any gaps in understanding the plot are due to his own inattentiveness. The plot never raises the issue of vision or representation in a way that would encourage an awareness of this. Instead, the spectator is thrown about by the film as a hapless object of the relentless onslaught of images that constantly force her to assume somewhat different imaginary viewing positions. But although this robs her of the superior vantage-point and visual mastery that is such an important element of modern ideas of the subject, she remains under the illusion that she is in control because the editing is only so marginally different from conventionally continuous editing. So while the integrity of the film spectator as a viewing subject is destabilized, this destabilization does not become conscious, but on the contrary, takes away the viewer’s sovereignty and individual control. This aiming at subconscious rather than rational destabilization is a large part of what makes this an ideologically dubious style. In the same way that the only seemingly sequential editing unites divergent shots into a false impression of continuity and a coherent homeland, the empty signifiers of Vaterland and Heimat – transported through and augmented by music, spectacle and rhetoric – work to unite its inhabitants. That the primary aim of such signifiers is to form a community rather than any specific political agenda is clear even when Giovanni first founds his troop from his four best mates from Malatesta’s army, after being shocked at their mercenary violence towards innocents. He tells them: ‘If we want to become comrades, we’ll have to do things very differently.’ For Giovanni, the goal is to become ‘comrades’, that is, people defined by their togetherness and relation to each other rather than their individuality, like a home community. The ostensible objective of national unity that Giovanni later adopts is secondary. For the mercenaries, it is also the wish to be part of this group under their leader that takes precedence over any ideological principles. The ‘very different’

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approach of this new band turns out to be fighting not for money, but for the very thing they model: a community. The way in which the empty signifiers work to create out of men and their hometowns a fatherland united under its leader becomes tangible when new members are recruited to Giovanni’s army. It is largely a marching song (like the whole score written by Giuseppe Becce) that both transports and performs these signifiers to create such a community. A troubadour sings it in a village square in order to recruit new members for Giovanni’s company (and to find his childhood sweetheart, Maria). The lyrics are a perfect string of empty signifiers, calling for people ‘with a heart’ to join ‘our’ ranks, following the flag and the ‘capitano’. The only purpose mentioned for joining this community is to ‘free the Heimat’ and that the captain ‘throws the enemy out of your fathers’ house and makes Heimat great forever’. Because there is no enemy occupying the fatherland, the sense of creating a Heimat rather than the idea of freedom dominates. A large part of the ‘text’ is an onomatopoetic imitation of drum and battle noise (‘ratatam, ratatam’), thereby making battle – the content of the song – into the form of the song. The song replaces the actual fighting experience in its function to weld together a community of fighters. As the recruiter moves through the village, the young, goodlooking men begin to step forwards, watched by the women, children and older men, to more martial stanzas of the same song that now mention fighting the enemy as brave soldiers, and being willing to die. The singer then leads his horse out of town, and the men follow as a disorderly bunch, like rats following the pied piper. The song has created the spearhead of a homeland community. This community is now consolidated through more music as well as visual spectacle and ritual. To the accompaniment of a drum roll that turns out to be diegetic (part of the story world), the new recruits arrive in a city square (shot in San Gimignano, but presumably intended to represent Florence), where other members of Giovanni’s army in black uniform are standing with their flags and drums around an octagonal fountain. A moving camera revolves around one of their leaders before one of the new recruits joins him on the fountain steps to salute him, as if drawn into the circle through the camera movement. In two spectacular shots from above, the rugged villagers walk from the corners of the frame towards the middle to mix in with soldiers around the fountain in a centripetal motion (illus. 70).

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70 Condottieri, the centripetal fusion of villagers and soldiers.

A visually coherent group is being created. While the drum roll continues, a cut moves the scene forward in time to a stone cellar in which all the men are standing in rows by the light of flames. At the crescendo, Giovanni athletically leaps onto the stage in front of the mercenaries and speaks an oath of loyalty, promising ‘never to abandon the fatherland’ and to ‘believe in the holy aim of a united nation’, which the recruits repeat. This oath again not just refers to but also performs the fatherland, as it joins the men into a coherent political community. When the individual converts and pre-existing members are shown speaking after Giovanni, their individualized features and different Italian and German accents do no more than indicate the ethnic range of the new company. The men who have been attracted into this army through the unifying power of song, impressive spectacle of mass ornament and empty heroic-patriotic rhetoric have in this ritual themselves become part of the spectacle and the empty signifiers of the homeland, completing their subsuming into this group. At the end of the vow, Giovanni gazes directly at the camera through fiery eyes that are here and throughout the film lit in such a way that they sparkle. This interpellates the viewer as part of this community

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by the very fact that he has been looking at the screen and thus allowed himself to be looked at as one of the many included in the vow. In fact, it could be said that it is the viewer’s gaze upon this restaged past that visually works the images together into a community, introducing an element of retrospect into this creation of a Heimat that will concern me further below. Although people are here perceived as part of a collective rather than as individuals, their leader stands out, not so much through individual traits as because he embodies this community. As in the mountain sequence, the figure of Giovanni is pivotal in keeping the divergent elements together and incarnating what may be meant by the ‘homeland’ in the film. On the plot level, Giovanni can assume this leadership position because he fights precisely for this community rather than for personal gain like the other mercenary leaders, and has inherited at least part of the homeland, his duchy, from his father. His patriarchal inheritance of the fatherland is again confirmed through a montage sequence. When he rides on Rome, low-angle shots of Giovanni on horseback and of equestrian statues portraying the famous earlier condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni (c. 1395/1400–1475) and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius are edited together (illus. 71). In this sequence Giovanni is presented as their successor, extending the homeland community back into the past. Just how different Giovanni’s leadership-through-landscape, through embodying the people and the region of his Heimat, is from a democratic approach to leadership is clear in contrast with other medieval films like Luther (dir. Eric Till, 2003). In this biopic, Martin Luther, too, very much represents the people to those in power. But this is not through an inherited position or belonging to a land, but because of his ideas, which resonate with the people. He is reluctant to accept the power bestowed upon him through the fact that the people support him, but stands by his convictions as epitomized by his famous dictum repeated in the film (illus. 72): ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.’ It is the force of popular opinion – expressed in the shouts of ‘Luther’ at the imperial diet of Worms and the support of the princes at the diet of Augsburg – that makes Luther powerful and forces the emperor to let him go despite his defiance of the pope. Luther can stand for the people not because he always agrees with the majority – for instance, he speaks against the peasants’ violence – but rather because he progresses from the

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71 Condottieri, a statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni.

72 Luther (Eric Till, 2003), ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.’

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medieval church by recognizing even the majority to be composed of individuals. He still draws on the power of community, but also stresses each person’s responsibility to account for her deeds before God. The church, on the other hand, makes the mistake of treating people neither as individuals nor a collective, but like numbers: Tetzel, an evil salesman of indulgences, works assembly-line style to sell years off purgatory, and addresses Hanna and Grete, two parishioners whom Luther has looked after personally, as a ‘gentle mother’ and a ‘crippled child’ – as stereotypes rather than individuals.

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The Past as Utopia in Condottieri But crucially, the identification of Condottieri’s protagonist with Heimat constructs an illusion of an identity that is in fact merely a juxtaposition of disparate elements not quite adding up to a whole. The film creates the unified homeland as a spectral illusion, but could not possibly show it as fully achieved. Laclau points out that this is typical of empty signifiers, which ‘function as the names of a fullness which is constitutively absent. It is because there is no human situation in which injustice of some kind or another does not exist that “justice”, as a term, makes sense.’12 The entirely harmonious units of Heimat and Vaterland likewise only ever exist as empty signifiers rather than as real places and groups. Although Giovanni manages to unite his army into a phalanx of the fatherland, he achieves his aim of unifying the nation only retrospectively, from the spectators’ point of view: while complete fullness can never exist, it is often fantasized that it did in a utopian past or will in a utopian future. Like childhood, pre-modernity in modern culture is regularly (though never quite convincingly) invented as a place where the impossible still existed.13 By returning to a pre-modern setting, Condottieri may have hoped to be able to show the homeland in actual existence, as imagined by the Nazi’s Blut und Boden (blood and soil) politics. But even in this pre-modern fantasy world, the pastoral idyll and national unity is ‘always already’ lost. The Duke of Lombardy’s medieval hilltop castle in an agricultural landscape is already under attack from Malatesta’s troops in the opening shots; the fighting already occurs with modern weapons like cannons and pistols as well as traditional swords and pitch. When we first see the little boy Giovanni, he is

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73 Condottieri, the wholesome country girl Maria.

already praying for survival with his mother and the daughter of their castellan, Maria, and is then abducted by a soldier from his prayer bench, thereby taken away from Maria, his mother, his home, his church and his childhood innocence in one fell swoop. Even the natural beauty of the mountain landscape is introduced when it is already lost, during Giovanni’s flight with his mother. Giovanni spends the rest of the film searching in vain for a return to the imaginary fullness of the fatherland, as epitomized by his father’s castle and Maria. Maria to him is closely associated with his Heimat, not only due to their shared childhood, but also when he meets her again twice in pastoral mountain settings. Initially, he does not recognize her, perhaps because she (unusually for a castellan’s daughter) has become a shepherdess, a natural and wholesome girl with plain clothes, loose hair and no make-up (illus. 73).14 In a complicated ruse to find her, the recruiter for the bande nere is sent out to sing a melody that Giovanni’s mother used to sing to them as children, so that Maria would recognize it, join in the singing and be brought to Giovanni. Like the bande nere song, it is performative as well as referential: the

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song is the search for Maria, but the troubadour modifies the text so that it is also about the search for Maria. Although he does not find her, Maria herself by coincidence sings another, presumably the original, version of the song within earshot of Giovanni, breaking off before the line about Maria, but instead having mentioned a longing for a lost ‘Heimat’. Maria and Giovanni now recognize each other and he kisses her, which is followed by another of the tell-tale montage sequences, this time of shots of them kissing dissolving into a series of images of clouds passing before the sun. This may be a mystical union of Giovanni with the landscape of the Heimat, but it is not a particularly harmonious one, whose disparate elements are again not visually aligned. The surplus element here is Maria: if she is meant to embody the landscape with whom Giovanni unites, where does that leave Giovanni’s own role as the embodiment of Heimat? Similarly, Giovanni’s strange claim at their wedding that ‘now there will be peace in the land and the people will be happy’ makes most sense if it expresses that the unified Heimat is somehow recaptured through this marriage. But it is never quite clear how this is meant to be achieved, and the fullness of the Heimat is never quite reached. The single short scene of domestic bliss in the recaptured castle with Maria and their baby son is overshadowed by the fact it occurs when Giovanni is about to lose it, telling Maria that he is leaving for a battle that turns out to be his last. A similar contemporary medieval film from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), can help to clarify how such an attempt to use heterosexual coupling to achieve fulfilment reveals ideological fissures. This is a film about the Russian prince Alexander Nevsky (1220–63) comprehensively defeating the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242 by uniting the people in their fight for the rural homeland, the Rus. Though obviously propagandistic and xenophobic, this film is not quite as totalizing in its ideology as Condottieri. Rather than hypnotizing viewers with slightly mismatched, fast editing, Alexander Nevsky gives them enough time to enjoy the beautiful and highly stylized nature, mass and battle scenes, and to keep a distance from the patriotic narrative of the film. More than the leader himself, it is the people – here mostly the peasants, with the elite joining in only later – who embody the homeland when they are shown, to rousing folksong, to emerge in striking, haptic images from the long grasses

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and lakes of the Russian steppe to join their equally rural leader. Moreover, Alexander’s cause is not quite as vague as Giovanni’s, insofar as there is at least an external threat: the invading Teutonic Knights (in the film simply called the Germans), who in an inversion of the peasants’ rising are successfully made to disappear into the landscape by drowning in a frozen lake. There is more room for burlesque and humour, and the film does not share Condottieri’s elegiac mood that reveals a lack of fullness even in the past, and instead presents the recovery of the past not only as achievable through film, but as a patriotic duty. Nevertheless, that the union of the people and of the homeland can never be quite achieved is again betrayed by the film’s sexual politics. While the joining of a man and a woman is a standard image of the achievement of completion at least since Plato, this works in Alexander Nevsky no more than in Condottieri because there is always an extra body. While Alexander remains unmarried, a significant plot strand revolves around a love triangle of two young men, Gavrilo and Vasili, wooing the same girl, Olga. Introduced as a face in the crowd at a market, Olga promises to marry whoever will emerge the bravest from the decisive battle, and fully becomes everywoman (embodying the people rather than the countryside like Maria) when she wanders among the wounded after the battle and many dying warriors address her by their girlfriends’, wives’ or sisters’ names. As Gavrilo seems to be dying, the somewhat less severely injured Vasili generously cedes the girl to him, making it clear that what matters more than the heterosexual pairing is the homosocial bond between the two now reconciled competitors, lying cheek-by-cheek in a sensual embrace (illus. 74). This revives Gavrilo sufficiently to hobble off supported by Vasili, with Olga in their middle. Their threesome, however, is resolved into an even queerer foursome involving a cross-dressing woman. During the victory celebration, Olga now asks Alexander to decide which of the two wounded men she should marry. Vasili steps in to declare that the bravest fighter was neither of them but a girl dressed in armour, Vasilisa – which implies that Olga should choose her in a lesbian pairing. But Vasili now sidesteps that issue by suggesting that Olga should marry the second bravest, Gavrilo, and Vasilisa marry Vasili himself. The two heterosexual couples are shown in brief shots that do not quite eradicate the queer surplus of the warrior-woman. The harmonious body of the people

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.

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74 Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938), Gavrilo and Vasili bond.

is gendered male, and the integration of women poses a real problem to Condottieri and Alexander Nevsky, a problem that reveals a fissure in the ideology of community in both films. That in Condottieri the fullness of the collective Heimat can only be envisaged as something already about to be lost is confirmed in the film’s final shot (illus. 75). It shows Giovanni’s tomb, decorated with a stone statue of Giovanni with his father’s sword across his chest, lying in the same position as both men did when they died. It is labelled ‘Giovanni d’Italia, † mdxxvi’, which may be designed to honour the deceased’s ambitions to unify the Italian nation rather than as a statement of achievement. Giovanni ‘of Italy’ can only claim his father’s heritage, his fatherland, in death. Just as he almost embodies the mountains, he almost embodies the tradition of the Italian Empire, but not quite. The fact that this tomb implausibly stands in the middle of an empty cathedral, whose congregation in medieval film is so often the epitome of a medieval community, only highlights that this posthumous unification is an abstract, hollow feat. It is left to the present audiences to make the retrospective ascription of a unified Italy true, by being part of a unified nation that could

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75 Condottieri, Giovanni’s tomb in the middle of the cathedral.

plausibly be traced back to Giovanni. The achievement of a fatherland can again happen only retrospectively, if at all. By depicting the past as ‘always already’ modern, especially in its military technology, Condottieri displays the typical National Socialist attitude of what Jeffrey Herf calls ‘reactionary modernism’, which sought to combine a pro-technological stance with conservative medievalism.15 But insofar as it shows that the lost community of the past did not exist even in pre-modernity, Condottieri is not simply nostalgic for the communal pre-modern past but betrays that this is a fantasy. Besides, by making clear the importance of retrospect, it even hints at the fact that it is the present that creates the past it needs. Though a close viewing against the grain of its depiction of pre-modernity and the past within pre-modernity allows to discern its inner contradictions in this way, the film tries to cover up the fact that its ideology is self-dismantling. Though Condottieri betrays despite itself that the ideal of a communal fatherland can never be reached, its ostensible message is to fight for it. Although Hitler and Goebbels were disappointed by Condottieri, especially its Catholic respect for the Pope, and ordered some cuts,16 the main

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values propagated by Condottieri are clearly those of National Socialism: a unified, militarized nation under one flag, represented through an extraordinary man leading a band of brothers willing to die for it, and based on an attachment to Heimat and its inhabitants and excluding everyone not born in this area. The politics of envisaging the Middle Ages as a more communal time and an alternative to modern individualism are neither good nor bad, right or left wing. But here, this pattern has clearly been used as part of an extreme right-wing ideology where one can only belong to a homeland by birth. Perhaps more worrying is that the currently fashionable introduction of affect into one’s relationship to history was already used in Condottieri, to objectionable ends. Through its beautiful cinematography, grand music, sympathetic character portrayal, humour and pathos, Condottieri encourages viewers to identify with Giovanni’s emotional attachment to his Heimat. Historical authenticity is here understood in the sense of an affective experience of the past rather than of factual accuracy. The promotion material, too, stresses that legend contains more truth than fact does, because it allegorically condenses reality: ‘Historical accuracy was not and is never what’s important. A legend usually has a much longer life. Why? Because it contains the essence of reality in allegorical form.’17 By citing the beauty of medieval altar pictures of the Virgin Mary in medieval garments as predecessors for anachronistic but attractive images, the marketing suggests that the film is true to the period depicted in a deeper sense, emulating medieval patterns of thinking and understanding history as opposed to superficially representing facts. In a fictional justification to a history professor criticizing that Giovanni’s helmet is not historically accurate, the promotion material states that the helmet had to fit Trenker, not Giovanni, and that the film’s aim is to bring the past to life: ‘one did not want to make an antiquarian film, one did not aim for historical accuracy, but for a link between Renaissance and the living present’.18 This affective definition of authenticity is currently making a comeback. That affect can be a positive force in historiography is evidenced precisely when National Socialist film provokes many academics to abandon their scholarly distance and allow affect – scorn and hatred for Nazism – to enter their writing. But an experiential authenticity of representing history has to be paired with self-reflexivity (or even self-refractivity) that encourages rather than numbs

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critical thought about the past. Condottieri instead partakes in Giovanni’s nostalgia for the lost past; and although it cannot retrieve it, it holds onto the illusion that everything was better in pre-modernity. Scholarship instead should aim to analyse and thereby shatter such illusions.

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8

The Nation’s Lost Past

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Nibelungen Films, 1924, 1966, 2004

Even the most passionate medievalist cannot ignore that ‘the past’ in Germany by and large means the Third Reich. Every representation of the German national past is overshadowed and inflected by this period, including any fantasies of a collective medieval past. In his influential 1990 book, Eric Santner studied the effects of the German ‘inability to mourn’ the National Socialist past on the films made by the second post-war generation, whose parents had fought in and lived through the war.1 He observed in Edgar Reitz’s and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s films from the 1970s and ’80s a fascination with Nazism and an inability to mourn the Holocaust despite their best efforts. His explanation is that because their parents’ generation had understandably disavowed any investment in the horrific Nazi regime and thus been unable to mourn Hitler and the dreams of national greatness he fostered, the children grew up in a climate of suppression of the past and emotional stultification that made it psychologically impossible also for them to work through the Nazi legacy. Santner’s thesis needs updating, now that the second generation has matured and become the dominant voice in German culture, while those who were adults in the Third Reich are aging and dying, and a third generation is beginning to make its mark in a reunified Germany. On the surface, it seems as if Nazi perpetrators and bystanders can now be mourned in mainstream culture, with an open public discourse on the war crimes against German civilians, as witnessed by Jörg Fried rich’s history Der Brand (The Blaze, 2002), W. G. Sebald’s novels, and films like Downfall (2004) or The Reader (2008). But in fact, the emotional underdevelopment and intergenerational mistrust and

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anger observed by Santner still underpin German culture and cinema, and any efforts at mourning. It has not disappeared with the ageing of the last Nazi party members; it is just losing a clear target object for the second and third generations. As a consequence, German films about the Third Reich now tend towards one of two extremes: either emotional detachment or emotional exaggeration. They are either uninvolved, taking a ‘factual’ approach that attempts (but usually fails) to be ethical by being as academic as possible, like Downfall, and express a German inability to feel anything but a suppressed melancholia. Or they overcompensate with exuberant physical and verbal displays of affect and a preoccupation with father-son relationships that elicits empathy for the perpetrators as victims, like The Reader or The Counterfeiters (2007). While Reitz and Syberberg saw American culture as a terrorizing influence, the latter, ‘sentimental’ school embraces Hollywood’s exaggerated emotionality as an escape.2 That the Nazi past still haunts both of these stances is evident even in films not directly dealing with Nazism. They share a vague sense of loss that has often been seen as part of the human condition by thinkers from Plato to Lacan, but that is now blamed variously on the Iraq war, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the economic crisis. Twenty-first-century German mainstream films about the more distant past of the Middle Ages have, for the most part, embraced the international emotive style rather than the factual, detached reconstruction mode, in keeping with medieval film’s tendency towards fantasy and fiction. Medieval films like Germanikus (2001), Vaya con Dios (2002), Luther (2003), Sword of Xanten (2004), Dreamship Surprise: Period 1 (2004), Tristan + Isolde (2006), Vicky the Viking (2009) and Pope Joan (2009) turn pre-modernity into the backdrop and setting of either comically or dramatically exaggerated love and adventure stories. But through their emphasis on collective rather than individual identities, these seemingly apolitical medieval films allow concerns with national, communal identity to re-emerge after all. The hyper-emotionality that is a consequence of the emotional immaturity caused by the Nazi legacy is brought to bear on precisely the sore issue of national identity. While many non-German films posit the Middle Ages as an origin and mirror of the nation, German films now typically show the Middle Ages as an ideal pan-European period before troubled nationalism – a fantasy that is often

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exposed as such because the communal culture is portrayed to be in crisis.3 Concerns with national identity are also implicitly present when the medieval material on which these films are based itself already has a history of nationalist appropriation. A good example for this is the Song of the Nibelungs, a heroic epic from the Northern European oral tradition, written down in medieval German around 1200 ce, which was stylized into a ‘national epic’ in the eighteenth century. It tells the story of Siegfried of Xanten (on the Lower Rhine), an extraordinarily strong but aggressive and naive prince, who marries the Burgundian princess Kriemhild of Worms (on the Upper Rhine), sister to the politically astute King Gunther. Siegfried is then murdered with Gunther’s consent by his adviser Hagen. But in the second half of the epic poem, the perpetrators of the crime become victims themselves when Kriemhild takes genocidal revenge upon the Burgundians (who are now for some reason called Nibelungs). Rather than give up Hagen to her, the Nibelungs all die with him. Fritz Lang’s 1924 film version, like Richard Wagner’s opera and Friedrich Hebbel’s drama, played an important part in the trajectory of turning the medieval poem into an expression of German nationalist mentality. Die Nibelungen, like Destiny written by Thea von Harbou and directed by Fritz Lang, and released in two full-length parts as Siegfried’s Death (or Siegfried) and Kriemhild’s Revenge, was a massively expensive and ambitious attempt to ‘bring back to life for the twentieth century’ ‘the sacred object of a nation’s spirit [das geistige Heiligtum einer Nation]’, as Lang put it.4 A title card famously dedicated each of Die Nibelungen’s parts ‘to the German people’. In Lang’s and Harbou’s version, Prince Siegfried first works as a smith’s apprentice in a forest. When he hears of the beautiful Burgundian princess Kriemhild, he decides to woo her. En route, he kills a dragon and then the dwarf Alberich, inheriting from him the Nibe lung treasure and a magic shape-shifting cloak. Gunther demands that before getting Kriemhild as a wife, Siegfried has to help him win the mighty Icelandic queen Brunhild as his own bride. Siegfried disguises himself with his magic cloak and overcomes Brunhild in a contest of strength as well as later in the royal bedroom. Brunhild senses that it was Siegfried, not Gunther, who overpowered her, and picks a fight with Kriemhild. The infuriated Kriemhild confirms her suspicions,

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and Brunhild demands that Hagen kill Siegfried. Hagen does so with Gunther’s consent, but Brunhild, who had only ever loved Siegfried, commits suicide. The widowed Kriemhild swears revenge for her husband, and in Kriemhild’s Revenge marries King Etzel the Hun and invites her brothers and Hagen to her new court. When they continue to refuse to give up Hagen, she has all the Burgundians killed in stages, in the end killing Hagen and breaking down dead herself. The film reveals the widespread, but paradoxical identification of Germany both with a murder victim (Siegfried) and with his killers (the Nibelungs). In Siegfried’s Death, it is Aryan Siegfried, brought down by his enemies because of his solitary, trusting heroism, who embodies the German nation. In political propaganda, Siegfried’s death as a victim of treachery and back-stabbing had often been compared to Germany’s defeat in the First World War. But Siegfried is not an entirely innocent national hero, as his quick-tempered aggression towards Alberich and towards the Burgundians when he first arrives, and his role in tricking Brunhild into wedlock, could be seen as the root of the conflicts that finally kill him. As critic Roland Schacht mocks at the time,

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what exactly is supposed to be German about this film: Siegfried? . . . But what’s he doing with Brunhild? Where is his heroic ethic in this betrayal for the blonde Kriemhild? Plus he blabs.5

If Siegfried is a flawed identification figure, the audiences’ sympathy in Kriemhild’s Revenge shifts further towards Siegfried’s killers, who gain a heroic profile by facing Kriemhild’s onslaught bravely and communally. Such loyalty in the face of death, dubbed Nibelungentreue (‘Nibelungs’ loyalty’), was idealized into a German national trait during the First and Second World War. Identifying in an unresolved contradiction with both Siegfried and the Nibelungs allowed Germans to maintain a positive self-image as victims even when they knew themselves to be perpetrators, too. The overwhelming impression of both parts of Lang’s film is one of a fateful development that nobody could have stopped – what Tom Gunning names a destiny-machine – so that all parties involved are exculpated.6 But Lang and Harbou’s Nibelungen films expose not only the paradoxical self-image of interwar Germany, but also the country’s equally vexed relationship to its past. By returning to the Middle Ages,

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they tell the story of how Germany became cultured, casting aside its primitive past in order to form a functioning political collective. In the plot, however, the archaic past is never fully left behind and comes back to haunt the Burgundians. Within the medieval setting, there are two different time zones. The medieval court of the Burgundians is the civilized and cultured centre of the plot, a community of cleanshaven, clean-cut Christian knights and ladies moving slowly and restrainedly in highly choreographed formations, dressed in ornate costumes with 1920s Jugendstil patterns. They are stratified into a rigidly hierarchical society run by a well-ordered political elite, based in a town-like castle with a massive cathedral, and form what Lang called ‘a culture that was already overly refined’ (illus. 76).7 This is contrasted with the four archaic realms of the forest smithy from which young Siegfried sets out, of the Nibelungs’ magic land, of Brunhild’s Icelandic home, and of Etzel the Hun’s Eastern steppe kingdom (illus. 77–80). All these primitive worlds are inhabited by short, scraggy, hairy, hunched cave- and hole-dwellers clad in furs and beads, scuttling about in disordered masses like animals and looking much more like stone-age than medieval caricatures. Racist, Orientalist and anti-Semitic stereotypes have been widely noted in the portrayal of Alberich and the Huns in particular, so that the Burgundians/Germans look superior to their more primitive neighbours.8 But the Burgundians are no more German than the forest dwellers, Nibelungs and Huns (neither in reality nor legend, film or popular thinking). Their descriptions in the critical literature as ‘cultured’ vs ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ people instead speaks of different degrees of historical evolution of the same group, in a ‘civilizing process’ à la Norbert Elias from a natural to an ever more restrained state.9 Siegfried, for example, undergoes a rapid transformation from caveman to member of the Burgundian court that can be seen as a compressed version of humankind’s progress. Admittedly, he already stands out among the primitive community in the forest through his height, straight posture, resolute movements, restrained facial hair, head and body, and his forging of a superior sword. He leaves the smithy as soon as he hears of the well-ordered Burgundian kingdom. On his way, he fights the dragon and Alberich, and when we next see him outside the Burgundians’ gates, he has changed his loin-cloth for courtly garments, acquired a band of subjugated kings riding in formation behind him, and transformed himself into a civilized knight. His

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76 Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, 1924), strict geometrical order at Worms.

77 Nibelungen, Siegfried at the archaic smithy.

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78 Nibelungen, the archaic Nibelungs’ realm.

79 Nibelungen, the archaic Iceland.

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80 Nibelungen, the archaic Huns.

progress to greater civilization seems inevitable, but it comes at a price. The savage past that he has left behind returns to haunt him: on the plot level, Alberich has put a curse on the new owner of the treasure; and indeed, the power and wealth provided by the treasure contributes to his demise by arousing the Burgundians’ envy; the pagan Brunhild’s savage demand for his death adds to that. Moreover, though Siegfried visually fits into the Burgundian court perfectly, his behaviour remains somewhat wild: he breaks courtly protocol with uncivilized rage as soon as he gets to Worms, flaring up at the Burgundians’ request that he help them win Brunhild; and throughout his time there stays close to nature, communicating with the birds (whose language he understands) and his horse. Siegfried never quite becomes the cultured knight he aspired to be, and is killed in the woods from which he had come. The Burgundians, too, barely keep together their advanced civilization in the face of more primitive societies. They remain vulnerable to archaic forms of power – Siegfried’s heroic strength, Alberich’s curse, Brunhild’s ferociousness and Etzel’s masses – that conspire to crush the entire dynasty. Arguably, the archaic returns in their midst when Kriemhild turns her back on all courtly and familiar ties and

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morals to wreak her vengeance. The medieval Burgundians’ relationship to the primitive worlds that actually still co-exist with them and topple their order might be interpreted as an allegory of modern Germany’s relationship to its past. This would suggest that Germany cannot either seamlessly integrate into the body of the nation or fully cast out the remnants of the archaic past, any more than Siegfried and Brunhild, the Nibelungs and the Huns can do so. Far from giving the nation back its medieval past in this cinematic updating of a national myth, Lang shows that the past cannot be recaptured and remains a threat as much as a source of power. Because of its nationalist appropriation, the Nibelungen story briefly fell from grace in 1945, but it had been too influential a model of representing German history to remain untackled for long. It was retold again in the light of the Third Reich as early as 1966/7 in a popular film, also called Die Nibelungen and released in two parts – Siegfried (1966) and The Nibelungs Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Die Nibelungen Teil II: Kriemhilds Rache, 1967). This film was directed by Harald Reinl, who had worked as Leni Riefenstahl’s assistant at the end of the war and been accused (but cleared) of using Sinti and Roma from a concentration camp to work as extras. The producer was Artur Brauner, a Polish-German Jew who survived the Holocaust in hiding. It was marketed as a film about German heroes and widely reviewed at the time as an allegory of the contemporary nation’s relationship to the Nazi past.10 The focus this time lies on Hagen, a Hitler-esque criminal with a black moustache, side-parting and obsession with loyalty, who actually acts in the interest of the whole country (illus. 81). The Burgundian court represents the pragmatic political elite willingly following him, and the national hero Siegfried is again his largely innocent victim. But in this version, the guilt for Siegfried’s murder oppresses the Burgundian people in the second half. Hagen takes the blame upon himself twice, but they rightly feel guilty for not having prevented it, like passive bystanders in Hitler’s Germany. The Burgundians have sworn an oath of loyalty to their King Gunther (like German soldiers swore one to Hitler) and collectively refuse to give up Hagen, preferring to die with him. Gunther takes on the traits of the criminal he harbours when he himself now begins to talk like Hitler did, displaying a bloodlust that extends to the self as well as the others. That the Burgundians’ loyalty to Hagen despite his crimes is depicted as a sign of strength becomes problematic as soon

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as this is decoded as an allegory of the Germans’ loyalty to Hitler. But another side of Germany, enlists the help of the mighty Eastern Empire to demand that Burgundians purge the criminal in their midst, is represented through Kriemhild in equally positive terms. However, Kriemhild turns out to be no better than the other Burgundians, driven by the same destructive and self-destructive bloodlust, only less heroically so. The remaining impression is that the bloodbath was inevitable, given Kriemhild’s loyalty to her first husband and the Burgundian men’s loyalty to each other. The cause of the problem seems to be Siegfried’s power – sending the message that once a nation is as powerful as he is, it will be a problem and attract hostility – as well as the Burgundians’/Germans’ unremitting loyalty and violence.

Histories of Emotional Underdevelopment in Sword of Xanten This is the legacy of Nibelungen films that Uli Edel inherited when he directed the two-part drama Sword of Xanten in 2004, which clearly shows its debt both to Lang’s and to Reinl’s problematization of Germany’s relationship to its past.11 Edel (born in 1947) is part of the second post-war generation; the star playing Siegfried, Benno Fürmann (born in 1972), belongs to the third. Both Edel and the great old man of medieval film, Max von Sydow, who here plays Siegfried’s foster father but is famous for his role as Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal, mention on the dvd commentary the Siegfried

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story as one of the tales with which they grew up and which was related to them by their fathers.12 Fürmann describes it there more vaguely as part of his cultural heritage, as ‘pretty big in Germany’. The film shares the tension between emotional detachment and emotional exuberance that six decades after the Second World War has become characteristic of German cinema’s representation of the past. Sword of Xanten (also released and broadcast on television under various other titles such as Curse of the Ring, Ring of the Nibelungs or Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King) is a transnational, Anglophone co-production by a partly German team. It again considerably rewrites the extant medieval versions of the Nibelungen legend into an action drama with a melodramatic love story, ending with Siegfried’s death and leaving out Kriemhild’s revenge. In this version, Siegfried and Brunhild are in love, but Gunther and Kriemhild desire Brunhild and Siegfried respectively and manage to break up the couple, with tragic consequences. Like many medieval films, Edel adds a new prequel of early trauma, giving a concrete psychological explanation for the protagonist’s identity crisis.13 As a young child, Siegfried witnesses his castle being raided and his parents killed, but by morning cannot remember his name or what happened to him. He grows up as a smith’s adoptive son under the name of Erik. One meteor-lit night, he meets and sleeps with Brunhild. They vow to get together again, but first, Erik kills a dragon and wins the treasure that it had stolen from the ghostly people of the Nibelungs, as well as a magic shape-shifting cap. Gunther befriends the dragon-slayer and asks him to fight the attacking Saxon kings on his behalf. During the combat, Erik recognizes the two kings as the men who assailed his parents’ castle, and remembers his identity as King Siegfried of Xanten. Kriemhild falls in love with him, and with the help of a magic potion makes him transfer his love for Brunhild onto her. Gunther, quite by coincidence, decides to marry out of all people the famously beautiful Brunhild. Brunhild has devised a test of prowess for her suitors so that only Erik/Siegfried can pass it. In return for being allowed to wed Kriemhild, Siegfried agrees to magically disguise himself as Gunther and manages to win Brunhild as a bride on Gunther’s behalf. But Brunhild rightly suspects that she has been tricked and betrayed, and wrongly blames Siegfried, demanding that he be killed. This sets off a chain of four killings: the king’s adviser, Hagen, obliges and assassinates Siegfried, disguising the

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murder as a Saxon attack. The shocked Kriemhild publicly accuses Gunther and Hagen of murdering Siegfried out of greed and jealousy, and tells Brunhild that he had been innocent of her betrayal. Hagen indeed now admits that he wanted Siegfried’s treasure all along and slays Gunther in order to possess it alone. But Brunhild, in despair about the murder of her beloved Siegfried, kills his murderer Hagen and then herself, so that only Kriemhild is left to mourn the dead. With its romantic and fantastic plot, confessional dialogue and appeals to empathy, the film has the melodramatic, exuberant international style now popular with second and third post-war generation filmmakers. It also markets itself as distinctly un-German, as a fantasy plot á la Lord of the Rings set in a vaguely European landscape (though it was in fact filmed in South Africa and enhanced with computer-generated images) and with an international cast and team.14 What reference to contemporary Germany there is – an antiSaxon joke by Siegfried, and the fact that the East German Saxons are the enemies in this film created predominantly by West Germans – hints at the continuing internal rift between East and West Germany. But crucially, even underneath the seemingly transnational outlook and apparent effusiveness lurks a lack of feeling and detachment from the community that encapsulates the spirit of early twenty-first-century German films. This is betrayed especially by the protagonist, Siegfried. Siegfried’s exuberant emotionality is that of a current Hollywood romantic hero. He is physically and verbally explicit about his love and passion for both Kriemhild and Brunhild, and able to articulate his feelings to a range of interlocutors (illus. 82). But his alleged depth of emotion is undermined by the plot: he professes his profound feelings for Brunhild when he has only just met her (and immediately slept with her), and soon forgets them; then declares his true love for another woman, Kriemhild, a love we know to have been artificially created through the magic potion. After Siegfried has drunk the potion, he treats Brunhild with the emotional detachment that is witnessed in so much recent German cinema. The impression of fake sentimentality is also due to Benno Fürmann’s ironically distanced acting style, which exudes the air of someone who does not take himself too seriously even in the most emotive scenes. Fürmann stands out as the sole German among the principal actors, and he is the only one who does not carry the

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82 Sword of Xanten (Uli Edel, 2004), emotionally exuberant Siegfried.

clichéd, highly emotional language with which the script provides him. His borrowed hyper-emotionality always rings a little hollow and never quite becomes his own. His delivery is more colloquial and mumbled than that of the other characters, which does not befit the elevated words he speaks. This also goes for the German-language version of the film, in which Siegfried is dubbed by Fürmann himself. The fact that in his native language, his own voice does not always quite match his lip-movements creates an additional uncanny effect of inauthenticity. Benno Fürmann’s star image, previously defined by rather unheroic and mentally troubled roles like Bodo in The Princess and the Warrior (2001) or Hein in Anatomy (2000), contributes to making him less than convincing as an action man. Like his emotional effusiveness, his pumped-up body clad in historical costumes never seems to fully belong to him. The paradigmatic German hero is not quite himself: Siegfried anachronistically suffers from post-war Germany’s emotional underdevelopment. Setting a story about disengaged Germans in the medieval past highlights that it is the past itself – both the distant and relatively recent past – that is a contributing factor in this malaise. In other words, the fictional medieval setting adds value insofar as it draws attention to the role that Germany’s past plays for its identity. Santner had observed two main ways in which the second generation has dealt with their parental Nazi perpetrators or bystanders: ‘global disavowal of identification with ancestors on the one hand, revision

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83 Sword of Xanten, Hagen and his outcast father Alberich.

of the past into a less abhorrent version on the other’.15 Both approaches are modelled in Sword of Xanten, the former by Hagen, the latter by Siegfried. Hagen’s father in this film, the Nibelung dwarf Alberich, has a criminal past: he tried to claim his people’s shared treasure for himself, and as a punishment was expelled from their community. Alberich reminds his son repeatedly that he is indeed Hagen’s father, that his blood flows in Hagen’s veins (illus. 83). That he often does so in Old Norse rather than in the modern English of the rest of the script further associates him with the past. Hagen reacts aggressively each time and threatens to kill Alberich if he mentions their kinship again, and in the end indeed stabs him from behind. However, this disavowal and even murder of his father leaves Hagen with a form of what Santner calls a ‘schizophrenic dissolution of identity’:16 Hagen tries to ‘pass’ as a Burgundian. He defines himself as a loyal servant to the Burgundian court, dissipating any personal interest into a kind of non-identity that is merely prosthetic to Gunther. But this auxiliary identity is not a stable one. In the final culmination of violence, Hagen suddenly raises arms against his king out of a wish to possess the treasure, which means renouncing the community of which he had been part. This is when he acts most closely in line with his father’s behaviour, who had also rejected his community out of greed for the treasure. Denying or indeed physically killing his father does not mean that Hagen gets rid of the inherited dispositions of the past.

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Siegfried, on the other hand, revises his parents’ war ‘into a less abhorrent version’, as many second-generation post-war Germans do. Like Hagen, Siegfried initially disavows any links to his biological father and the war in his childhood. Instead, he follows in the footsteps of his substitute ideal father, the smith Eyvind, who has nothing to do with the war, as he lives reclusively much further north and has an unbroken, uncomplicated relationship to his own past, adhering to the old Northern gods and the traditions of his trade. Siegfried only begins to remember the war when he encounters the dragon: when he first sees the devastation wreaked by the dragon, he mistakes it for the effects of war (asking wide-eyed ‘Is this war?’), and experiences his first brief flashback to the attack on his castle. The dragon is further associated with war when Gunther’s knights return from their battle with the dragon on stretchers like wounded soldiers. Siegfried’s fight with this war-like dragon takes on symbolic overtones of reclaiming the treasure of the collective’s past from the monster of war which had been occupying and despoiling it. That the treasure stands for the people’s past is suggested by the fact that it is has long been in the custody of the Nibelungs, an undead people of ancientlooking semi-transparent white old men with beards and flowing gowns (illus. 84). Just as a nation’s past can only be shared, the treasure can only be guarded collectively by these spectres from the past, while it brings a curse to any human who tries to own it. By killing the dragon, Siegfried frees the splendid historical treasure that the dragon had made inaccessible, just as the memory of the Third Reich has made any untarnished access to the past impossible. However Siegfried has to reclaim not only the symbolic treasure of the collective past, but also his actual personal past. He is eventually able to remember it when he recognizes the Saxon twin kings as his father’s killers. Like that of the community, this past turns out to be as illustrious as it could be: both he and his parents are royal, and innocent victims of an unprovoked attack by vicious and greedy enemies. This appears to be true not only in Siegfried’s memory, but also in what the film shows us of his childhood: the circumstances leading to the offensive are not explained, but the negative portrayal of the Saxons makes it plausible that this was an indeed an unjustified assault on an innocent community; so does the fact that this is a beleaguered castle, which in the genre tradition of medieval films is usually the seat of the good side in a conflict. Without even

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84 Sword of Xanten, the undead people of the Nibelungs.

having to rewrite the past, Siegfried finds himself in a situation where, when he does remember the past, his parents emerge as blameless. The war is a morally ‘less abhorrent version’ of what it could have been. This is analogous to the situation in which Germans of the first and second generation may find themselves when they do face up to repressed memories of the Second World War now: the national mood allows them to envisage their parents’ generation as victims as well as perpetrators. Through the re-vision of his past, Siegfried simultaneously recovers his royalty; he experiences, in Santner’s words, a ‘narcissistic respecularization of identity’.17 From a lowly smith, as if by magic, he turns into a king; his identity, inherited from his father, is as ideal as it could be. The one scene in which Fürmann speaks as if he means it, without irony, informality or detachment, in a way that befits the hero of a historical epic, is when his character reclaims his paternal inheritance (illus. 85). After his memories have flooded back to him in mid-fight, he shouts at the Saxon kings: ‘You have killed my father’, beats them to the floor with ease, and proclaims: ‘I am Siegfried, son of Siegmund, King of Xanten.’ He retrieves his kingdom at the same time as his personal identity and his family’s heritage. But precisely in this authentic moment of shouting out who he is, claiming this inheritance and fullness, Siegfried already endangers it. As soon as the popular and physically powerful dragon-slayer turns out to be a king as well, he becomes a dangerous competitor to

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85 Sword of Xanten, Siegfried reclaims his past.

Gunther. Even as Siegfried is still on the battlefield, Gunther plots for him to marry Kriemhild so that he will be tied closely into the Burgundian community, but this is not enough to contain the powerful new king. Siegfried is killed before he even manages to travel back to Xanten and actually become king there. His ideal identity following the reclamation of a better-than-expected past remains an unfulfilled fantasy. Likewise, the treasure of the collective past cannot be owned by an individual, not even by a national hero like Siegfried. Siegfried wisely passes the treasure for safekeeping to the Burgundians. But even that does not work, as it attracts the envy of the Saxons and of Hagen. There is not enough of a sense of community to own it together, even in this pre-modern society. Like the contemporary nation, neither Siegfried nor the Burgundians are strong enough to claim the treasure; it irretrievably belongs to the dead. Kriemhild, to whom the treasure had passed, throws it back into the river, to let it lie, as it does not belong to the humans. This could be read as an allegory that is both hubristic and pessimistic. Like Siegfried’s – violent – claiming of the treasure of a past community makes him too powerful and enviable and leads to his murder, so the claiming of the national past might attract the envy and aggression of Germany’s neighbours. All that can be hoped for is that the treasure can be let lie in peace.

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Santner argues that there should be another way of conceptualizing the Third Reich by remembering chips of resistance in the perpetrators, with affect, and reclaiming the alternative futures that would have been possible. One could argue that Sword of Xanten as a whole attempts to do this: it remembers a nationalist epic to re write it into a more democratic, pan-European story. But all it ends up betraying is a preoccupation with the Nazi past. Along with the other pre-Nazi heritage of Germany, the Middle Ages cannot be recovered untainted.

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9

Animation and the Human between Animal and Cyborg

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Jester Till Beowulf The Adventures of Prince Ahmed

At the climactic end of Jester Till (2003), a very free adaptation of the fifteenth-century comic tales about the trickster Till Ulenspiegel, the automated figurines of a medieval glockenspiel clock on the town hall tower come to life (illus. 86). While the real Till is fighting an evil false queen on the clock tower, the figurine of a jester looking very much like Till becomes animated and delivers a well-placed (and perhaps still automatized) kick that in a Chaplinesque chain of events knocks the Queen over and makes her chop off the jester figurine’s head, which lands on her own shoulders so that she cannot see, and sends her falling into a heap of dung at the foot of the tower to her inglorious end.1 But having disposed of the despot, the glockenspiel is not finished with intervening in the world of the humans: now the figurine of death – a skeleton with a scythe – sneezes and with smoke and fire turns first into a ghostly shape and then into Till’s magician grandfather, who was suspended between life and death since a trick went wrong at the outset of the film, but has now returned unharmed to a happy ending. A mechanical jester coming to life, a human woman with a jester figurine’s head, and a figurine of death turning into a living human – it is difficult to distinguish human agents from their inanimate doubles here. As is the case in many medieval films, the limits of the human are playfully blurred here in the sense of the distinction not of an individual human from a wider collective, but of the human and the non-human. Animals and inanimate objects in this genre often take on the traditional characteristics of the Enlightenment ideal of the modern human individual subject, such as agency, rationality and

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86 Jester Till (Eberhard Junkersdorf, 2003), a glockenspiel comes to life.

consciousness, whereas humans often lose them and their superiority over the rest of the world.2 Both medieval film and animated film are in a privileged position for such unusual representations of human objects and non-human subjects because of their preference for fantasy subject-matter and their non-referential nature as only an indirect representation of reality (insofar as animation is not an indexical impression, a photograph or live action film of the real world; and insofar as medieval film is obviously a recreation of a world no longer in existence).3 The more sophisticated animation techniques have become, the closer they have got to creating an illusion of an alternative reality, a virtual reality: the ‘hyperreal’ of computer-animated worlds, which confuses even further the relationship between a real human and the pixels we see in motion. To some theorists, this conflation of reality and fiction is a return to the Middle Ages, which appear again as a time of magicians and dragons rather than simply as the time when stories about magicians and dragons were written.4 The Middle Ages are imagined as a repository of alternatives to the enlightened individual subject, as providing historical precedents to what we are now facing. This is the case not only in the theoretical reflection on such films, but also in animated film itself, which has drawn on the Middle Ages with particular intensity and radicalism. (To reiterate, I do not share such imaginations of the Middle Ages, but consider them worth describing as characteristic of the twenty-first century.)

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Such technological advances also increasingly challenge the ideal of the modern subject. In their questioning of what it means to be human, medieval films are part of a preoccupation in modern culture that is currently often labelled ‘post-human’. Post-human thinkers like Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway have criticized the ‘speciesist’ belief that human beings are fundamentally different from other animals and from machines and inanimate matter, pointing out the overlaps especially in the figure of the cyborg.5 I shall show this at work in Beowulf (2007) and The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (1926), which are concerned very much with pre-modern and modern anxieties about the stability of the distinction between human and animal, and human and inanimate object.

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The Modern Subject as a Failed Model in Beowulf Beowulf, written by Roger Avery and Neil Gaiman and directed by Robert Zemeckis, dramatizes the struggle of the modern subject, in vain attempting to separate itself from technology, medieval collectivity and animal materiality. The film tackles postmodern anxieties, partly brought about by its own use of technology. Beowulf pioneered the technique of ‘performance capture’, which records the movements of actors and objects as in a traditional live-action film, but then scans those images in and manipulates and animates them. Insofar as the human characters in this film are computer-enhanced images, they are cyborgs, that is, hybrids of filmed biological bodies and technological intervention. They are not limited by each actor’s external spatial boundaries; their skin is of the same pixellated texture as their surroundings. To a greater extent than before, this new computer-generated imagery technology allows even audiences the illusion of leaving the confines of their bodies, as spectacular gravitydefying flights and zooms following birds or dragons grant unprecedented visual mastery. Beowulf addresses this death of the modern subject by returning to its birth, by purporting to show the first historical glimpses of human individuality in a modern sense. The film tells the early Germanic story of the monster-slayer Beowulf, transmitted in a late tenth-century Old English poem of the same name. Through a subtitle, Beowulf claims a historically precise setting for its plot – ‘Denmark ad 507’ – and uses what is clearly meant to be

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a realistic mise-en-scène, with early medieval, vaguely Viking-looking houses, costumes, tableware, weapons, boats and armour. At Herod, the settlement of the Danish king Hrothgar, the monster Grendel bursts into the mead hall and kills many of those present, but spares the king. Young Beowulf comes to the rescue from Geatland, flirts with Hrothgar’s queen and fatally wounds Grendel. But the monstrous attack is repeated when Grendel’s mother takes bloody revenge upon the hall after the victory feast. Beowulf rides to her lair to fight her, but she appears as a beautiful woman and seduces him into fathering a child with her. It turns out that the same had happened to King Hrothgar, so that Grendel was his son. The old king makes Beowulf his son and heir, giving him the queen as a wife, and then commits suicide. A cut to Beowulf’s mature years shows him now haunted by his own monstrous son, who again invades the mead hall in a killing frenzy. Beowulf faces up to him and manages to kill him. But his mother survives to attempt to seduce the next king, Wiglaf. Beowulf shows its protagonist as a modern, civilized subject in the process of becoming, of attempting to distinguish himself from animality, technology and the collective. He fails to do so. The contrast between him and the medieval community around him is set up in the opening banqueting scenes. The medieval society to which we are introduced is very much the jolly, burlesque, unrestrained stereotype that Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the carnivalesque. The initial feast in the mead hall is characterized by uncivilized behaviour: burping, shouting, uproarious laughter, chanting, exposed flesh, drunkenness, quarrelling, greedy and messy eating that barely differs from that of the dog, mice and bird of prey who are also feeding themselves in the hall. King Hrothgar is as lewd, naked and drunk as the others; and his adviser Unferth, who is marginally more restrained, gains his sense of superiority over another human through the constant brutal beating of his slave Cain. As in many medieval films, a hog is being roasted here, perhaps because the hierarchical relationship of one species eating another still has to be constantly performed in order to remain in place; and the pig was even in the Middle Ages often understood as closely related to humans and invoked as a derogatory label for people acting like animals.6 When the monster Grendel bursts into the hall and begins to eat the Danes, the fragility of human superiority over other species becomes palpable.

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The impression of the medieval community’s uncivilized behaviour is compounded by the fact that we witness the feast through the eyes of the queen, who is clearly disgusted by her subjects’ behaviour without being able to change it. She has reached a more civilized level of a ‘classical’ body more contained in all aspects of its relationship to the outside world: her flesh does not spill out of her modest dresses; she does not drink, eat or have sex; her voice is quiet and clear. When Beowulf arrives from Geatland to deliver this community from the monster, a second, similar feast is held. Beowulf here appears as the queen’s male equivalent in attempting to disavow the biological needs of his body through civilized asceticism. He displays the hard, disciplined body of modern action heroes (a much-slimmed down and toned version of Ray Winstone’s body, on whose acting this avatar is based). Rather than resisting any exchange between his body and the outside world, Beowulf does eat, drink, display flesh, fight and have sex, but he does so in order to show the superior stamina, firmness and continence of his body. Both Beowulf and the queen also believe in a modern ideal of romantic love, and it is not surprising that they look to each other rather than to the medieval society around them for providing this. The later scenes confirm Beowulf’s relative modernity: he is a progressive leader who converts the gang of warriors into an effective army and civilizes Herod into a proper castle with towers, parapets, bridges and ramparts. Beowulf is set apart not only from the uncivilized medieval community, but also from the monsters. Beowulf’s monsters have been interpreted in many different ways by the recipients of its various versions over the centuries, but I suggest that this particular incarnation of the monsters highlights their mixture of technological and organic elements. Grendel’s shape-shifting mother, an avatar of Angelina Jolie, appears very much like a cyborg when Beowulf first encounters her (illus. 87). This is also the viewers’ first and dominant impression of her, and an image much used in the promotion material. Jolie, whose star persona already includes what seem to be non-natural enhancements to her beauty, which are exaggerated here, is shown rising out of the water, naked but coated in a layer of fluid gold, her feet ending in stiletto-like growths. She moves in robotic ways and resembles that prototypical cinematic robot, Maria in Metropolis (1926) with the added sexual element of the organic stilettos. Her

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87 Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007), Grendel’s shape-shifting cyborg-like mother.

hair is tied to a long braid that moves independently from her body like a tail, adding an animal-like element. Her shape-shifting second son, fathered by Beowulf, in his final appearance also looks like a metal-human hybrid, his idealized body totally encased in (or perhaps made out of) gold. The golden skin is typical both of the smooth surfaces of computer-generated imagery especially in its early incarnations, and of the fashion for smooth organic forms in technological products. But it also befits pre-modern society as represented in the Beowulf tradition, with its high estimation of gold objects and of metal armour. As well as incorporating inanimate technology, Beowulf’s monsters are here characterized by an emphasis on materiality, mortality, fragility and lack of containment of their animal-like bodies, in contrast to the contained civilized body of Beowulf and the queen. Grendel in particular is all body, a grotesque, hyper-biological, unrestrained and fragmentable body (illus. 88). Because his huge body is not covered in skin, its workings – its muscles, organs and mucus – are clearly visible. Despite his size and strength, he is shown to be very fragile, overly sensitive in particular to sound (which makes his ear-like bubble vibrate) and quite easily brutally mutilated. His body is not clearly spatially separated from its surroundings, as it constantly leaks fluids, flesh, blood, brain and mucus. Grendel’s mother also has an animal incarnation looking like a scaly dragon (at one stage dimly seen in the water), and another, mermaid-like human-animal hybrid form with a scaly tail. The dominant shape of her second son is that of a dragon resembling a flying dinosaur, with a reptile-like slender head and body, two wings and small legs, all covered in scales.

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88 Beowulf, Grendel’s vulnerable monstrous-human body.

These monstrous bodies again seem to personify both post- and premodern nightmares of losing the distinction between humans and animals. The fact that Grendel’s mother and one of her sons can change shape from humanoid metallic to animal-like bodies is itself a highly postmodern ability to overcome the limits of the body through morphing or filmic tricks as well as a hypermedieval, marvellous ability to do so, answering again to anxieties of both periods about the fluidity of the body. Beowulf, on the other hand, tries his best to embody a different, modern identity and to deny both his animal materiality and his dependence on technology. Rather than acknowledging that he needs armour and weapons for survival as prosthetic extensions of his body, he strips down and drops his weapons for his fights (with a seamonster in an embedded story; with Grendel, declaring that he wants to face him as nature intended; with Grendel’s mother; and later with an attacking Frisian, Finn). He also disavows his animal nature, in particular in the fights against Grendel and Finn, insofar as he uses reason, so essential to modern humanness, (when he observes Grendel’s and Finn’s behaviour and consciously adapts his fighting strategy) and insofar as he ignores his own mortality, seemingly convinced that he cannot be killed. Beowulf attempts to distance himself from others’ mortality, too, as mentioned in chapter Two, forgetting the dead as quickly as possible. What Grendel’s mother seduces him with in their encounter in her lair is precisely the dream of modernity, of a hard, continent, imperishable body controlled by reason, not animal and

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not cyborg. She initially addresses him as an animal and even as a monster (‘Beowulf, the bee-wolf, the bear’, ‘I know that underneath your glamour, you are as much a monster as my son, Grendel’). She then promises that he can overcome his mortality, be eternally strong, mighty and powerful and live forever in his story. Moreover, she indulges his fantasy that he does not need technological help to fight, that he can kill without his sword. By virtue of being a monster’s treacherous promise, this fantasy of abjecting animal and technology is exposed as illusionary and dangerous. Indeed, the further plot shows how futile and self-defeating these attempts at segregating the human from the non-human are. It reveals that the monsters are intimately related to the humans – especially to Hrothgar and Beowulf – and that they share those traits that are often used to define the human: the ability to cry, to speak, to have a name, to feel love, pain and compassion. Though his fighting strategy is seemingly successful, Beowulf does not manage to truly overcome the monsters, who keep returning in different guises, and especially not the monster within. Only when Beowulf finally accepts his own animal mortality and dependence on technology to sustain his body is he able to win his final fight. He takes on the responsibility to kill the dragon because the monster is not of a different species, but his own son. In a spectacular action sequence, his son in his dragon-shape flies around the castle while Beowulf hangs from a rope he attached to the dragon. Beowulf first has to pierce the soft spot in the dragon’s neck in order to kill him and manages to do so, but it turns out that his blade does not quite reach the monster’s heart. As he had severed Grendel’s arm, he now cuts his own arm off at the shoulder so that he hangs merely from the chainmail sleeve of his armour, giving him the crucial extra inches he needs to reach into the dragon’s neck and rip the monster’s heart out with his bare hands, before crashing to the floor together with the dying dragon (illus. 89). In the gesture of cutting, he accepts and exploits both his vulnerable body and his armour as part of his physical dimensions as a fighter. This draws attention to his suffering flesh and at the same time transcends it through accepting his metal skin as part of his body. But in this act of embracing his technological and animal nature and thereby becoming pre- and postmodern, he also kills himself. He resists Wiglaf’s attempts to have him healed, and dies shortly afterwards from the injuries sustained in this fight.

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89 Beowulf, Beowulf cuts his arm off to rip his son’s heart out.

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Beowulf shows what the modern human has to abject in order to come into being: technology and materiality, in the form of animals, monsters, slaves and the dead. It also makes clear that like all abjection, this is incomplete. The abject always haunts the subject. It has done so since the first attempts to constitute such a subject in premodernity, and now does so again with renewed force due to postmodern technology. The film has some sympathy for the modern subject under threat and encourages fighting against its others, but its main emphasis is on the inevitability of its downfall, the impossibility of achieving this ideal and its cost to humans and others. Its open ending allows for some hope that this circle may be broken, but the film spent its entire plot showing that monsters both within and without the human cannot be overcome. It is thus ultimately a pessimistic film.7

Object goes Subject in The Adventures of Prince Ahmed The anxiety about the dissolution of the difference between humans and animals, and humans and technology, was not caused by computer-generated imagery, however. Similar concerns are displayed in The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, the earliest surviving animated feature film, from 1926. It was created by Lotte Reiniger in Berlin with illustrious co-operators such as the filmmaker and visual artist Walter Ruttmann and the composer Wolfgang Zeller. It pioneered the technical possibilities of the medium, using silhouette cuts of

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black cardboard reinforced with lead, on a background of multiple layers of transparent glass and paper. The camera was fixed at a set distance from the backlit ‘trick table’ and the cardboard figures were moved between each shot, in a technique later patented by Disney.8 The film is sceptical about the possibility of modern human identity. It posits three related pre-modern alternatives and challenges to the modern Enlightenment subject: shadow puppets instead of humans; shape-shifting instead of a coherent subject; and partial vision instead of scientific observation. It does so by drawing on the pre-modern technology of the shadow-play and on a pre-modern story that creates an alternative marvellous world, but that could also be seen as a prefiguration of a postmodern virtual reality, in which humans are no longer tied to their material bodies. The Adventures of Prince Ahmed is based on several tales from Arabian Nights, especially the story of Prince Ahmed, with an Orientalist setting in the ‘city of the Caliph’ (Baghdad), the magic archipelago of Wak-Wak and in China. As in most adaptations of medieval literature, this film’s plot seems to take place during a fictionalized Middle Ages. The Arabian Nights are largely set in the eighth century under caliph Haroun al-Rashid, but in the film no precise dating for the plot is given.9 As is characteristic of medieval film’s disjointed temporality, momentary spectacle and instant desires take precedence over psychological continuity. The plot revolves around three objects of desire: a magical horse, the flying fairy Pari-Banu and the caliph’s daughter Dinarsade. The horse is created by an evil magician and is mounted by Dinarsade’s brother, Prince Ahmed, but cannot be controlled and takes Ahmed to the magical island of Wak-Wak, where he sees and falls in love with Pari-Banu. Meanwhile, Aladdin of the wonder lamp meets and falls in love with Dinarsade. But the evil magician abducts Dinarsade as well as Pari-Banu, allowing the former to be taken home by the demons of Wak-Wak, and trading the latter off to the Chinese emperor and his favourite courtier. Ahmed and Aladdin join forces with a powerful witch and manage to overcome the evil magician and rescue the women. The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, unlike Beowulf, does not even attempt a great degree of mimetic fidelity of this marvellous world to the real world: its characters and settings are unashamedly black, two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. They mimic the outlines of real

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people and objects, and convey realistic movement and thereby emotion, but because there is very little internal differentiation of the black shapes, any mimetic effect is outdone by the impression of an artificial creation. That realism has not been a high priority allows for slippage not just between fact and fantasy, but also between medieval and modern settings: the scenes in Aladdin’s city, for instance, look as much like the expressionist claustrophobic alleys of Weimar films taking place in the present day as of those set in the Middle Ages. The Adventures of Prince Ahmed’s triple anti-mimetic stance – animation, setting in a marvellous world, non-mimetic silhouette cuts – has usually been interpreted as a trivialization of medieval literature not worthy of much attention. It does not help that the film is based on a medieval work of non-realist fiction, which is also rarely granted historical value either as working through actual historical events or as giving an insight into the mentality of the time of writing. The fact that the main artist in the film-making team was a woman, Lotte Reiniger, and a persistently self-belittling woman at that, contributed further to its marginalization. Partly because she exclusively made animated films set in a marvellous and often medievalized world (predominantly based on pre-modern stories, fairy tales and light operas), she has never received the academic attention she deserves; she has remained a successful brand, known for the advanced trick technology and beauty of her work, rather than an auteur. Prince Ahmed’s anti-mimetic nature, however, can be viewed not as sentimentalizing escapism but as an avant-garde technique to make strange not just film, but also the modern subject; and its visual beauty can be interpreted as part of a strategy to expose the ‘magic’ of film. Taken seriously in this light, Prince Ahmed’s representational strategy that does not aim for an indexical relationship to reality challenges the modern distinction between fiction and reality in a way that both chimes with postmodern and pre-modern concerns, and indeed revives the pre-modern medium of the shadow play for the ultramodern medium of film. While other films cannibalize fine art techniques, usually drawing, and animate them, Reiniger develops a pre-modern art form that was already animated, that of the shadow-theatre, so that it could be recorded frame by frame, and this is what makes her postmodernist destabilization of the subject and of reality at the same time very much pre-modern. (It could be argued that live-action film, too, is a

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development of the pre-modern art of theatre acting, different mainly through the ability to record the performance, but live-action film for the most part disavows this debt and stresses its difference from the theatre.) In her publications on animation, Reiniger correctly dates the origin of the shadow play to pre-modern China, with significant centres in India, Java and the ‘Orient’ before the sixteenth century (she mentions the year ad 1000, but it is now thought to be even older than that).10 As she points out, shadow play, allegedly having been invented to make a Chinese emperor’s courtesan come back to life, has its mythological roots in a desire to bring back the dead from the realm of the shadows.11 It thus answers to pre-modern hopes as much as to postmodern concerns with the haunting past. Reiniger shows her respect for this pre-modern art form when she predominantly uses it to tell stories that are of a pre-modern origin, too, here the Arabian Nights. She even sets part of Prince Ahmed in China and the Orient, where the shadow play originated (with the magic islands perhaps carrying overtones of Java). Although this is to some extent a patronizingly Orientalizing move with racist overtones, it is saved from a mere exoticization of the Other by its relatively respectful engagement with the ‘Orient’s’ own pre-modern aesthetic traditions. The way she represents these locations is less indebted to their real or fantasized geographies than to their art, so that China looks like a Chinese drawing rather than a photo by a Westerner, and the characters like Chinese shadow puppets rather than like Western stereotypes. The film explores alternatives to the modern subject not only implicitly by representing it as a shadow puppet in an alternative world, but also, like Beowulf, by explicitly questioning its distinction from animate or inanimate objects. Long before a realistic simulation of morphing was technically possible, Reiniger’s silhouette films found a non-mimetic trick technique that allowed shape-shifting on screen through the manipulation and gradual replacement of limbs. Having worked with Paul Wegener on his medieval Pied Piper of Hamelin (1919, which survives only fragmentarily) and other films, she shared his idea of film being best suited to such marvellous material. From the Arabian Nights, Prince Ahmed selected shape-shifting motifs for their spectacular value that exploited the most advanced techniques to the full. Objects, plants, animals, humans and monsters frequently turn into each other: the magician metamorphoses into a bat, tree,

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various monsters, a lion, scorpion, vulture and fish, and back to human shape; he makes fluid matter into a horse and moneybags into furry flying demons and then a stone; the witch turns into a snake, rooster and fish; and Pari-Banu and her companions turn into birds with the help of their feather dresses. Apart from shape-shifting into animals and plants, humans also more generally lack the free will and autonomous agency conventionally claimed to distinguish them from animals. The stark twodimensionality of silhouette cuts often makes human subjects appear merely as abstract, moving shapes that form part of patterns. Characters are frequently represented as mass ornaments more than as individuals (illus. 90–92).12 These ornamental characters move in a robotic, machine-like abrupt way, in contrast to the elegant, fluid movements of others. The score, composed by Wolfgang Zeller in close co-operation with the animators, also contributes to the sense that humans are mere objects of external stimuli. Like many of Reiniger’s films, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed has an operatic or balletic quality, with several elaborately choreographed scenes that do not necessarily further the action but impress by their spectacular virtuosity and beauty. But this can have sinister undertones when the music becomes so dominant that it appears not simply to accompany the characters’ actions but to produce them. This is clear not only in the mass scenes, but also in the playful fighting when Ahmed flirts with a harem-like group of girls keen to kiss and embrace him. One girl dances for him, but this soon turns into a fight as the five girls compete for Ahmed’s affections, and each new movement of the characters seems as much provoked by a movement in the music as later set to music. In the plot, there is also a striking emphasis on humans being treated not as autonomous subjects, but as passive objects of trade, kidnapping, imprisonment and desire. The characters are flung about by the plot without much conscious control or forward planning. Especially the women seem to play the traditional role of objects of exchange between men. Dinarsade is merely the object of trade between her father and first the magician (which she resists) and then Aladdin (to which she consents after being offered a palace). PariBanu has no father who could exchange her; Ahmed merely kidnaps her, as does the magician and then some demons. That trade dehumanizes the trafficked humans is also made clear when the jugglers

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90 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926), Chinese courtiers as mass ornaments.

91 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, jugglers as mass ornaments.

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92 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, an arrest as mass ornament.

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93 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, the magician pushes himself into the picture.

performing for the caliph at the start, who sell their performance for money-bags, are shown to be mere ornamental objects (see illus. 91). The magician cunningly resists similarly trading his magic horse for money-bags, wanting to swap it for Dinarsade instead. That it is money itself that ends up with the greatest deal of agency in such transactions over humans is clear when the moneybags morph into demons and then further change into a stone used to pin Ahmed down on a mountain. Money is not a passive object of exchange, but is animated, while the trafficked humans are mere objects, mere moving shapes.

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The Two-way Look in The Adventures of Prince Ahmed But the objects of transactions often turn out to control their owners rather than vice versa, most frequently through their eyes, and this is what raises the second postmodern dissolution of the autonomous subject: the interaction between observer and observed. Science is still the dominant discourse of modernity; if something is scientifically proven, it is believed to be true, because the observer of an experiment is supposed to be objective. This has been much critiqued in theoretical physics, art and philosophy. Posthuman thinkers argue that the object observed will alter the subject who observes, and that this is desirable. Moreover, they emphasize that the observer is always historically situated and limited, and cannot claim a universal, superior vantage-point. Donna Haraway has called us to embrace this ‘partial

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vision’ – partial both in the sense of emotionally invested and in the sense of limited – and acknowledge the interaction between observer and observed.13 The self-refractively inclined genre of medieval films, too – animated or not – has partaken in making this explicit perhaps more than other genres: Hard to Be a God (see chapter Two) is a good example of a film in which the historians as detached, scientific observers are gradually drawn to intervene in the alternative medi eval world they are meant merely to watch, and finally turn out to have been the objects of an experiment themselves, testing how historians will react to witnessing brutality. The interaction between observer and observed is precisely what The Adventures of Prince Ahmed stresses, although in the context of filmic rather than scientific observation. The characters want to possess something beautiful as soon as they see it: the magician in this way instantly desires Dinarsade, Ahmed wants the horse, the ladies of Wak-Wak and Pari-Banu at first sight; Aladdin wants Dinarsade and the Chinese emperor wants Pari-Banu as soon as they lay eyes on the women. Sumptuous visual beauty is the motor of the plot. But the beautiful objects turn out to be hard to own and control, more animated than expected, and arguably more powerful than their observers, whose desires they command: Dinarsade resists the advances of the magician who ends up dead at the close of this plotline; Pari-Banu resists the emperor and his favourite courtier, and initially also Ahmed (but in turn is made susceptible to manipulation by her desire for her bird-dress); and the horse nearly kills Ahmed by flying too high. So the objects of the gaze have profound effects on the observer, both making her want to possess them and then eluding her control. Crucially, the film itself is a dangerous beautiful object of the gaze, and reflects on its own effects on its viewers. It reminds us that any observer is situated, that no observer remains uncompromised by what he sees, not even spectators of The Adventures of Prince Ahmed. Because this film is based on spectacle more than narrative progression, viewers will have difficulties in following the story when they are distracted by the beautiful figures and scenes, thereby being seduced away from their own rational subjectivity. The powerful effect of this film’s beauty even on ‘professional’ repeated viewers is evident in the unusually emotive value judgements of beauty and metaphors of ‘magic’ in the academic and quasi-academic literature on this film.14

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The plot explicitly thematizes the compromising effects not only of seeing beauty, but specifically of filmic beauty, when the magician acts as an animator, bringing to life abstract shapes and transcending the limits of the fictional world. The first act begins with an extra ordinary sequence in which moving shapes appear against a blank blue background, shapes which turn out to be limbs that gradually unfold into the human figure of the magician. The magician uniquely transcends the plot insofar as he uses the edges of the rectangle in which the film is projected, pushing himself up on the outer edge of the frame until he is the picture (illus. 93). By looking straight into the camera, he appellates the viewer as a witness to his self-animation. He then makes some gestures and brings forth some fluid blobs that eventually congeal into the outline of a horse, which he uses to fly to Baghdad and start the main plotline. Twice more, he asserts his control over what the film spectator sees or does not see. When he is imprisoned by the caliph at the beginning, he is shown crouching so that his body fills the entire rectangle. To escape, he does not break through this frame, but uses his mastery of the protofilmic by first conjuring up a tiny replica of his horse which is somehow magically connected to the real one, so that he can see the actual horse’s current location; then creates a knot of fuzzy lines between his hands that he forms into a round frame. In this magic circle, a moving scene of Ahmed, Pari-Banu and the horse on the mountain in China appears in a miniature film-within-thefilm (illus. 94). Armed with this knowledge, the magician crushes the image into nothingness, steps out of his chains and shape-shifts into a bat. Looking us straight in the eye, he escapes not through the edges of the frame, but through the invisible fifth wall of depth, by flying into the distance until he disappears. The film spectator had been firmly in control at the beginning of this sequence, with the magician exposed to our gaze, and the audience providing the sixth wall to the front of the prison. But the observed object turns out to have much greater powers of observation than we do. He is able to watch exactly what he wants to see between his hands and, moreover, outwits the spectator by escaping from view into the distance. He makes us into unwitting accomplices of his crime, reminding us that the object of the gaze can be more powerful than the spectator. Finally, the animator-magician exploits the fact that our vision is partial when he looks down into the shaft of Aladdin’s deep cave

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94 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, the magician’s filmwithin-the-film.

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95 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, the magician closes the lid on Aladdin’s cave.

and locks him in by closing the lid over the round opening (illus. 95). This is filmed as if looking up from within the shaft, so that the magician’s torso appears in a round yellow hole surrounded by a black mask, reminiscent of an iris shot. The magician is able to close this iris by moving the lid across diagonally, thus escaping our visual field once more. Later, we are not even allowed to witness his killing, which, strikingly, happens off-screen. So Prince Ahmed indulges us in an illusion of visual mastery, only to limit our vision at crucial points and snap us out of this illusion. However, this is always to an extent diegetically motivated (within the plot), so that the spectator’s emotional investment in the film is not necessarily interrupted. The fact that most of the animation and quasi-filmmaking in the plot is produced by the magician as the evil antagonist suggests a

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96 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, Ahmed parting the leaves to see more.

profound ambivalence towards the visual lure of film. And indeed, this film, despite and because of its beauty, does much violence to the spectator. Lotte Reiniger is a violent filmmaker both in terms of the violence of the content – kidnappings, fighting, attempted rapes, imprisonment, killing – and in terms of constantly forcing the viewer to adjust the extent to which we take the image to be mimetic, threatening us with loss of coherence and visual mastery. This is clearest in the most visually seductive episode of the plot, Pari-Banu’s and her companions’ nude bathing, which Prince Ahmed observes. This sequence highlights how subjective any observer is, both in and outside the plot, and how the observed object is able to affect and violate the viewer. The sequence alternates shots of Ahmed hiding behind some trees and shrubs, and the fairies arriving, taking off their feather-costumes and bathing. Ahmed’s vision is partial in the sense of limited by his point of view: medium shots of the fairies, perhaps from his perspective, do not always show the centre of the action as the fairies walk in and out of the frame, and he has to part to the leaves straining to see more (illus. 96). Ahmed’s vision is also partial in the sense of involved. At the beginning, he seems to be the perfect objective observer, a self-effacing stranger hidden to watch this scene of undisturbed, innocent natural beauty. But this turns out to be an illusion, as he gets involved, clearly desiring what he sees and then even interfering with it: he robs Pari-Banu’s dress while she is in the water, and later chases and abducts her. So the diegetic observer is far from neutral.

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97 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, an illusion of depth.

Secondly, the spectators’ vision is exposed as partial here, too: our vision at crucial moments is also limited by a mask like an iris shot, which surrounds the circle of the branch hiding Ahmed (see illus. 96). Moreover, it is also hard to watch this scene impartially, unemotionally, without getting involved with the beauty of the images and their content. The fact that this is an overtly erotic scene highlights the affective and physical component of all observation. So the seemingly hidden, self-effacing observer, Ahmed, is exposed as an object of our observation at the same time as we are shown that our own vision is as partial as that of Ahmed struggling to see more. We are no more an objective, universal observer than Ahmed is. But despite the seeming beauty, the object’s effect on the spectator is also particularly violent here. We have to first accept that there is intended to be an illusion of depth here with some palm trees clearly meant to be behind the pond, further in the background than the characters (illus. 97). But then the narrow bent branch or fern leaf supposedly makes it impossible for the fairies to see Ahmed, so that we have to see it as an uninterrupted two-dimensional shape – a three-dimensional fern of this width could never hide a grown human. However, the parting of the leaf (see illus. 96) to see more only works

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if we accept the branch as three-dimensional again, and moreover tilted horizontally, so that Ahmed can look out of the gap despite the stem of the leaf still forming an uninterrupted line. This violent juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional effects is actually quite characteristic of the film. When the magician escapes from prison, for example, we are first asked to accept that the silhouettes of iron rings on top of his feet are meant to tie his ankles to the chain, but when he breaks free, we are asked to see them as simply overlapping with his feet. In the ornamental mass scenes, too, an illusion of depth is sometimes created with some figures intended to be in the foreground, others in the background. But this impression is undermined as they are all of the same size; and any three-dimensionality is abandoned when the figures are no longer arranged in a spatially plausible pattern, for instance, during the arrest of the magician at the caliph’s court (see illus. 92). This violence of forcing viewers to switch between different angles, visual conventions and different degrees of realism, has not been noticed because the film is marvellous in Todorov’s sense and made to look beautiful – witness the arrest scene, which turns a brutal capture into a picturesque arrangement. But even more so than celebrated filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Reiniger forces viewers to give up their expectations about what they see, and violates ways in which we normally see both in real life and in films. The fantasy setting and beauty allows such an extreme degree of visual violence to be shown and applied to the spectator while still making this an attractive and successful film. If beauty balances violence, then in the plot, the evil magician as quasi-filmmaker is counterbalanced by a positive character who also has some powers of proto-filmmaking: Aladdin. With his magic lamp, he is able to make characters – the ghosts of the lamp – appear on a cave wall (illus. 98), echoing at once the camera obscura, Plato’s cave and the ancient Chinese use of oil lamps in the shadow play. He is also a tailor, with his scissors prominently displayed, reminiscent of the scissors needed to cut the silhouette puppets. With the help of the lamp’s ghosts, Aladdin is able to build a palace overnight, which we see assembled in under half a minute. (The witch and PariBanu also have some shape-shifting and magic powers, but these are not as overtly shown as proto-filmic.) While the good demons from the lamp, orchestrated by the witch, manage to overcome the bad demons, it is clear that both light and shadows work together to

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98 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, Aladdin makes the ghosts of the lamp appear.

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99 The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, light and shadows work together.

create this film, and that the outcome of the fights matters less than their spectacular value (illus. 99). The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, then, ultimately withholds value judgement on whether film is good or bad. It simply visualizes film as a powerful illusion of optical mastery that is unmasked as just that: an illusion. The fact that this is told as a fairy tale also has a profoundly disillusioning message. That film grants magic powers of objectivity is no more believable than fairy tales. So the film simultaneously celebrates visual beauty and impressiveness, and warns against overestimating one’s detachment. This is precisely what postmodern critics of science have been arguing: there is no such thing as an objective observer. This argument has been commonly made for the sciences, and the social sciences have embraced it in their mainstream methodology. In the arts and humanities, especially in history,

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however, the idea that the object of study is passive still largely reigns supreme. As regards medievalism, it would do us good to acknowledge that the past is not an inert object of study, but has important effects on the academic observer. Letting the past come alive in an imaginary world might be a more productive guiding fiction for academic endeavour in the humanities than in scientific experiment.

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Film’s Reliance on Medievalism: A Conclusion

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Cathedral, Book and Film While primarily giving new interpretations of a range of classic and neglected films, this book has also aimed to show that there is such a thing as a ‘medieval film’: a group of films usually set in the Middle Ages, creating non-linear time structures, playing visuality off against writing, and critiquing the modern individual human subject. But I would like to use this conclusion to argue that medievalism is important to all films, not just to those that belong to this genre. A significant range of filmmakers and film theorists believe that all film is medieval, a return to medieval forms of communication and thinking. This comparison of film as a medium to the Middle Ages is often confusing rather than helpful, but it has proved remarkably persistent and is significant as a film historical and film theoretical phenomenon. Like many filmmakers, film theorists associated the Middle Ages with non-linear time, visuality and pre-individualism, and ascribed the same characteristics to the medium of film. After film had been invented in 1895, cultural commentators – if they took note of it at all – initially described it as yet another aberration of modern culture, corrupting the youth and making the masses even more stupid. But when film gradually developed from a type of variety show to a respectable form of middle-class entertainment in the 1910s and ’20s, it began to be widely hailed as a media revolution, capable of radically transforming modern culture in the same way that the invention of the printing press had transformed medi eval culture and made it modern. Instead of the traditional division

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of history into an ancient, medieval and modern era, these prophets of a new age divided it into a pre-modern (ancient and medieval), a modern and a recent (then and now rarely called postmodern) period. This belief in film as a revolutionary invention, equal to the discovery of print, has become a widespread pattern of thought that continues to be used with little modification for the ‘new media’ of telecommunication and digital transmission to this day. Film is considered medieval in the sense that it returns to medieval forms of communication that were more visual and collective and less linear. More than that, according to these thinkers, all of modern culture will be transformed back into a new medieval culture, because film replaces print as the leading medium of communication. This formula is of course based on crass simplifications of both ‘the Middle Ages’ and the phenomenology of film, but has been so successful precisely because of its simplicity and its snug fit with generally held stereotypes about the Middle Ages and film. The film critic Béla Balázs formulated the belief in film as launching a new Middle Ages so paradigmatically and beautifully in his first review column for the Viennese newspaper The Day in 1922 that it is worth reading at length: But crucially, film is a fundamentally new kind of art of an emerging new culture . . . A means of mental expression that will influence humankind so widely and so deeply due to the unlimited accessibility of its technology must be of similar significance as Gutenberg’s technological invention was for its time. Victor Hugo once wrote that the printed book assumed the role of the medieval cathedrals. The book became the carrier of the people’s spirit and shredded it into millions of little opinions. The book broke the stone: the one church into a thousand books. Visible spirit became readable spirit, visual culture became conceptual. We probably need to say no more about how this changed the face of human society. But today, another machine is at work to give human society a new spiritual shape. The many millions of people who sit every night and watch images, wordless images, which represent human feelings and thoughts – these many millions of people are learning a new language: the long forgotten, now newly emerging (and indeed international) language of facial expressiveness . . . Perhaps we are standing on the threshold of a new visual culture?1

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In a nutshell, we have the main themes here that recur in film and media theories to the present day. Balázs orders history into three periods, divided by the invention of the printing press and of film: the Middle Ages, characterized by the cathedral; the modern period, characterized by the book; and a new period characterized by film. For him, as for many medieval films, film and cathedral have more in common with each other than with the book: they are both visual and collective media, communicating through images to a united people, as opposed to the book, which communicates through words to individuals, having torn apart their communal spirit. Apart from visuality and collectivity, the new culture of film and the medieval culture of cathedrals have one further element in common that Balázs does not state explicitly, but on which his comparison is based: they both upset the fundamental idea that history is a linear progression, that time’s arrow moves unstoppably, steadily and irreversibly forward in a line. By returning to the past, film resists a linear forward trajectory: the future, according to Balázs’s prediction, will circle back to the past. The Middle Ages themselves are also often described as a period with a radically different, slower and more static sense of time where past, present and future merged into one, as epitomized again by the cathedral.2 How the modern idea of a chronological progression of time is linked to the modern culture of print is drawn out by the media theorist Vilém Flusser, who influentially reiterated many of Balázs’s ideas in the 1990s. Flusser, too, speaks of a ‘return to the Middle Ages as the defining characteristic of the massive changes in our communication structures’.3 Like Balázs, he sees the Middle Ages as a time of a communal folk culture (albeit with an elite literate strata), which through the invention of print was radically transformed into modern, linear culture. This shift happened, he claims, because the standardization of national languages for print forced people to use these originally written languages rather than their local dialects. Flusser’s central observation is that since the invention of print, and even more clearly since the invention of compulsory schooling, people had to learn a written language [the printed national languages rather than the local vernaculars] in order to speak, that they did not really speak any more but read invisible texts. This fundamentally changed their

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programming: they became programmed towards linearity and literacy, that is, they gained a historical consciousness. This was the end of the oral – mythical, magical, ritual – existence and the beginning of the ‘progressive’, modern being.4

So by virtue of reading texts in a linear fashion from left to right, Flusser alleges, people developed a linear understanding of time, too, and thereby became modern. Like Balázs, Flusser also believes that this linear mindset is only recently being challenged again by what he calls ‘technoimages’: paradigmatically film, video, cinema, television and photography. He, too, sees the cinema as a new basilica, taking on the functions that used to be fulfilled by churches.5 Both Flusser and Balázs are part of a persistent tradition of scholarly and popular thought that considers film and other audiovisual media as a return to the visual, collective and non-chronological Middle Ages, especially to cathedrals. The dominant pattern in the media and film histories and theories that reach back to the Middle Ages is thus a tripartite scheme where the Middle Ages and the new period bracket the modern era characterized by the written, individualized and linear medium of print (illus. 100). This conception of comparing the new age of film to the Middle Ages and opposing both eras to the modern period can be found even in the earliest polemics for and against film. Werner Serner in 1913 warned that cinema returns audiences to a primitive state of voyeurism, of an unbridled enjoyment of violent spectacle, and is the modern equivalent of medieval visual displays like executions and tournaments that had died out with the French Revolution.6 In what is usually regarded as the first book-length theory of film, The Photoplay (1916), the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg compares film in its side-lining of the written word to medieval painting.7 In the 1920s and ’30s, the psychoanalyst Ernst Rothschild, the filmmaker Paul Wegener, the writer Otto Foulon and the film theorist Rudolf Arnheim all likened the invention of film in its revolutionary importance to that of the printing press.8 The collective nature of film production and reception was particularly often diagnosed in the 1920s and seen as similar to that of medieval art, especially of Gothic cathedrals, for example, by the socialist Lu Märten and the writers Ivan Goll and Adolf Behne.9 Film architects like Robert Herlth compared their creative collaboration with cameramen, designers, directors and

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100 The dominant pattern of periodization in media and film histories.

others on set to a medieval Bauhütte, the workshop of cathedral builders.10 By 1932, Ludwig Bauer was railing against the new collectivity made possible through mass media like film as a dangerous erosion of individuality, a backward ‘new Middle Ages’.11 The comparison of film to the Middle Ages spread across the Atlantic, in part (but not exclusively) through the many Germanspeaking émigré filmmakers and thinkers lured by America and later driven out by National Socialism. Münsterberg was a German émigré, so was Erwin Panofsky, who made the set designers’ self-image as the new cathedral builders famous in the Anglophone world in 1934.12 The Weimar actor and later Hollywood director William (or Wilhelm) Dieterle in his memoirs (quoted in chapter Five) echoes the idea that ‘the invention of film plays a greater role in human history than the invention of print’ because it has colonized even those parts of the world and segments of the population who are illiterate, leading to a global desire for equal quality of life.13 But the definition of film through recourse to the Middle Ages also took root in other countries. The ‘apparatus’ school of film theory in France criticized film for returning to a Renaissance (post-medieval) single perspective, for not using editing to depict multiple viewpoints but instead feeding the viewer’s fantasy that he is an omnipotent humanist subject who can extend his personal viewpoint with help of the camera.14 As early as 1948, Sergei Eisenstein had argued that film should instead, like medieval painting, combine different viewpoints.15 This line of thought

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still perceives a sea change between the medieval and the modern, and casts film as a return to medieval art and communication, but now takes the alleged invention of perspectival painting rather than of the printing press to be the major turning point from the Middle Ages to modernity. André Bazin in 1945 similarly suggests that film can revive the aesthetics of medieval art because it no longer has to strive to achieve a purely physical likeness, but can focus its efforts on representing the inner essence of an object, too, just as medieval painting could before the invention of perspectival drawing.16 He also proclaims ‘the birth of a new, aesthetic Middle Ages’ because film can return to the collective and democratic mode of production of a medi eval cathedral as opposed to the individualistic, copyright-obsessed print culture of modernity.17 A final strand of thought about film invokes the Middle Ages and its cathedrals to argue that this period in its essential features has lasted much longer than usually assumed (as a continuous joint medieval-modern era) and only fully ended with the invention of film. Photography and film are what finally transformed the cathedral from a static object into a mobile reproduction, according to Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 argument: ‘The cathedral leaves its place to find a reception in the studio of the art lover.’18 Where cathedrals had been cult objects not aimed at being seen by an individual human (‘certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not visible to the observer on the ground’), art lost its sacral dimension with its ability to be reproduced, paradigmatically through film.19 Siegfried Kracauer likewise claims that photography mobilizes and ‘takes the crockets and figures down from the Gothic cathedrals’ and that film is a radical departure from the static worldview of the Middle Ages.20 Murray Pomerance in Cinema and Modernity (2006) follows this argument when he characterizes film as the point where the medieval period of darkness is finally left behind.21 Although this strand of film theory does not see film as a return to the Middle Ages, it still uses the Middle Ages as a reference point to define what is so radically new about cinema. Media theory continues to diagnose the departure from a modern culture dominated by print, linear time and individualism into a new Middle Ages, this time not only through film but through new media more generally. This was modelled by the founder of media and communication studies, Marshall McLuhan, who in the 1960s saw these

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new media as a return to a medieval culture.22 He adds manuscripts as a crucial medium of the Middle Ages, but emphasizes that unlike modern printed books, they were still part of face-to-face communication and made to be touched and heard as well as seen.23 The periodization into Middle Ages (dominated by cathedral and manuscript), modernity (dominated by print) and a new age dominated by film, electronic media and digital technologies has become the standard, much reiterated historiographical pattern, replayed by the likes of Umberto Eco with his visual ‘new Middle Ages’ and Elena Esposito.24 In order to emphasize the significance of new developments in digital animation technologies, theorists such as Vivian Sobchack, Jonathan Crary, Joseba Gabilondo, Mark P. Wolf and Lev Manovich also compare them to the break between medieval and modern art.25 That not only film and media theories, but also films themselves intensively deal with and reflect on media history has been the subject of the preceding chapters, in particular of Part ii, Lethal Letters.

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Stereotypes about the Middle Ages and about Film The view of both the Middle Ages and of film that emerges from these sweeping media histories is necessarily reductive. Mainstream films to some extent are indeed a collective effort and traditionally received by a collective cinema audience, but they can be (and increasingly are) also produced and received individually; they create the illusion of making present again the time of their recording or even of their setting, although they also rely on audiences being able to tell the difference between these points in time; and they are a visual medium even though the auditory channel and written paratexts are of course also integral to them. There can never be one theory of film that captures it in all its facets. But I am less interested in the limited accuracy of this widespread description of film as visual, collective and non-chronological than in its origin and function. Why did early attempts to characterize the new medium focus on its visuality, collectivity and achrony, and prove so persistent? And why did they describe this as a return to the Middle Ages? One of the clues lies in the fact that the features attributed to film sometimes change – is it a visual or rather a multi-sensual or mobile medium? – whereas what remains constant is the depiction

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of the modern period as dominated by the book and its mentality. Whatever film is to the theorists, it is new and different from all that came before, usually labelled ‘the modern’. Film thus had to be everything that modernity was not. I suggest that theories of film draw on the Middle Ages because they are looking for a historical precedent for a really different era, to make their utopian or dystopian dreams for the future more credible by anchoring them in the past. To those who defend film – and most writers on film do, like Balázs, Münsterberg, Rothschild, Foulon, Wegener, Arnheim, Goll, Märten, Behne, Herlth, Panofsky, Dieterle, Eisenstein, Bazin, McLuhan and Eco – the Middle Ages usually function as a Romantic, utopian model that film can emulate. But the comparison of the era of film to the Middle Ages can be equally well adapted by those to whom film seems primarily a danger, such as Flusser and Bauer, who then draw on the Middle Ages as a barbaric, primitive time into which mass media return us. Some critics, like Kracauer, Pomerance, Manovich and to some extent Benjamin, combine a positive view of film with a negative view of the Middle Ages by arguing that film has only just departed from the Middle Ages. ‘Modern’ is then the label they give to the most recent period of film, not the one replaced by film. For all three groups, film is characterized as collective, non-chronological and visual not only because the writers perceive this to be the case, but also because the Middle Ages are already associated with collectivity, non-chronology and visuality, and this influences the discourses on film. So writers on film who want to highlight its epoch-making significance fall back on the invention of print as the only comparable phenomenon, since it has changed the Middle Ages into modernity. They also observe that film’s visuality, collectivity and non-chronology dovetails with existing views of the Middle Ages. This leaves us with the question why the Middle Ages are associated with visuality, collectivity and non-chronology, both in cinema and in film theory. Because any such large-scale generalization must fail, the Middle Ages cannot convincingly be characterized as more or less collective, visual and non-chronological than other periods (though there is a kernel of truth here, too). And yet the films and film theories that claim this are not uninformed; they are able to draw on a long tradition of academic and popular thought that has held this view and often saw medieval mentality as embodied in the cathedral (some of the writers on film, like Umberto Eco and Erwin

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Panofsky, are of course distinguished medievalists themselves). Most of these characterizations can be traced back to the humanists in the mid-fourteenth century, who proclaimed the start of a new age and declared everything that came before them a dark age of ignorance and stagnation. The idea that time in the Middle Ages was not yet perceived in terms of linear progression originates from the very fact that the humanists declared themselves different from all that came before, thereby evidencing and fostering a sense of historical progress and change.26 The Romantics in the late eighteenth century were the first to argue for a New Middle Ages, revalued more positively as a model to cure the ills of modern society. The notion that visuality and collectivity, epitomized by the cathedral, played a greater role before the invention of print is given its classic expression in the Romantic fiction of Victor Hugo, from whom Balázs borrows the description of the cathedral as a book in stone (mentioned in chapter Five).27 Such ideas then became embedded in academic scholarship through writers like Jacob Burckhardt and Ferdinand Tönnies. In the 1910s and ’20s, they were enthusiastically reiterated not only by film theorists, but also by academics, architects, artists and critics: the Bauhaus manifesto and the art historian Wilhelm Worringer influentially held up the Gothic cathedral as their model for a return to the collectivity and spirit of the Middle Ages; academic medievalists such as Johan Huizinga described the greater visuality of medieval culture; historians such as Karl Lamprecht emphasized the stagnation of time in the Middle Ages; and the cathedral in particular was seen as transcending linear time by Panofsky and others.28 That writers on the Middle Ages of all the available stereotypes about the Middle Ages seized the ones that proclaimed it to be non-chronological, visual and collective is again due to the contrast they perceived to their own time as well as to their desire for the latest historical knowledge. This conception of the Middle Ages has continued in film theory, wider culture and academia until the present. Not only film scholars, but also medievalists and other historians still hold the Middle Ages to be ‘the age of cathedrals’, characterized by visuality, collectivity and non-chronological perceptions of time.29 Films and film theory continue to be influenced by more recent scholarship. But most academics watch films, too, and are influenced by them, albeit less consciously so. The continued academic representation of the Middle Ages as less dominated by chronology, writing and individualism

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than modern culture is partly due to the fact that it summarizes important aspects of that millennium, but partly also due to the enmeshed scholarly and popular traditions of perceiving it as such. It is high time to acknowledge the close links between medieval film, film studies and medieval studies.

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References

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what is medieval film? an introduction 1 In the Anglo-American context, the early Middle Ages (until 1066 or so) are sometimes still referred to as the separate period of the Dark Ages. 2 This is also typical of Kluge’s written and filmic work, which often describes the past as present in national or individual bodies, and regularly makes use of medieval material as part of a continuous memory stock. See, for example, Kluge’s The Patriotic Woman (1979), People Preparing the Year of the Hohenstaufen (Menschen, die das Stauferjahr vorbereiten, 1977), News of the Hohenstaufen (Nachrichten von den Staufern, 1977). I identify director and year of first release of the films mentioned whenever this is relevant in the context; this information is also listed in the Index of Medieval Films in the back. I use English titles; where there is no English title, I give the original with my own translation. 3 The most significant publications on medieval film in general are: John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York, 2003), François Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental, Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 70 (Paris, 2004); Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, eds, Medieval Film (Manchester, 2009); Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (New York, 2008); Richard Burt and Nickolas Haydock, eds, Exemplaria, xix/2 (2007) (special issue on ‘Movie Medievalism’); Louise D’Arcens, ed., Screening the Past, 26 (2009, online www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/, accessed May 2010) (special issue on ‘Early Europe’); Martha Driver and Sid Ray, eds, The Medieval Hero on Screen (Jefferson, nc, 2004); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, md, 2009); Sandra Gorgievski and Xavier Leroux, eds, Babel, xv/1 (2007), (special issue on ‘Le Moyen Âge mise en scène: perspectives contemporaines’); Kevin Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson, nc, 1999); Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, nc, 2008); Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds, Queer Movie Medievalisms (Farnham, 2009); Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, eds, Mittelalter im Film, Trends in Medieval Philology, 6 (Berlin, 2006); Arthur Lindley, ‘The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film’, Screening the Past, 3 (1998, online), n. p.; Mischa Meier and Simona Slaniˇcka, eds, Antike und Mittelalter im Film: Konstruktion – Dokumentation – Projektion, Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur, 29 (Cologne, 2007); Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey, eds, Race, Class and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema (New York, 2007); Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold, eds, Studies in Medievalism (2002), (special issue on ‘Film and Fiction’); David Williams,

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5

6 7

‘Medieval Movies’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 20 (1990), pp. 1–32. On important areas of medieval film, see in addition, for example: Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York, 2006); Kevin Harty, ed., Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays (Jefferson, nc, 2002 [1991]); Nickolas Haydock and E. L. Risden, eds, Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (Jefferson, nc, 2009); Amilcare A. Iannucci, ed., Dante, Cinema and Television (Toronto, 2004). Cautiously pioneering the potential understanding of medieval film as a genre are Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, ‘Preface: Hollywood Knights’, in Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray, pp. 5–18, here: p. 5; Agnès Blandeau, ‘Perception du Moyen Âge au cinema: mises en scène des Canterbury Tales de Chaucer’, Babel, 15/1, pp. 17–31, here: pp. 17–8; Kevin Harty, ‘Introduction’, in Harty, Reel Middle Ages, pp. 3–9, here: p. 3; John Ganim, ‘Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 182–202; Tison Pugh and Lynn T. Ramey, ‘Introduction: Filming the “Other” Middle Ages’, in Race, Class and Gender, ed. Pugh and Ramey, pp. 1–12, here: p. 1; Pugh, ‘Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages’, in Queer Movie Medievalism, ed. Kelly and Pugh, pp. 147–64, here: pp. 147–8. The following all deny that medieval film is a genre: Williams, ‘Medieval Movies’, pp. 1, 5; Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval, p. 137; Christian Kiening, ‘“Mittelalter” im Film’, in Mittelalter im Film, ed. Kiening and Adolf, pp. 3–101, here: p. 3; Hedwig Röckelein, ‘MittelalterProjektionen’, in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. Meier and Slaniˇcka, pp. 41–62, here: p. 41; Thomas Scharff, ‘Wann wird es richtig mittelalterlich? Zur Rekonstruktion des Mittelalters im Film’, in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. Meier and Slaniˇcka, pp. 63–83, here: pp. 67–70; Bildhauer and Bernau, ‘Introduction: The A-chronology of Medieval Film’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 1–19, here: p. 2; Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, pp. 39–41. See Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Insistent Fringe: Moving Images and Historical Consciousness’, History and Theory Theme Issue ‘Producing the Past: Making Histories Inside and Outside the Academy’, xxxvi/4 (December 1997), pp. 4–20; Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval, pp. 1029–87; Röckelein, ‘Mittelalter-Projektionen’, pp. 57–8; Scharff, ‘Wann wird es richtig mittelalterlich?’, pp. 71–7; Sarah Salih, ‘Cinematic Authenticity-effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 20–39; Andrew Higson, ‘“Medievalism”, the Period Film and the British Past in Contemporary Cinema’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 203–24; Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, pp. 47–52. Steve Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, Screen, xxxi/1 (Spring 1990), pp. 45–66, esp. pp. 56–8. The costume designer for Robin Hood (dir. Ridley Scott, 2010), Janty Yates, compares these film’s costumes to that of Kingdom of Heaven (2005), set in ‘the same time frame . . . more or less’, in an interview of the film’s official

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website: www.robinhoodthemovie.co.uk, accessed May 2010. 8 Harty lists 564 medieval films in his Reel Middle Ages, Amy de la Bretèque in his L’imaginaire médiéval has an only partially overlapping list of 290 films, pp. 1097–225. 9 Although not yet fully established as a label, ‘medieval film’ is also used in, for example, Brian J. Levy, ‘Medieval Literary Technique and the Cinema of Occupied France: Images, Motifs and Ironic Patterns in Les Visiteurs du Soir’, Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992), pp. 103–11; Harty, Reel Middle Ages; Lindley, ‘Ahistorism’; Arthur Lindley, ‘Scotland Saved from History: Welles’s Macbeth and the Ahistoricism of Medieval Film’, in Literature/Film Quarterly, xxix/2 (2001), pp. 96–100; Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray; Carl James Grindley, ‘Arms and the Man: The Curious Inaccuracy of Medieval Arms and Armor in Contemporary Film’, Film and History, xxvi/1 (2006), pp. 14–19; and Bernau and Bildhauer, eds, Medieval Film. In German, the equivalent term Mittelalterfilm is commonly used in academic and lay discourse and the film business. 10 Ruth Evans, ‘Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), pp. 43–69, esp. p. 49. See also David Matthews, ‘Medieval Studies and Medievalism’, in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton and David Matthews (Cardiff, 2006), pp. 9–22. 11 Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval, includes films referring to the ‘High Middle Ages’ up to the fifteenth century, p. 21. Harty, Reel Middle Ages, considers films from the conversion of Ireland to Christianity to the Turkish victory at Lepanto (423 to 1571), but excludes Shakespearean and Oriental themes, p. 1. 12 See esp. Waxworks in chapter Two and The Adventures of Prince Ahmed in chapter Nine. 13 See chapter Three. 14 For example, ‘Interview with Frank Vogel’, in Märkische Union (27 October 1974); Horst Knietzsch, Neues Deutschland (17 November 1974); Hans Dieter Schütt, Junge Welt (19 November 1974); ‘rp.’, in Norddeutsche Zeitung (25 November 1974); Heide Gossing, Ostsee-Zeitung (29 November 1974); Heinz Kersten, Frankfurter Rundschau (3 January 1975). 15 Bernhard Riff, ‘Der Schatz’, in G. W. Pabst, ed. Gottfried Schlemmer, Schriften der Gesellschaft für Filmtheorie, 1 (Münster, 1990). All translations in this book are mine. Similarly Eric Rentschler, ‘Introduction: The Problematic Pabst: An Auteur Directed by History’, in The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, ed. Eric Rentschler (New Brunswick, nj, 1990), pp. 1–23, here: p. 5. 16 See esp. chapters One, Two, Three and Six. 17 Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Eco, Faith in Fakes: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, ca, 1986 [1973]), pp. 61–72, here: p. 61; Mischa Meier and Simona Slaniˇcka, ‘Einleitung’, in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. Meier and Slaniˇcka, pp. 7–16, here: pp. 7–8; Michael Mecklenburg and Andrea Sieber, ‘Mythenrecycling oder kollektives Träumen? Überlegungen

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zur Mittelalterrezeption im Film’, in Bilder vom Mittelalter: Eine Berliner Ringvorlesung, ed. Volker Mertens and Carmen Stange (Göttingen, 2007), pp. 95–136, here: p. 95; Röckelein, ‘Das Mittelalter im Film’, in Geschichte des Mittelalters für unsere Zeit: Erträge des Kongresses des Verbandes der Geschichtslehrer Deutschlands ‘Geschichte des Mittelalters im Geschichtsunterricht’, Quedlinburg 20.–23. Oktober 1999, ed. Rolf Ballof (Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 308–14, here: p. 308, who elsewhere, however, also states that ‘hardly any’ medieval films were produced in Germany after 1945, Röckelein, ‘Mittelalter-Projektionen’, pp. 49, 56. See also Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval, p. 20. The focus on feature-length films excludes most of Wilhelmine and other early cinema, but the Middle Ages – especially as mediated through Wagner operas – were a popular topic from the invention of film. For examples, see Harty, Reel Middle Ages. Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, pp. 46–8. See also Neale, Genre and Hollywood (New York, 2000), pp. 31–40. Despite Derek Elley’s claims, not all epics (e.g., Gone With the Wind) are set in premodern past, Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London, 1984), pp. 12, 13, 16; and not all medieval films (e.g., Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1975] or Golem [1921]) are epics. Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca, ny, 1975 [1970]), esp. pp. 24–56. Neale, ‘Questions of Genre’, pp. 47–8. See Ursula Schulze, Das Nibelungenlied (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 65–7. There are of course many other ways of representing the past in medieval thought and culture: see, for instance, Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, wi, 1987); Andrew Galloway, ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, The Cambridge History of English Literature, i (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 255–85. This has been the organizing central observation in the two most probing monographs on medieval film to date, in Laurie A. Finke and Martin Shichtman’s Cinematic Illuminations (e.g., pp. 3–22), which analyses medieval films as providers of fantasies, and in Nickolas Haydock’s Movie Medievalism (e.g., pp. 7–8), where he speaks in loosely Lacanian terms of the ‘medieval imaginary’ as a repository for contemporary fantasies. This does not apply to each medieval film, of course; a notable exception are films produced in the gdr (German Democratic Republic) and set during the late Middle Ages and early modernity, which more routinely show the beginning of the humanist and scientific world view and gradual rise of the proletariat that was perceived to continue into the gdr, for example, Thomas Müntzer (dir. Martin Hellberg, 1956), Copernicus (dir. Ewa Petelska and Czeslaw Petelski, 1973), Johannes Kepler (dir. Frank Vogel, 1974) and Jörg Ratgeb (dir. Bernd Stephan, 1978). Lindley, ‘Ahistoricism’, n. p. See also Lindley, ‘Scotland Saved’. Treating historical film as allegory for the present is the standard (and often

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fruitful) approach, exemplified for medieval films, for example, by Susan Aronstein’s work, especially Hollywood Knights; Richard Burt often argues against it, for example, Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film, pp. 75–7. 28 See for instance Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, nj, 2001); Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago, il, 2007). 29 Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, p. 6. I shall not rehearse the arguments made in the ongoing trial in the court of academic opinion on the issue of historical accuracy. As regards medieval film, the ‘prosecution witnesses’ (demanding accuracy, often combined with a belief in a recoverable truth about the past), have been mostly historians, for instance, Aberth, Knight at the Movies; Edward Besson, ‘Oh, What a Lovely War! Joan of Arc on Screen’, in Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray, pp. 217–36; Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Reel Joan of Arc: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of the Historical Film’, The Public Historian, xxv/3 (Summer 2003), pp. 61–77. For the defence (authenticity as an effect), mostly literary scholars have spoken, for instance Martha W. Driver, ‘What’s Accuracy Got to Do With it? Historicity and Authenticity in Medieval Film’, in Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray, pp. 19–22; David Salo, ‘Heroism and Alienation through Language in The Lord of the Rings’, in Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray, pp. 23–37; William F. Woods, ‘Authenticating Realism in Medieval Film’, in Medieval Hero, ed. Driver and Ray, pp. 38–51; Helen Dell, ‘Past, Present, Future Perfect: Paradigms of History in Medievalism Studies: Theorising Modern Medievalism’, Parergon, xxv/2 (2008), pp. 58–79; Louise D’Arcens, ‘Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale’, Parergon, xxv/2 (2008), pp. 80–98; Greta Austin, ‘Were the Peasants Really So Clean? The Middle Ages in Film’, Film History, xiv/2 (2002), pp. 136–41; Myra J. Seaman and John Green, ‘Sacrificing Fiction and the Quest for the Real King Arthur’, Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages, ed. Eileen A. Joy et al. (New York, 2007), pp. 135–54. Witnesses that could be cited by either side, arguing for a complex notion of authenticity and recoverable reality, are Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Introduction: It’s Only a Movie’, in Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 1–29; Salih, ‘Cinematic Authenticity-Effects’; William F. Woods, ‘Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate’, Studies in Medievalism, 12 (2002), pp. 55–78; and Stuart Airlie, ‘Strange and Eventful Histories’, in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London, 2001), pp. 163–83.

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Part I Time’s Bow

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1 the non-linear time of medieval film 1 On time in early film, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, ma, 2002). See also Leo Charney, ‘In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity’, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley, ca, 1996), pp. 279–94, and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford, 1962 [1949]). 2 For example, in Aron Gurevich, ‘Perceptions of the Individual and the Hereafter in the Middle Ages’, in Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. Jana Howlett, trans. S. C. Rowell (Cambridge, 1992 [1982]), pp. 65–89; Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilisation 400–1500, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford, 1988 [1964]), pp. 165–94; in the context of medieval film, François Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental, Nouvelle Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, 70 (Paris, 2004), pp. 47–8. For more on time in medieval film, see Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Introduction’, Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009); Anke Bernau, ‘“Poison to the Infant, but Tonic to the Man”: Timing The Birth of the Nation’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 86–109; Alison Tara Walker, ‘Towards a Theory of Medieval Film Music’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer, pp. 137–57. 3 Peer Raben, responsible for the music in Niklashausen Journey, describes the film as ‘set in some German Middle Ages’ but also as ‘the only valid document of the spirit of the famous late sixties’. Raben, ‘Arbeit ohne Endpunkt’, in Das ganz normale Chaos: Gespräche über Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Juliane Lorenz (Berlin, 1995), pp. 63–81, here: p. 77. Wilhelm Roth says it is set ‘in a timeless era, whose external features for the most part belong to today’s Europe, but also to the Third World as well as to the European Middle Ages and Rococo’. Roth, ‘Kommentierte Filmografie’, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfgang Schütte (Frankfurt, 1992 [1974]), pp. 119–269, here: p. 137. 4 On the non-linear timing of Kingdom of Heaven (2005), and on the way in which dvd editions complicate any historicization of the point of time of the release of a film, see Richard Burt, ‘Cutting and Running from the (Medieval) Middle East: The Mises-hors-scène of Kingdom of Heaven’s Double dvds’, Babel, xv/1 (2007), pp. 247–97, esp. pp. 251–62. 5 Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (Munich, 1992), pp. 131, 223. 6 Ibid., p. 130. 7 Lotte Eisner, who established the common label ‘expressionist’, acknowledges that expressionism was, via Romanticism, modelled on Gothic art. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism, the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (London, 1968 [1952]), pp. 18–19. ‘Gothic’ is used by Kreimeier as it refers to an ‘imaginary Middle Ages’, Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story, p. 102, and by Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar

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Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London, 2000), p. 20; ‘Romantic’ is used by Dietrich Scheunemann in ‘Activating the Differences: Expressionist Film and Early Weimar Cinema’, in Expressionist Film: New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Rochester, ny, 2003), pp. 1–31, here: p. 14. But ‘medieval’ is less judgemental and ambiguous than ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, pp. 4, 34. The ‘creative anachronism’ and non-linear time of many medieval films is also observed by Arthur Lindley, ‘The Ahistorism of Medieval Film’, Screening the Past, 3 (1998, online), n.p.’; Amy de la Bretèque, L’imaginaire médiéval, pp. 47–89; Arthur Lindley, ‘Once, Present and Future Kings: Kingdom of Heaven and the Multitemporality of Medieval Film’, in Race, Class and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema, ed. Tison Pugh and Lynne T. Ramsey (New York, 2007), pp. 15–29. Newspaper journalists also loved to present their pre-release publicity trips to the sets of medieval films (usually) in Babelsberg as returns to the past, with their heavy irony preventing simple escapism, for example, anon., ‘Visit to the Film Palace of the Borgia’, in Film-Kurier (22 February 1922). For example, scriptwriter Hans Kyser, ‘Der deutsche Faustfilm’, in Ufa-Premierenprogramm film premiere programme, 1926; actual aerial photography would have been ‘only real and not romantic in a medieval way’; set designer Robert Herlth, ‘Dreharbeiten mit Murnau’, in Lotte Eisner, Murnau: Der Klassiker des deutschen Films (Velber, 1967), pp. 123–31, here: p. 130 (this appendix by Herlth is not given in the 1964 French original or the English translation); Flodoard v. Biedermann, ‘Urbild und Abbild’, in Ufa-Magazin, 9, special issue on Faust (15–21 October 1926); anon., ‘The Middle Ages!’, in Hausprogramm, (Dresden, November 1926); anon., ‘Confusion of Medieval Charlatanism’, in Hausprogramm (Dresden, 5 July 1929); anon., Filmkurier 199 (26 August 1926); anon., Reichsfilmblatt, 20 (2 October 1926); Holly Stetson, Deutsche Aktien-Zeitung, 483 (15 October 1926); ‘Fritz Engel’, in Berliner Tageblatt, 488 (15 October 1926); anon., Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 487 (15 October 1926); anon., Kinematograph, 1026 (17 October 1926); Arvs, Film-Echo im Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 40 (18 October 1926); and in the following academic works: Russell A. Berman, ‘The Masses and Margarita: Faust at the Movies’, in Our Faust? Roots and Ramification of a Modern German Myth, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison, wi, 1987), pp. 139–52, here: p. 141; Göttler, ‘Kommentierte Filmografie’, in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, ed. Fritz Göttler, Reihe Film, 43 (Munich, 1990), pp. 107–208, here: p. 188; Holger Jörg, Die sagen- und märchenhafte Leinwand: Erzählstoffe, Motive und narrative Strukturen der Volksprosa im ‘klassischen’ deutschen Stummfilm (1910–30) (Sinzheim, 1994), p. 281; Thomas Koebner, ‘Der romantische Preusse’, in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Ein Melancholiker des Films, ed. Hans Helmut Prinzler (Berlin, 2003), pp. 9–52, here: p. 37. Murnau, ‘Regisseure über ihre werdenden Filme’, Revue Suisse du cinéma et la cinématographie Suisse, cf. viii/1 (223–4) (1 January 1926), pp. 77–8,

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here p. 78. On the large number of Wilhelmine and Weimar fantastical films, see Jörg, Die sagen- und märchenhafte Leinwand; on the numerous early Faust films, see Ernest Prodolliet, Faust im Kino: Die Geschichte des Faust films von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart (Fribourg, 1978), pp. 11–32. For example, anon., Vorwärts, 490 (17 October 1926); Herbert Ihering, Berliner Börsen-Courier (15 October 1926); ‘rf.’, Film-Blätter, 30, Staatliches Filmarchiv der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, n.d.; Helma SandersBrahms, ‘So deutsch, so schön’, in Murnau, ed. Prinzler, pp. 185–8; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, p. 242; Oskar Roehler, ‘Survival-Kit für die Zukunft’, in Murnau, ed. Prinzler, pp. 189–90, here: p. 189. Murnau, ‘Regisseure’, p. 78. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London, 1989 [1985]), p. 80, although he elsewhere seems to retract from this strict chronology somewhat. On the importance of Deleuzean time images (understood slightly differently) in medieval film, see also Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, nc, 2008), pp. 36–78. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 97–8. He calls this an ‘Augustinian’, that is, a pre-modern understanding of time. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, ma, 1997), esp. pp. 459–62. Eric Rohmer, L’Organisation de l’Espace dans le ‘Faust’ de Murnau (Paris, 1977), pp. 15–42, esp. p. 26. See, for example, Kenneth S. Calhoon, ‘F. W. Murnau, C. D. Friedrich, and the Conceit of the Absent Spectator’, Modern Language Notes, 120 (2005), pp. 633–53; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, pp. 235–9 (on Nosferatu). This undermines Frances Guerin’s persuasive division of the non-linear time into a linear narrative disrupted by the ‘magic’ of film, Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis, mn, 2005), p. 114. Le Goff, Medieval Civilisation, pp. 165–94. On medievalist milleniarism in the Left Behind films (2000, 2002, 2005), see Christopher Powers, ‘Movie Milleniarism: Left Behind, Script/ure and the Sleeping Dragon’, in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Haydock and Risden (Jefferson, nc, 2009), pp. 269–98. An hourglass also features in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both the 1923 and the 1939 version), where it measures the hour that Quasimodo has to spend on the pillory. In the 1923 version, in addition, an inter-title stresses the changeability and brevity of time (‘swift run the sands of life except in the hour of pain’), and Esmeralda’s execution is brought forward twice, shortening her future. Historia von D. Johann Fausten: Text des Druckes von 1587, ed. Stephan Füssel and Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Stuttgart, 1999). When the protagonist of Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Arthurian romance Parzival (circa 1210) returns from wanderings during which he had lost all

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sense of time, he re-enters society on Good Friday; Faust returns on what is presumably Easter Sunday. The imagination of the Middle Ages as a lost innocent ‘childhood’ of Europe that can be rekindled through film is certainly a common one, and has been invoked with reference to Faust, too, for example, Göttler, ‘Filmografie’, p. 186, Kyser, ‘Faustfilm’, Engel, Berliner Tageblatt, 488 (15 October 1926). Guerin, A Culture of Light, pp. 114 and 118; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, p. 243. On the experiential and yet anti-illusionist effects of Murnau’s style, see Jo Leslie Collier, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transportation of Romanticism from Stage to Screen (Ann Arbor, mi, 1988), pp. 131–57. Holly Stetson, Deutsche Aktien-Zeitung, 483 (15 October 1926). They had cooperated on the medievalist The Wandering Image (1920), and would go on to do Nibelungen (1924). On Harbou’s medievalism in these films as well as in The Legend of Holy Simplicity (1920), The Stone Rider (Der steinerne Reiter, 1923), The Burning Field (Der brennende Acker, 1922 and The Chronicles of the Gray House (1925), see Karin Bruns, Kinomythen 1920–1945: Die Filmentwürfe der Thea von Harbou (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 17–41; on Lang’s medievalism also in films like Plague in Florence (Pest in Florenz, 1919), see Georges Sturm, Die Circe, der Pfau und das Halbblut: Die Filme von Fritz Lang 1916–21, Filmgeschichte International, 8 (Trier, 2001), pp. 42–6, 112–20, 168–72. The setting of the tales is variously described as ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’, Decla-Bioscop-Presseheft/Illustrierte Filmwoche, 9/39 (press kit), pp. 450–3, here: p. 451; ‘Middle Ages’, Herbert Ihering, Berliner Börsen-Courier, liv/473 (9 October 1921); ‘Renaissance’, F. Podehl, Der Film, vi/41 (9 October 1921), p. 63; ‘gothic’, R. A. Sievers, Der Drache, iii/41 (12 April 1922), pp. 712–13, here: p. 713; ‘timeless’, Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, trans. (from German manuscript) Gertrud Mander (London, 1976), p. 46; ‘Baghdad around 800, Venice in the Renaissance, China in the Middle Ages’, Karl Wilhelm Schiffer, Arbeitsmaterial No. 16, Bundestagung der deutschen Jugendfilmclubs (Cologne, 1963); ‘mock-Gothic’, Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, p. 145. That German small towns preserved medieval mentality is argued by Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story, pp. 131, 223. If we see whole rest of the film, from the moment of drinking, including the return to the frame narrative, as the maiden’s fantasy at the point of her death, we are still shown two different outcomes of the same moment, albeit within the fantasy. He puts this most radically and concisely in Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative time’, Critical Inquiry, vii/1 (Autumn 1981), pp. 169–90. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London, 2000), esp. pp. 10, 19–23, 26. Ibid., p. 19. Unlike me, Gunning sees the destiny-machine as representing the experience of time in modernity, and the allegorical moment as closer to pre-modern (baroque) drama, Ibid., pp. 10, 27.

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2 the medieval dead reanimated 1 Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, nc, 2006), pp. 69–104. 2 Other films set in the Middle Ages that feature reanimated dead or personifications of death are Ferryman Maria, with a personification of death; Sumurun (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1924), which abounds with seemingly dead characters reawakening, but ultimately lets only the filmmaker-withinthe-film survive; Rashomon, where a dead person seems to speak from the other side; and Orchestra Rehearsal (dir. Federico Fellini, 1978), where the dead buried in a medieval chapel are at least metaphorically raised by the chaotic orchestra. Other films set in the present or future that feature reanimated medievalist characters or a return to the Middle Ages are Veritas Vincit (dir. Joe May, 1919), where an Indian mystic transports a woman back into her past in ancient Rome and a small medieval town ‘around 1500’ to guide her in the frame narrative in the present (in a similar structure to Destiny and Waxworks); Werewolf Shadow (dir. León Klimovsky, 1971), which features a medieval werewolf; Hitler – A Film from Germany (dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977), where Hitler rises from his grave together with various remnants of the Middle Ages; Dreamship Surprise (see chapter Three); the self-explanatory A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (dir. Tay Garnett, 1949); Black Knight (dir. Gil Junger, 2001), in which a black American is transposed to a medieval court; or Timeline (dir. Richard Donner, 2003), where a group of archaeologists time-travel to fourteenthcentury France. On medieval time-travel films, see also John Engle, ‘A Hard Day’s Knights: Movie Time Travel, the Middle Ages and a New Millenium’, Babel, xv/1 (2007), pp. 317–35. A few films show the appearance of medieval characters that are not dead and reanimated but time-travel into the present, such as The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (dir. Vincent Ward, 1988) and The Visitors (Les Visiteurs, dir. Jean-Marie Poiré, 1993). 3 Paul Wegener describes ‘late Gothic’ as the setting, in ‘Bei den Schaffenden III: Paul Wegener’, Film-Kurier (5 June 1920); ‘-z-n.’, in Film-Kurier, ii/245 (30 October 1920); ‘r’, in Vorwärts (31 October 1920); ‘Mv’, in Vossische Zeitung (2 November 1910); Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, nj, 1947), p. 31; Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis, mn, 2005), p. 126; Amory Burchard, Der Tagesspiegel (5 August 2001), p. 11; Omer Bartov, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From ‘The Golem’ to ‘Don’t Touch my Holocaust’ (Bloomington, in, 2005), p. 4; James J. Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages: Wegener’s Der Golem and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in Exemplaria, xix/2 (Summer 2007), pp. 290–309. Its location in Prague, to this day often seen as a ‘medieval’ city due to the survival of much of its medieval layout and architecture, contributes to this impression. 4 Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages’, pp. 294–8; Guerin, A Culture of Light, p. 131; Bartov, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema, pp. 1–5; Noah W. Isenberg, ‘October 29, 1920: Paul Wegener’s Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam Debuts in Berlin’, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and

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Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, ct, 1997), pp. 384–9; Seth L. Wolitz, ‘The Golem (1920): An Expressionist Treatment’, in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, ma, 1983), pp. 384–97; ‘e. j.’, in Film-Blätter (Staatliches Filmarchiv der ddr), 98, n.d. For example, in the portrayal of Alberich in the Nibelungen (1924), of Nosferatu as a vampire with both medieval and anti-Semitic associations in Nosferatu (1922), of Rotwang as a mad scientist with similarly both medievalist and anti-Semitic features in Metropolis (1926), or Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), often perceived as medieval and antiSemitic in its violent depiction of Christ’s suffering. Wegener’s previous two versions, of which only fragments survive, both showed the Golem resurfacing into present-day Germany. The middle-aged emperor in the film is presumably Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph ii (1552–1612, emperor from 1576), not Louis ii, as Paxson presumes in ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages’, p. 292. Herbert Ihering, Berliner Börsen-Courier (31 October 1920). Similarly ‘-z-n.’, Film-Kurier; ‘r’, in Vorwärts (31 October 1920); ‘Mv’, in Vossische Zeitung (2 November 1920); Schönemann, Paul Wegener, p. 82; Isenberg, ‘October 19, 1920’, p. 385; Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film (Berlin, 1926), p. 83; Holger Jörg, Die sagen- und märchenhafte Leinwand: Erzählstoffe, Motive und narrative Strukturen der Volksprosa im ‘klassischen’ deutschen Stummfilm (1910–30) (Sinzheim, 1994), p. 169; Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages’, p. 291. For example, Paul Wegener, ‘Die künstlerischen Möglichkeiten des Films’, in Kai Möller, Paul Wegener: Sein Leben und seine Rollen. Ein Buch von ihm und über ihn (Hamburg, 1954), pp. 102–13, here: p. 111. Inter-titles mention that ‘he will come to life’; that the book the Rabbi uses is ‘the art of making dead things come to life’ and that the magic word can ‘awaken to life every lifeless thing, corpse or artificial creation’. The Golem figure itself is also supposed to grow in some versions of the legend, Jörg, Die sagen- und märchenhafte Leinwand, p. 172. This was noted by ‘-z-n.’, in Film-Kurier. Several versions of the legend insist that the Golem is dead rather than inanimate when they let the Golem die again through removing one letter of the life-giving word, so that it becomes ‘meth’ (‘dead’), see Heide Schönemann, Paul Wegener: Frühe Moderne im Film (Stuttgart, 2003), p. 91. Exodus in ‘-z-n.’, Film-Kurier; Ahasver in Bartov, The ‘Jew’, p. 5; Ahasver and the patriarchs in Schönemann, Paul Wegener, p. 99; Ahasver and Moses in Isenberg, ‘October 29, 1920’, p. 386; Moses in Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages’, p. 293, Haydock, Movie Medievalism, p. 24, and Guerin, A Culture of Light, p. 131. See Schönemann, Paul Wegener, pp. 91–2 and 95–8; Arnold Zweig, ‘Der Golem’, Die Schaubühne, iii/10 (1915) pp. 224–8. James Paxson sees it as a consequence exclusively of the fool’s transgression

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of the speaking taboo provoked by a close-up of Ahasver’s face (by which he means a medium shot of his upper body), Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages’, p. 296. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, History, Theory (Minneapolis, mn, 2001), Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London, 2005). Carl Hauptmann, Film und Theater [1915], p. 4. I quote from the copy of the typescript he sent to Wegener ‘with the liveliest greetings’. Carl Boese, Erinnerung an die Entstehung und an die Aufnahmen eines der berühmtesten Stummfilme: Der Golem (unpublished manuscript, Kinemathek Berlin). Noted by Jörg, Die sagen- und märchenhafte Leinwand, p. 176. ‘Die Stadt Arkanar’, Hallelujah-Film Presseheft, pp. 27–8. The production history is carefully described in Hans-Michael Bock, ‘Barock und Orient’, in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett: Drehbuch von Henrik von Galeen zu Paul Lenis Film von 1923 (Munich, 1994), pp. 115–38, here: pp. 125–32; see also Jürgen Kasten, ‘Episodic Patchwork: The Bric-á-BracPrinciple in Paul Leni’s Waxworks’, in Expressionist Film: New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Rochester, ny, 2003), pp. 173–86. A lighter reading of Waxworks as well as Destiny and Sumurun – defying tyranny through entertaining it – is provided by Donald Haase, ‘The Arabian Nights, Visual Culture, and Early German Cinema’, Fabula, xlv/3–4 (2004), pp. 261–74. The film premiere’s programme gives the biographical dates for Haroun (766–809), who the audience ‘knows from school’ and Ivan (1530–1589), Premierenprogramm, Ufa-Theater Kurfürstendamm (13 November 1924); ‘fate of famous men who are now condemned to an existence as wax figures’, ‘their reanimation in film’, Kinematograph, 927 (23 November 1924), p. 19. It is unclear whether filmmakers and audiences saw Ivan the Terrible as part of Russia’s Middle Ages, as most academics do now, but the episodes are markedly closer to the lack of vitality of the present. This film was understood as ‘medieval’ for instance by Hans-Dieter Tok, Leipziger Volkszeitung (24 May 1975); and by the gdr film administration (Gutachten Otto, Leiter der ha Kulturpolitische Arbeit mit dem Film bei der hv Film (20 December 1974); Gutachten Wolfgang Heise about the script, March 1971).

3 queer time 1 As a starting point, see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, 2005). For an extended and somewhat different version of this chapter, see Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921)’, in Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, ed. Ben Davies and Jana Funke (Basingstoke, 2011). 2 Tom Boellstorff, ‘When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time’, in GLQ, xiii/2–3 (2007), pp. 227–48, here: p. 228. 3 On the conservative gender politics of most medieval films, see Jacqueline

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Jenkins, ‘First Knights and Common Men: Masculinity in American Arthurian film’, in King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema, ed. Kevin J. Harty (Jefferson, nc, 1999), pp. 81–95. This bears out Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh’s observation that both queerness and medievalism often come together in cinema in subversive ways (though I will also give examples for how they can confirm normative sexuality): Kelly and Pugh, ‘Introduction: Queer History, Cinematic Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality’, in Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Kelly and Pugh (Farnham, 2009), pp. 1–18. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London, 1999), p. 179, my emphasis. Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge, 2007); Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge, 2009). See Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, pp. 223–5. Shakespeare had of course used male actors to play women masquerading as men for comic effect, but not his tragic heroes. Edward Payson Vining, The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem (Philadelphia, pa, 1881). For discussion of Vining, see Ann Thompson, ‘Asta Nielsen and the Mystery of Hamlet’, in Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London, 1997), pp. 215–24. See Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 46–7. The eleventh-century imperial palace in Goslar, heavily ‘restored’ in the nineteenth century, stands in for Elsinore in outdoor shots. On medievalist settings in Shakespeare’s play and various other films and performances of it, see Patrick J. Cook, ‘Medieval Hamlet in Performance’, in Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings, ed. Martha Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, nc, 2009), pp. 105–15. The film’s disjointed temporality has also been observed by critics who have not remarked on its medievalist claims: Buchanan sees Hamlet as a modern figure removed from the period setting, Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, pp. 235–6, so does Howard, Women as Hamlet, pp. 148 and 155; Lisa S. Starks argues that Hamlet’s double gender is itself a return of the repressed past, but not that of the Middle Ages but of the First World War, Starks,‘“Remember Me”: Psychoanalysis, Cinema, and the Crisis of Modernity’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, liii/2 (Summer 2002), pp. 181–200. Boellstorff, ‘When Marriage Falls’, p. 232. The gdr’s Ministry for Culture required cuts that would make the didactic message of ‘the right balance between love and faithfulness’ clearer. See, for example, Protokoll-Hauptblatt HV Film, Sektor Filmzulassung und Kontrolle, dr1 MfK-hv Film 585; see also veb defa-Studio für Spielfilme, Stellungnahme zum Film “Frau Venus und ihr Teufel” (12 April 1967). See also Frank Degler, ‘Affirmative Humour in Bully Herbig’s Parody of Star Wars/Star Trek: (T)Raumschiff Surprise’, in Gender and Laughter: Comic

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Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media, ed. Gaby Pailer, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher and Ulrich Scheck, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik, 70 (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 297–312. Schweiger reprises the camp medieval role in the much more homophobic 1 ½ Knights: In Search of the Ravishing Princess Herzelinde (1 ½ Ritter: Auf der Suche nach der hinreißenden Herzelinde, dir. Til Schweiger, 2008), in which Schweiger plays a virginal knight with a chin-length bob who is disguised as a minstrel in a pastel pink outfit for part of the plot, but is reinstated to heteronormativity (and a less feminine hairdo) in marrying his princess in the end. Another case in point is Pope Joan (dir. Sönke Wortmann, 2009) discussed in chapter Five, which adapts the popular myth of the early medieval German Johanna, driven by her thirst for knowledge and for the power to do good to cross-dress as a man in order to gain access to the clerical learning and status allegedly reserved for men. She escapes being married off by her father, and then by her older lover’s wife, and becomes a monk and eventually pope instead. But the ending suggests that this was a tragic mistake: Johanna is seen to yearn to be her lover’s wife and become a mother, and her miscarriage during the Easter procession at which she and her lover also die implies that her resistance to the biological role of a woman has rendered her life impossible; and that ultimately the biological female body will betray the weaker sex under any male clothing. Similarly, in Crusaders (dir. Dominique Othenin-Girard, 2001) a young Jewish woman, Rachel, cross-dresses in order to be able to attend school and read and study astronomy, but mercifully is soon unmasked and becomes a feminine married woman. Carolyn Dinshaw can be read to argue that affective links to the past are queer in themselves, irrespective of the genders involved, when she defines ‘queerly historical acts’ as those which ‘create a relation across time that has an affective or erotic component’; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, nc, 1999), p. 50. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York, 1975), pp. 157–210. J. Lawrence Guntner points out that throughout the film the innocent, conciliatory world of youth to which Hamlet, Horatio and young Fortinbras belong is portrayed much for positively than the violent, lustful adult world into which Hamlet is forced and which kills him; Guntner, ‘Expressionist Shakespeare: The Gade/Nielsen Hamlet (1920) and the History of Shakespeare on Film’, Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities, xvii/2 (Winter/Spring 1998), pp. 90–102, here: pp. 96–7. Lawrence Dawson has been more critical of the film’s liberating potential in ‘Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret’, Shakespeare Survey, 45 (1992/3), pp. 37–62. Cf. Ulrich von der Osten, ns-Filme im Kontext sehen!: ‘Staatspolitisch besonders wertvolle’ Filme der Jahre 1934–1938, Diskurs-Film-Bibliothek, 13 (Munich, 1998), pp. 106–11. On the wreath as a sign of Joan’s passion, see Judith Klinger, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’, in Mittelalter im Film: Trends in Medieval

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Philology, ed. Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, Trends in Medieval Philology, 6 (Berlin, 2006), pp. 135–70, here: pp. 165–6. Veit Harlan in his memoirs describes how the Nurembergers were called to come to the mass scenes in clothes ‘looking as medieval as possible’; Harlan, Im Schatten meiner Filme, ed. H. C. Ophermann (Gütersloh, 1966), p. 71; Frank Noack explains that it was sa and other riders who wore ‘medieval folk dress’ for these scenes; Noack, Veit Harlan: Des Teufels Regisseur (Munich, 2000). This continuity into a long tradition of national progress is the role of medieval Nuremberg also in other Nazi films, like Triumph of the Will (dir. Leni Riefenstahl, 1939). The War of the Oxen (dir. Hans Deppe, 1943) features a very similar constellation of a medieval country-girl dressing up as a man in armour in order to support a political cause and protect her virginity, with an older man giving her up to a younger leader for marriage as the happy ending. Condottieri, discussed in chapter Seven, also has the leader’s girlfriend wearing male clothing in an effort to help in his fight. Kraft Wetzel and Peter A. Hagemann, Liebe, Tod und Technik: Kino des Phantastischen 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1977), p. 69. Werner Fiedler, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (8 January 1936). Similarly impressed by Hildesheim and the short documentary: Heinrich Bachmann, Germania (9 January 1936); F. Röhl, Der Film (11 January 1936) (‘medieval town’); and after its release in Berlin with the same pre-film: ‘K.’, Neue Berliner Zeitung/Das 12 Uhr Blatt (8 February 1936); ‘-ws.’, BZ am Mittag (8 February 1936); ‘W. H.’, Berliner Nachtausgabe (8 February 1936); ‘F. R.’, Der Film (8 February 1936); ‘Schneider’, Licht-Bild-Bühne (8 February 1936); ‘G. B.’, Berliner Volks-Zeitung (9 February 1936); ‘f.’, Berliner LokalAnzeiger (9 February 1936); ‘thk’, Berliner Morgenpost (9 February 1936); ‘the thousand-year-old Hildesheim’ as origin of the film, ‘cht.’, Der Angriff (8 February 1936); all reprinted in the Ufa-Presseheft about the Berlin premiere on 8 February 1936. The setting is given as 1565; the German inter-titles omit this medievalist introduction, set the plot in 1560 and use Shakespearean names. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 86, my emphasis. See Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Mourning and Violence: Kriemhild’s incorporated memory’, in Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000, ed. Helen Fronius and Anna Linton (Rochester, ny, 2008), pp. 60–75. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, nj, 2002), p. 229. See also Tracey Sedinger, ‘Theory Terminable and Interminable: On Presentism, Historicism, and the Problem of Hamlet’, in Exemplaria, xix/3 (Fall 2007), pp. 455–73. His feminine identification was observed not only by Vining, but also by the prominent psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who used him as a model for the Oedipal drama; see, for example, Jones, ‘The Death of Hamlet’s Father’, in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 29 (1948), pp. 174–6; see also Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester, 1995), pp. 34–6.

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Part II Lethal Letters

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4 the dangerous power of writing 1 On the tension between text and image and their claims to truth in medieval film, see also Christian Kiening, ‘“Mittelalter” im Film’, in Mittelalter im Film, Trends in Medieval Philology, ed. Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, 6 (Berlin, 2006), pp. 3–101, here: p. 4; Richard H. Osberg and Michael E. Crow, ‘Language Then and Language Now in Arthurian Film’, in King Arthur on Film, ed. Kevin Harty (Jefferson, nc, 1999), pp. 39–66, here: pp. 46–9; Richard Burt, ‘Border Skirmishes: Weaving around the Bayeux Tapestry and Cinema in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and El Cid’, in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009), pp. 158–81; and Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film (New York, 2008), pp. 23–73 and 137–67. 2 Horst Wenzel, ‘Die Schrift und das Heilige’, in Die Verschriftlichung der Welt: Bild, Text und Zahl in der Kultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Horst Wenzel, Wilfried Seipel and Gotthart Wunberg, Schriften des Kunsthistorischen Museums, 5 (Vienna 2000), pp. 15–57, here: pp. 36–9; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Grab und Schrift’, in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter: Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern (Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums 8.–10. Juni 1995), ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier and Thomas Scharff, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 76 (Munich, 1999), pp. 9–23. 3 On the film’s anti-writing attitude, see also Richard Burt, ‘Getting Schmedieval: Of Manuscripts and Film Prologues, Paratexts, and Parodies’, Exemplaria, xix/2 (Summer 2007), pp. 217–42, here: pp. 228–30. Other examples of treacherous abuse of writing are Jester Till (2003), in which the ignorant young King Rupert is manipulated by his evil aunt into signing written laws oppressing the poor and a will that grants her power to the throne; Destiny, where the Chinese emperor sends out a letter of invitation to his court that is more like a threat; Golem, where the emperor posts an eviction notice for the Jews of the Ghetto; Lucretia Borgia (dir. Richard Oswald, 1922), in which the evil Cesare Borgia writes out a death sentence in a letter; Wilhelm Tell (dir. Rudolf Dworsky and Rudolf Walther-Fein, 1923), where the oppressive Landvogt (‘reeve’) is repeatedly shown behind his writing desk, the emperor crushes a document granting freedom to the people, and written documents demand excessive payments of dues and ridiculous deference to a hat on a stick, in contrast to the face-to-face communication among the rural population; and Boccaccio (dir. Herbert Maisch, 1936), where misattributed letters between secret lovers are the cause of much confusion and a scribe is given a death sentence for inciting adultery in his love poems when he is denounced by a spoilsport professional printer, though all is dissolved in hilarity. 4 See, for example, Miriam Hansen, ‘The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance’, in Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Jane Gaines (Durham, nc, 1992), pp. 169–202.

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5 This is argued not only by semioticians, but also, for example, by Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, ca, 1990 [1985]); for an overview of this line of film theory see Gertrud Koch, ‘Das Bild als Schrift der Vergangenheit’, in Mimesis, Schrift und Bild: Ähnlichkeit und Entstellung im Verhältnis der Künste, ed. Birgit R. Erdle and Sigrid Weigel (Cologne, 1996), pp. 7–22. 6 See Joachim Paech, ‘Die Szene der Schrift und die Inszenierung des Schreibens im Film’, in Schrift und Bild im Film, ed. Hans-Edwin Friedrich and Uli Jung, Schrift und Bild in Bewegung, 3 (Bielefeld, 2002), pp. 67–79, here: pp. 68–9. Another example for the preference of visuality over writing is Crusaders (2001), in which writing is positive insofar as it is a material object rather than a text (for example, the protagonist Martin’s silver amulet inscribed with the first verse of the Koran in Arabic, which identifies his Saracen father) but otherwise abused in political struggles. Ultimately, the film advocates a retreat into the family and into the visual immediacy of the cathedral in one’s homeland rather than the pursuit of book learning. 7 Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’, in Hugo Münsterberg On Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York, 2002 [1916]), pp. 45–162, here: p. 143. 8 David Williams, ‘Medieval Movies’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 20 (1990), as well as the respected and widely cited Internet Medieval Sourcebook include it as a medieval film (www.fordham.edu/halsall/medfilms.html, accessed May 2010), another website situates it as ‘borderline ancient/medieval’ (www.celyn.drizzlehosting.com/mrwp/faq8.html, accessed May 2010). Despite Sirk’s cult status, there is very little research on the film. On Sign of the Pagan as a historical epic, and on its depiction of time, see Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Sign of the Times: The Semiotics of Time and Event in Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan’, in The Epic Film in World Culture, ed. Robert Burgoyne, afi Film Readers (London, 2011), pp. 124–43. 9 Jon Halliday, ed., Sirk on Sirk: Conversations with Jon Halliday (London, 1997 [1971]), p. 11. Although Sirk’s autobiographical statements cannot always be trusted, this claim at least shows his awareness of medieval art and of Panofsky. 10 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, Critique, 1/3 (January/February 1947 [1934]), pp. 5–28. 11 See Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis, 2007), esp. p. 197. 12 That there is little to be seen on the lower scroll either may be compounded by the poor quality of the versions accessible to me, tv versions in German and English. 13 On the anachronistic Muslim subtext in Sign of the Pagan, see Jean-Loup Bourget, Douglas Sirk (Paris, 1984), p. 74. 14 See Michael Schaudig, ‘“Flying Logos in Typosphere”: Eine kleine Phänomenologie des graphischen Titeldesigns filmischer Credits’, in Schrift und Bild, ed. Friedrich and Jung, pp. 163–83, here: p. 173.

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5 the printing press vs the cathedral 1 On the difficult production process, see Lee Atwell, G. W. Pabst (1977), p. 110. 2 Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation’, in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Oxford, 2004), pp. 1–52, here: p. 15. 3 That the film is set at the end of the Middle Ages and the cusp of a new time is mentioned, for instance, by Horst Knietzsch, Neues Deutschland (12 February 1973); Heinz Hofmann, Nationalzeitung Berlin (15 February 1973); Eleonore Kriemann, Märkische Volksstimme (16 February 1973); anon., Berliner Zeitung (20 February 1973); ‘kr.’, Die Union (16 March 1973). 4 In Jörg Ratgeb (1978), even a printing press that reproduces Dürer’s images (rather than texts), works for commercialization and unjust enrichment of the bourgeois Dürer rather than for true art. 5 Richard Burt, ‘Getting Schmedieval: Of Manuscripts and Film Prologues, Paratexts, and Parodies’, Exemplaria, xix/2 (Summer 2007), p. 224. Among the many films that imitate manuscripts – with Gothic fonts and ornamental borders – in their programmes and press packs are Veritas Vincit (dir. Joe May, 1918), Hamlet (1920) and The Master of Nuremberg (dir. Ludwig Berger, 1927). 6 Burt, ‘Getting Schmedieval’, p. 223. 7 This is also the case in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where Esmeralda’s forced confession and order of execution are read out by an unfair system of justice that hides behind desks. 8 Christian Kiening, ‘“Mittelalter” im Film’, in Mittelalter im Film, ed. Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, Trends in Medieval Philology, 6 (Berlin, 2006) p. 24; Marta Mierendorff, William Dieterle: Der Plutarch von Hollywood (Berlin, 1993), p. 124. 9 It is here indebted to the 1923 version, which also dramatizes the visual spectacles of Quasimodo’s body and his public punishment, the feast of fools, Esmeralda’s dancing and executions, through spectacular shots (for example, from above), use of the iris to focus attention, point-of-view shots and meaningful exchanges of glances. 10 I thank Alex Davis for this idea. 11 Repeated, for instance, in Mierendorff, William Dieterle, p. 124; Horst O. Hermanni, William Dieterle: Vom Arbeiterbauernsohn zum Hollywoodregisseur (Worms, 1992), p. 121; Hervé Dumont, William Dieterle (Paris, 2002), p. 130. 12 William Dieterle, Der Kampf um die Story: Die Hollywood- und Lebenserinnerung des Schauspielers und Regisseurs William Dieterle, ed. Willi Breunig (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 2001 [1970–72]), p. 104. 13 James J. Paxson, ‘The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages: Wegener’s Der Golem and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, Exemplaria, xix/2 (Summer 2007), pp. 296–7.

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6 detecting the middle ages 1 See also John Arnold, ‘Nasty Histories: Medievalism and Horror’, in History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. John Arnold, Kate Davies and Simon Ditchfield (Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire, 1998), pp. 39–50. 2 Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge, 2005), esp. p. 43. 3 See also Nikolas Haydock on The Da Vinci Code and other films; Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, nc, 2008), pp. 26–35 and 197–207. 4 On truth in The Da Vinci Code, see also Susan Aronstein and Robert Torry, ‘Chivalric Conspiracies: Templar Romance and the Redemption of History in National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code’, in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, ed. Haydock and E. L. Risden (Jefferson, nc, 2009), pp. 225–45, here: pp. 230–7 and 242; Todd Mc Gowan, ‘The Case of the Missing Signifier’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, xiii/1 (April 2008), pp. 48–66. On blood as truth in medieval literature, see Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff, 2006), pp. 16–50. On the temporality of The Da Vinci Code’s medievalism, see David W. Marshall, ‘Introduction: The Medievalism of Popular Culture’, in Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, ed. David D. Marshall (Jefferson, nc, 2007), pp. 1–12, here: pp. 1–2. 5 Arnold Angenendt, ‘Grab und Schrift’, in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter: Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern (Akten des Internationalen Kolloquiums 8.–10. Juni 1995), ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier and Thomas Scharff, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 76 (Munich, 1999), here pp. 16–17 and 18–19. 6 On the dismissal of detection work here, see Andrew Moor, Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (London, 2005), pp. 107–8. 7 See Constantin-Filmprogramm and Presseheft (press kit, 1986), esp. ‘Interview mit Jean-Jacques Annaud’, pp. 19–22, and ‘Drehort Kloster Eberbach: Ein Stück Mittelalter im 20. Jahrhundert’, p. 25. See also Sarah Salih, ‘Cinematic authenticity-effects’, in Medieval Film, ed. Bernau and Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009), pp. 25–9. Historical accuracy as well as accurate literary adaptation is also the dominant concern of the circa 30 press and circa 100 Internet reviews that I have seen. On the opposition of image and text in this film, see also Tanya Kiang, ‘Picturing a Name: Word & Image in The Name of the Rose’, Circa, 35 (July–August 1987), pp. 22–5. 8 On the importance of visuality see Peter M. Spangenberg, ‘Il nome della rosa: Intermediale Formbildungen in Umberto Ecos Roman und dem filmischen Palimpsest von Jean-Jacques Annaud’, in Kino-/(Ro)Mania: Intermedialität zwischen Film und Literatur, ed. Jochen Mecke and Volker Roloff, Siegener Forschungen zur romanischen Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft, 1 (Tübingen, 1999), pp. 127–39, here: pp. 134–9. 9 On the medievalism of A Canterbury Tale as conservative, see Ian Christie, ‘“History is Now and England”: A Canterbury Tale in its Contexts’, in The

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Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English FilmMaker, ed. Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (London, 2005), pp. 75–93, here: pp. 82–8; and Moor, Powell and Pressburger, pp. 88–106.

Part III Human Limits

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7 the birth of the leader from the collective 1 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (New York, 2002 [1860]), p. 93. 2 On many films’ recourse to the Middle Ages as a time before the ‘anomie’ of modern capitalist society (the clash between an individualistic public sphere and an over-invested co-operative family sphere), see Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, md, 2009), pp. 288–334; on cross-temporal communities in medieval films, see Lynn T. Ramey, ‘In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community in Occupied France, 1942–43’, in Race, Class and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema, ed. Tyson Pugh and Lynne T. Ramey (New York, 2007), pp. 139–53. 3 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, ma, 1968 [1965]), esp. pp. 26–9. On Bakhtin’s changing arguments on this issue, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, ca, 1990), esp. pp. 433–41. 4 Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–43 (Berkeley, ca, 2008), pp. 88–95, here: p. 91; see also Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–43 (Albany, ny, 1998), p. 129; Marcia Landy, ‘The Medieval Imaginary in Italian Films’, in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009) pp. 110–36, here: p. 116. 5 Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, nj, 1992), esp. pp. 3–17. 6 Tobis Rota Filmberichte, vol. i: Luis Trenker als Mensch und Regisseur, vol. ii: Die Fahne im Licht: Ein neuer Bericht zu dem Luis Trenker-Film der Tobis-Rota, vol. iii: Hier drehte Luis Trenker den “Condottieri”: Letzter Bericht zu dem Luis-Trenker-Film der Tobis-Rota. 7 Anon., ‘Die schwarze Schar’, in Tobis-Rota Filmbericht, ii. See also anon., ‘Die Leibstandarte bei Luis Trenker’, in Tobis-Rota Filmbericht, iii. 8 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, 2009 [2005]), p. 96. 9 On Trenker’s canny identification with this region as Heimat, rather than the German nation, see Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, ma, 1996), pp. 73–96; on his negotiation between German and Italian citizenship and allegiance, see Franz A. Birgel, ‘Luis Trenker: A Rebel in The Third Reich? Der Rebell, Der verlorene Sohn, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, Condottieri, and Der Feuerteufel’, in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich, ed. Robert C. Reimer (Rochester, ny, 2000), pp. 45–64.

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10 Anon., ‘Der Film – Trenkers Lebenselement’, in Tobis-Rota Filmbericht, iii. 11 A similar association of rather than match between him and the probably Ghibbelline eagle occurs later in an allegorical fable told by Malatesta’s girlfriend Tullia. 12 Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 96. 13 On the ever-failing invention of a pre-modern ideal, in German Heimatfilme in general, see Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 36 (Berkeley, ca, 2009), esp. pp. 14 and 93–113; in medieval films in general, see Finke and Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations, pp. 245–367; and in Nazi films in general, see Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, nc, 1996), esp. pp. 28–34. 14 On Maria as well as Tullia as a contrasting image of Italy as courtesan, see Landy, Folklore of Consensus, p. 127. 15 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Politics and Culture in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). On this tension between technological mediation and pre-modern communal agrarianism Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, see Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: Germany between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley ca, 2002), pp. 117–19. 16 Cuts marked on the censorship card no. 45108 (2 April 1937), see also Birgel, ‘Luis Trenker’, p. 49. 17 Anon., ‘Legenden um eine Hochzeitsnacht’, in Tobis-Rota Filmbericht, iii. The Italian version adds that this is a ‘liberal evocation of the time’ in a prologue title in the film itself, see Ricci, Cinema and Fascism, p. 91; on history as myth in this film, see also Landy, ‘Medieval Imaginary in Italian Films’, pp. 116–18. 18 ‘Man wolle keinen musealen Film drehen, man erstrebe keine historische Treue, sondern eine Verbindung zwischen Renaissance und lebendiger Gegenwart’, in anon., ‘Der Professor und die Bombe’, Tobis-Rota Filmbericht, i.

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8 the nation’s lost past 1 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, ny, 2000 [1990]). That this should not be referred to as a trauma, simply as a loss, is convincingly argued in Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia, pa, 2004), esp. pp. 9–10. 2 See also Gerd Gemünden, ‘Nostalgia for the Nation: Intellectuals and National Identity in a Unified Germany’, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, nh, 1999), pp. 120–33. 3 On nationalist politics in medieval film, see, for example, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, md, 2009), pp. 71–194; Anke Bernau, ‘“Poison to the Infant, but Tonic to the Man”: Timing The Birth of the Nation’, in Medieval Film, ed.

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Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009); and Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York, 2006). Fritz Lang, ‘Worauf es beim Nibelungen-Film ankam’, in UfaPremierenprogramm, film premiere programme of the Ufa-Palast am Zoo (14 February 1924), p. 6, reprinted in Fred Gehler und Ulrich Kasten, Fritz Lang: Die Stimme von Metropolis (Berlin, 1990), pp. 170–74, here: pp. 170–71. Roland Schacht (‘Balthasar’), in Das Blaue Heft, v/6 (1 March 1924), pp. 17–21, here: p. 20. Similarly Leander in Der Drache, v/15 (24 June 1924), pp. 29–31. Unsurprisingly, the film’s character as a national epic was emphasized even more for the re-release of the film’s first part in a new cut and soundtrack in 1933, see, for example, Joseph Goebbels, ‘Reklameanleitung’, in Ufa-Leih Reklame-Ratschlag, advertising instructions, p. 8. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London, 2000), e.g., p. 35. Lang, ‘Worauf es beim Nibelungen-Film ankam’, p. 171. On the contrast between the Burgundians and the primitives, see, for example, Leander in Der Drache, v/15 (24 June 1924), pp. 29–31, here: p. 31; Christian Kiening and Cornelia Herberichs, ‘Fritz Lang: Die Nibelungen’, in Mittelalter im Film, ed. Kiening and Heinrich Adolf (Berlin, 2006), pp. 189–225, e.g., pp. 205 and 218; Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 39; Heinz-B. Heller, ‘“Man stellt Denkmäler nicht auf den flachen Asphalt”: Fritz Langs Nibelungen-Film’, in Die Nibelungen: Studien zur Rezeption des Nibelungenstoffs im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim Heinzle and Anneliese Waldschmidt (Frankfurt a. m., 1991), pp. 351–69, here: p. 359 and p. 357; Francis Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis, mn, 2005), pp. 137–9. On Alberich as an anti-Semitic figure, see David J. Levin, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton, nj, 1998), pp. 116–40. Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process (Oxford, 1982 [1939]). For example, ‘The great German heroic song’, ‘The greatest German heroic legend comes to life’, ‘The heroes of the legend in a great German monumental film’, in Constantin-Film Werberatschlag for first part of film; ‘The zenith of the German heroic legend’, Constantin-Film Werberatschlag for second part of film; ‘-ldi’, Neue Zeit (5 January 1967); Rüdiger Dilloo, Die Welt (25 February 1967); Wolf Schön, Rheinischer Merkur (3 March 1967); Willi Wespe, Wochenpost (25 August 1967); arguing against this widespread interpretation: Eugen Hollerbach, Deutsche Bauernzeitung (2 March 1967). Other films with Nibelung themes include the early biopic Richard Wagner (1913), which visualized Wagner’s Ring libretto as he reads it to his friends, the documentary about a Nazi youth programme entitled Nibelungen auf Fahrt (dir. Erich Dumm, 1935), the soft porn version The Erotic Adventures

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of Siegfried (1971), Syberberg’s use of the Wagnerian Nibelungs as a narrative frame in Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), and The Nasty Girl (1990), which begins with a recitation of the Nibelungenlied. Sword of Xanten dvd, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005. For example, Birth of the Witch (Geburt der Hexe, dir. Wilfried Minks, 1980), Braveheart (1995), The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), The Da Vinci Code (2006), Tristan + Isolde (2006); see also Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, nc, 2008), pp. 26–7. On the transnationalism rather than patriotism of much recent German historical film see Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana, il, 2008), pp. 60–89. Santner, Stranded Objects, p. 151. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 151.

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9 animation and the human between animal and cyborg 1 The director, Eberhard Junkersdorf, on the dvd ‘production notes’ calls Till ‘a character who originates in the Middle Ages’ Jester Till dvd, knm Home Entertainment, 2004. 2 Another example is the digitally manipulated talking pig and his dumb human companion in Siegfried (2005), see chapter Eight. 3 Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London, 2002), p. 31. On the links between animation and medieval film, see Anke Bernau, ‘Suspended Animation: Myth, Memory and History in Beowulf’, in Screening the Past, 26 (2009, online www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast, n.p.). 4 Joseba Gabilondo, ‘Morphing Saint Sebastian: Masochism and Masculinity in Forrest Gump’, in Meta-Morphing: Virtual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis, mn, 2000), pp. 183–207, here: p. 186; Robert Burgoyne, ‘Memory, History and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film’, in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester, 2003), pp. 220–36, here: p. 234. See also the conclusion to this book. 5 For example, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, il, 1999), esp. pp. 84–112; Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Haraway (London, 1991), pp. 149–81; Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, mn, 2008), p. 71. 6 Eating animals is condemned as barbaric in the future world of Hard to Be a God; a pig is tried in court like a human in The Hour of the Pig (also known as The Advocate, dir. Leslie Megahey, 1993), a singing pig opens Dreamship Surprise, a talking pig is the hero’s best friend in Siegfried. 7 It also shows the modern subject to fail as a location of truth – neither the

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filmic images nor the dialogue are shown to present the past accurately, see Bernau, ‘Suspended Animation’. For a full description of Reiniger’s technique as well as her sources and Orientalism in Prince Ahmed, see Christiane Schönfeld, ‘Lotte Reiniger and the Art of Animation’, in Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönefeld (Würzburg, 2006), pp. 171–90. For the overlap between Orientalism and Medievalism, see John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York, 2005). Lotte Reiniger, ‘Wie macht man einen Silhouettenfilm?’, in Lotte Reiniger: Silhouettenfilm und Schattentheater, exh. cat., Puppentheatermuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich, 1979), pp. 27–34, here: p. 27. See also Lotte Reiniger, Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films (London, 1970), pp. 15–16. Reiniger, Shadow Theatres, pp. 15–16. Siegfried Kracauer famously observed this to be typical of Weimar Germany, see Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, ma, 1995 [1928]). For example, Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, esp. pp. 131–59; Donna J. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 183–201. For example, ‘magic and enchantment, everyone feels it who has seen these images, this film’, Walter Schobert, ‘Hommage an Lotte Reiniger/Tribute to Lotte Reiniger’, in Lotte Reiniger: Filme/Films, ed. Carola Ferber and Andreas Ströhl (Munich, 1999), pp. 5–13, here: p. 5; William Moritz speaks of the bathing scene as ‘an ecstatic moment of bravura animation magic’, and repeatedly of the ‘impossible intricacy’ of the film, Moritz, ‘Some Critical Perspectives on Lotte Reiniger’, Animation Journal, v/1 (Fall 1996), pp. 40–51; Hartmut W. Redottée of the ‘happiness-inducing [beglückende] experience of a Reiniger-film’, Redottée, ‘Die Geburt des Märchens aus dem Geiste des Films’, in Lotte Reiniger, exh. cat., pp. 24–6, here: p. 24.

film’s reliance on medievalism: a conclusion 1 Béla Balázs, ‘Kinokritik!’, Der Tag (1 December 1922), pp. 5–6, here: pp. 5–6; reprinted in Balázs, Schriften zum Film (Munich, Berlin and Budapest, 1982–4), vol. i, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (1982), pp. 149–51, here: pp. 150–51; emphasis in original. Balász used this passage almost verbatim again in Der sichtbare Mensch oder, Die Kultur des Films, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt a. M., 2001 [1924]), pp. 16–17; as well as again in Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York, 1970 [1948]), pp. 39–40. Similarly also Balász, Der Geist des Films (Frankfurt a. M., 2001 [1930]), esp. p. 74. A new translation of the last two is just out: Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: ‘Visible Man’ and ‘The Spirit of Film’, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford, 2010).

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2 See Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Forward into the Past: Film as a Medieval Medium’, in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bildhauer (Manchester, 2009), pp. 40–59, where I discuss film theorists’ reliance on medievalism in greater detail, and in Bildhauer, ‘Zeiträume: Das Mittelalter als Innenraum – Kosmos, Kathedrale, Kino’, in Innenräume: Anglo-deutsche Arbeitstagung, ed. Hans-Jochen Schiewer et al. (Berlin, 2008), pp. 409–26, where I treat the historiographical and cultural background more extensively. 3 Vilém Flusser, ‘Umbruch der menschlichen Beziehungen’, in Kommunikologie, ed. Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Frankfurt a. m., 1998 [1996]), pp. 7–231, here: p. 53. 4 Flusser, ‘Umbruch’, pp. 56–7. This reiterates arguments from Jack Goody and other historians of orality in the 1960s, for example, Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968). 5 Ibid., p. 205. 6 Werner Serner, ‘Kino und Schaulust’, Die Schaubühne, 9 (1913), pp. 807–11, here: p. 807, reprinted in Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film, ed. Anton Kaes, Deutsche Texte, 48 (Munich, 1978), pp. 53–8, here: pp. 53–4. 7 Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’, in Hugo Münsterberg On Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York, 2002 [1916]), pp. 45–162, here: p. 143. The art historian Dagobert Frey also compares medieval painting to film in its use of written scrolls or inter-titles, and in the way it tells stories through successive scenes, Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grundlagen der modernen Weltanschauung (Augsburg, 1929), pp. 38 and 52. 8 Ernst Rothschild, ‘Film und Erotik: Bemerkungen zu künstlerischen und pädagogischen Prinzipienfragen’, Neue Schaubühne, 2 (1920), pp. 317–28, here: p. 318; Paul Wegener, ‘Die Zukunft des Films’, Der Spiegel, 24 (15 February 1920), pp. 18–21; Otto Foulon, Die Kunst des Lichtspiels: Totenrede, gehalten vor der Einäscherung des Lichtbildners Matthias Grüner am 22. Mai 2043 (Aachen, 1924), pp. 5–6; Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Zum ersten Mal’, Berliner Tageblatt, 54 (25 October 1931), reprinted in Arnheim, Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Munich, 1977), pp. 19–21, here: pp. 19–20. 9 Ivan Goll, ‘Das Kinodram’, Neue Schaubühne, 2 (1920), pp. 141–3, here: p. 143; Lu Märten, Wesen und Veränderungen der Formen/Künste: Resultate historisch-materialistischer Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a. m., 1924), pp. 135–7; Adolf Behne, ‘Die Stellung des Publikums zur modernen deutschen Literatur’, Die Weltbühne, xxii/1 (1926), pp. 774–7, here: pp. 776 and 777, reprinted in Kino-Debatte, ed. Kaes, pp. 160–63, here: p. 162; on Goll and Märten in this respect, see Heinz B. Heller, Literarische Intelligenz und Film: Zur Veränderung der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland, Medien in Forschung und Unterricht Series a, 15 (Tübingen, 1985). 10 Robert Herlth, ‘Form und Inhalt’, Filmtechnik–Filmkunst, 9 (30 April 1927), reprinted in Werkstatt Film: Selbstverständnis und Visionen von Filmleuten

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der Zwanziger Jahre, ed. Rolf Aurich und Wolfgang Jacobsen (Munich, 1998), pp. 25–8, here: p. 28. On this image, see also Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, md, 1998), p. 4, and Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (Munich, 1992), esp. pp. 123–4 and 132. Ludwig Bauer, ‘Mittelalter, 1932’, Das Tagebuch xiii/1 (2 January 1932), pp. 10–13, here: p. 10, English excerpts in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, ca, 1994), pp. 384–6, here: p. 384. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, Critique, 1/3 (January/February 1947 [1934]), pp. 5–28. William Dieterle, Kampf um die Story: Die Hollywood und Lebenserin nerung des Schauspielers und Regisseurs William Dieterle, ed. Willi Breunig (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 2001, [1970–72]), p. 104, see chapter Five. For example, Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton (Bloomington, in, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, trans. Alan Williams, in Film Quarterly, xviii/2 (Winter 1974/5 [1970]), pp. 39–47, here: pp. 41–2; Daniel Dayan, ‘The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’, Film Quarterly, xxviii/1 (Autumn 1974), pp. 22–31, here: pp. 26–7. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (London, 1986 [1943]), pp. 83–8, here: pp. 148–50. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in Bazin, What is Cinema?, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, ca, 1967–71 [1945]), vol. i (1967), pp. 9–16, here: pp. 10–12. André Bazin, ‘Adaptation or the Cinema as Digest’, in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (New York, 1997 [1948]), pp. 41–51, here: pp. 46–7. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma, 1996–2003 [1935]), vol. iii (2002), pp. 101–33, here: p. 103; see also Walter Benjamin, ‘Über das Mittelalter’ [c. 1916], in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a. m., 1972–89), vol. ii/1 (1977), pp. 132–3, here: p. 133. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 106. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, ma, 1995 [1927]), pp. 47–63, here: p. 62; Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, nj, 1997 [1960]), p. 81. Murray Pomerance, ‘Introduction’, in Cinema and Modernity, ed. Pomerance (New Brunswick, nj, 2006), pp. 3–15, here: p. 11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London, 1964), esp. pp. 284–96. Lee Braude likewise argues that contemporary American society was medieval in many ways, partly because it is visual in its preoccupation with tv and film, see Braude, ‘The Medieval Strain in

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Contemporary Culture: A Debate with Weber’s Ghost’, Phylon, xxxii/3 (1971), pp. 224–36, here: pp. 231–2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London, 1962), esp. pp. 82–122. Umberto Eco, ‘Living in the New Middle Ages’, in Eco, Faith in Fakes: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, ca, 1986 [1973]), pp. 73–85, here: esp. pp. 81–3; Elena Esposito, ‘Fiktion und Virtualität’, in Medien – Computer – Realität: Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien, ed. Sybille Krämer (Frankfurt a. M., 1998), pp. 269–96; Esposito, ‘Die Wahrnehmung der Virtualität: Perzeptionsaspekte der interaktiven Kommunikation’, in Schnittstelle Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation, Mediologie, i, ed. Georg Stanitzek and Wilhelm Vosskamp (Cologne, 2001), pp. 116–31. See also Werner Faulstich, Einführung in die Medienwissenschaft: Probleme, Methoden, Domänen (Munich, 2002), esp. pp. 201–2; Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, Introduction to Media Studies (Stuttgart, 2005), pp. 116–25. Influential theorists arguing along these lines are Walter Ong, Eric A. Havelock, Jack Goody, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Jan and Aleida Assmann. A different pattern of thinking sees Hollywood films as emulating the structures of medieval literature; see Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (New York, 2003), esp. pp. 143–207, and Carol Clover, ‘The Same Thing – Sort Of’, Representations, c/1 (Fall 2007), pp. 4–12; critically Adrian Martin, ‘The Long Path Back: Medievalism and Film’, in Screening the Past, 26 (2009 online www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast), n.p. Other examples of scholars drawing analogies between film and medieval art in Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film (New York, 2008), pp. 187–8. Vivian Sobchack, ‘“At the Still Point of Our Turning World”: MetaMorphing and Meta-Stasis’, in Meta-Morphing, ed. Sobchack (Minneapolis, mn, 2000), pp. 130–58; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, ma, 1990), p. 1; Joseba Gabilondo, ‘Morphing Saint Sebastian: Masochism and Masculinity in Forrest Gump’, in Meta-Morphing: Virtual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis, mn, 2000), pp. 183–207, here: p. 186; Mark P. Wolf, ‘A Brief History of Morphing’, in Meta-Morphing, pp. 83–101; Lev Manovich, ‘“Reality” Effects in Computer Animation’, in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling (Sydney, 1997), pp. 5–15, here: pp. 5–6. There is a tradition of associating animated film with medieval art, observed in Michael O’Pray, ‘Eisenstein and Stokes on Disney: Film Animation and Omnipotence’, in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Pilling, pp. 195–202. Terrance R. Lindvall and J. Matthew Melton compare animated cartoons to medieval comedy in the Bakhtinian sense, Lindvall and Melton, ‘Towards a Post-Modern Animated Discourse: Bakhtin, Intertextuality and the Cartoon Carnival’, in Animation Journal, iii/1 (Fall 1994), pp. 44–64, here: p. 44. A different idea is that of medieval literature and art as proto-cinematic. For summaries of such modern perceptions of the Middle Ages and cathedrals specifically, see Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Die Moderne und ihr

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Mittelalter’, in Mittelalter und Moderne: Entdeckung und Konstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt, ed. Peter Segl, Kongreßakten des Symposions des Mediävistenverbandes, vi (Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 307–64; Oexle, ‘“Die Statik ist ein Grundzug des mittelalterlichen Bewußtseins”: Die Wahrnehmung sozialen Wandels im Denken des Mittelalters und das Problem ihrer Deutung’, in Sozialer Wandel im Mittelalter: Wahrnehmungsformen, Erklärungsmuster, Regelungsmechanismen, ed. Jürgen Miethke und Klaus Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 45–70; Norbert Brieskorn, Finsteres Mittelalter? Über das Lebensgefühl einer Epoche (Mainz, 1991); Dieter Mertens, ‘Mittelalterbilder in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Die Deutschen und ihr Mittelalter: Themen und Funktionen moderner Geschichtsbilder vom Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff (Darmstadt, 1992), pp. 29–54. In English, the series Studies in Medievalism is the first port of call for such an overview; especially relevant in this context are Medievalism and the Academy, ed. Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin and David D. Metzger, Studies in Medievalism, 2 (Cambridge, 1999–2000); German Medievalism, ed. Francis G. Gentry, Studies in Medievalism, iii/3 and 4 (Cambridge, 1991); Defining medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism, 17 (Cambridge, 2009). 27 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, trans. Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford, 1993 [1831]). On Hugo’s and other French writers’ description of the medieval cathedral as a holistic, collective work of art see Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France (Ashgate, 2003), esp. pp. 85–110. 28 Walter Gropius, ‘Der neue Baugedanke’, Das Hohe Ufer, 1/4 (April 1919), pp. 87–8, here: p. 87; Wilhelm Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich, 1911); Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, il, 1996 [1919]); Karl Lamprecht, Einführung in das historische Denken (Leipzig, 1912), p. 10. 29 See Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Zeiträume: Das Mittelalter als Innenräum – Kosmos, Kathedrale, Kino, in Innenräum: Anglodeutsche Arbeitstagung, ed. HansJochen Schiewer et al. (Berlin, 2008).

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Acknowledgements

I began the work for this book in 2001 by taking a continuing education degree course in film studies at the University of Cambridge. Thank you to Patrick Phillips and Charlie Ritchie, my first film teachers, and my stimulating group of fellow students. I am deeply grateful to the various institutions who have financed all the time off teaching that allowed me to write this book. From 2002–2004, I held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, and I cannot appreciate enough the opportunities this opened up to me and the support and stimulation of the extraordinary community of scholars assembled there. The project continued into my lectureship at the University of St Andrews, where I got little done on the book but learned a lot about everything else – until my firstever institutional research leave in early 2009, for which I am very grateful. My Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Freie Universität Berlin for the academic year 2009/2010 allowed me to complete the manuscript. The award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in October 2009 meant that I could relax about the deadline. I could not have won all this research time without the help, references and hands-on advice of Frances Andrews, Helen Chambers, Mark Chinca, John Ganim, the late Dennis Green, Margaret-Anne Hutton, Chris Jones, Stefan Keppler, Bill Miller, Greg Moore, Nigel Palmer, Rhiannon Purdue, Miri Rubin, Ritchie Robertson, Hans-Jochen Schiewer, Claire Whitehead and Christopher Young – I owe you the gift of time. I think well in conversation, so I have greatly profited from the responses to various versions of this material presented at seminars, lectures and conferences. For inviting me to present at seminars, I thank Karen Stöber at Aberystwyth University; John Ganim at the University of California, Riverside; Andrew Johnston, Andrea Sieber, Annette Gerok-Reiter, Cordula Lemke and Ingrid Kasten at the Freie Universität Berlin; Karina Kellermann at the Universität Bonn; Hans-Jochen Schiewer at the Universität Freiburg; Henrike Lähnemann at the University of Newcastle; and Nick Martin at the University of Birmingham. I am also indebted to the organizers of the following conferences for letting me test my ideas about medieval film: the New Chaucer Society conference at Siena, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference at Los Angeles, the Alexander von Humboldt-Netzwerktagung at Oldenburg, the Sex/ualities in and out of Time Conference at Edinburgh, the Studientag Neue Perspektiven der Mittelalterrezeption at the Freie Universität Berlin, several International Medieval Congresses at Leeds, the Violent Women and Murderous Mothers conference and the Anglo-German Colloquium at Oxford, the Conference of University Teachers of German in Scotland at Glasgow, and the Seeing Gender Conference at King’s College London. Two conferences deserve a special mention: the Middle Ages in the Modern World Workshop that I co-organized with Chris Jones at St Andrews, and the Middle Ages on Film conference at St Andrews that I co-organized with Anke

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Bernau in 2005. Chris has been an indispensible source of local support and enthusiasm for this project. Anke has been my most frequent discussion partner about medieval film, and this book would have looked very different without her. The major ideas of this book all developed as we were co-editing Medieval Film, and I would like to thank her and our contributors to this collection and the conference for helping me think through them. For sharing some of their fine unpublished work with me, I also thank John Arnold (on Se7en), Carolyn Dinshaw (on The Passion of the Christ and A Canterbury Tale) and Dan Kline (on Monty Python and the Holy Grail). This is primarily a book about a number of medieval films and what they can tell us about the significance of the Middle Ages today. But it also makes some wider claims about medieval films in general. The corpus on which I base these claims comprises over 200 films that are either set between the years 500 and 1500 or that reviews, marketing, filmmakers and audiences describe as medieval. Of those films, about 170 are feature-length narrative films intended for cinematic release, most of them (c. 120) ‘German’ in the broadest sense (that is, with a significant input by German residents, citizens or companies). I have seen all apart from about 35 of these films (20 German, 15 international); for these inaccessible or lost films, I have relied on descriptions in contemporary reviews or scholarship. The film archives of the Bundesarchiv, Filmmuseum/Kinemathek and Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the University of Siegen as well as various libraries in Berlin, Potsdam, Cologne and St Andrews have been very helpful in letting me view all the other films as well as related written archival materials and publications. About half way through my archival work, I spotted a frequent concern of these films with time, collective identity and writing, and refined these general observations on the basis of the remaining viewings. I am grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (daad), the Carnegie Trust and the Humboldt Foundation for financing research trips to the German archives for one year and two summers, and to my sister Katharina Bildhauer and to Lars Klasing for providing a home from home, and to my Berlin and Cologne friends for making these stays an absolute joy. I was lucky enough to be able to teach an entire course on medieval film at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, and learned so much from my students there. Thanks to them, and to Hans-Jochen Schiewer for inviting me. For reading and commenting on chapters and related papers, I am deeply grateful to Anke Bernau, Robert Burgoyne, Carolyn Dinshaw, David Martin-Jones, Asa Mittman, Claire Whitehead and the entire Work in Progress reading group at St Andrews. For constant encouragement, to Harry Jackson. For sitting through some of my films with me, to Greg Moore, Soumhya Venkatesan, Jon Woolf and Claire Whitehead. For research assistance, to Nadine Ebert. For keeping an eye out for medieval films, to Kathi Bildhauer and Julia Grün at the Berlinale Film Festival. Thank you to Michael Leaman at Reaktion, who invited me to submit my work and reminded me at an important stage that there is more to responsible academic writing than meticulousness (not that I was able to deliver). For someone who thinks about the past so much, I am strangely bad at remem bering on cue, and no doubt forgot to mention lots of people to whom I am also grateful, and apologize.

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Index of Medieval Films

Films either set between 500 and 1500 or perceived as having medieval settings, sources or elements by filmmakers, critics and audiences; films without page references are not mentioned in the text but are part of the corpus on which my genre definition is based; films are listed by English title, with their original title, director, country of production and year of release given in brackets.

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Abelard (dir. Franz Seitz, Germany, 1977) 82–4 Adventures of Don Quixote, The (dir. G. W. Pabst, France/uk, 1933) 115–16 Adventures of Prince Ahmed, The (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, dir. Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1926) 198–212 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (dir. Michael Curtiz/William Keighley, us, 1938) 9 Alexander Nevsky (Aleksandr Nevskii, dir. Sergei Eisenstein, ussr, 1938) 166–8 Amourous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (aka When Sex was a Knightly Affair, dir. Raphael Nussbaum, us, 1976) Anazapta (dir. Alberto Sciamma, uk, 2002) Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrey Tarkovsky, ussr, 1966) Anna Boleyn (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1920) Arminius the Terrible (Hermann der Cherusker – Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald, dir. Ferdinando Baldi, Italy/Germany/Yugoslavia, 1967) Attila the Hun (Attila, dir. Pietro Francisci, France/Italy, 1954) Aucassin and Nicolette (dir. Lotte Reiniger, uk, 1975) Beowulf & Grendel (dir. Sturla Gunnarson, Australia/Canada/Iceland/uk/us, 2005) Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, us, 2007) 51–3, 73, 192–8 Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, us, 1915) Birth of the Witch (Geburt der Hexe, dir. Wilfried Minks, Switzerland/Germany, 1980) 245 Black Knight (dir. Gil Junger, us, 2001) 232 Blind Director, The (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit, dir. Alexander Kluge, Germany, 1986) 7–8, 11–12, 20, 65 Boccaccio (dir. Herbert Maisch, Germany, 1936) 238 Boccaccio ’70 (dir. Federico Fellini et al., France/Italy, 1962) Bold Adventure (Till Eulenspiegel: Der lachende Rebell, dir. Gérard Philipe, Germany/France, 1956) Brancaleone at the Crusades (Brancaleone alle crociate, dir. Mario Monicelli, Italy, 1970)

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Braveheart (dir. Mel Gibson, uk/usa, 1995) 8–9, 14, 245 Brothel of Brescia, The (Das Frauenhaus von Brescia, dir. Hubert Moest, Germany, 1920) Burning Field, The (Der brennende Acker, dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Germany, 1922) 231

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Caliph Stork (Kalif Storch, dir. Ewald Mathias Schumacher, Germany, 1923) Caliph Stork (Kalif Storch, dir. Lotte Reiniger, Germany, 1935) Camelot (dir. Joshua Logan, us, 1967) 25 Canterbury Tale, A (dir. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, uk, 1944) 132, 136–44, 138–39, 141, 143–4 Canterbury Tales, The (I racconti di Canterbury, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, France/Italy, 1972) Charlemagne Code, The (Die Jagd nach dem Schatz der Nibelungen, dir. Ralf Huettner, Germany, 2008) Chronicles of the Grey House, The (Zur Chronik von Grieshuus, dir. Arthur von Gerlach, Germany, 1925) 231 Code of the Templars (Das Blut der Templer, dir. Florian Baxmeyer, Germany, 2004) Condottieri (dir. Luis Trenker, Italy/Germany, 1937) 152–71 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (dir. Tay Garnett, us, 1949) 232 Copernicus (Kopernik, dir. Eva Petelska/Czesław Petelski, Germany/Poland, 1973) 117, 226 Count of Charolais, The (Der Graf von Charolais, dir. Karl Grune, Germany, 1922) 118 Crusade in Jeans (Kruistocht in spijkerbroek, dir. Ben Sombogaart, Belgium/ Germany/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 2006) 52 Crusaders (Crociati, dir. Dominique Othenin-Girard, Germany/Italy, 2001) 236, 239 Da Vinci Code, The (dir. Ron Howard, us, 2006) 132–6, 245 Destiny (Der müde Tod, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1921) 15, 41–50, 232, 234, 238 Devil’s Envoys, The (Les visiteurs du soir, dir. Marcel Carné, France, 1942) Dona Juana (dir. Paul Czinner, Germany, 1928) Don Quixote’s Children (Don Quichottes Kinder, dir. Claudia Holldack, Germany, 1981) Dreamship Surprise – Period I ([T]Raumschiff Surprise – Periode I, dir. Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, Germany, 2004) 79–81, 173, 245 Ekkelin’s Retainer (Raubritter – Die Geschichte von Ekkelins Knecht, dir. Reinhard Kungel, Germany, 2008) El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, Italy/uk/us, 1961) 13 Erotic Adventures of Siegfried, The (Siegfried und das sagenhafte Liebesleben der Nibelungen, dir. Adrian Hoven, Germany, 1971) 244 Excalibur (dir. John Boorman, uk/us, 1981) 9

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Execution of Joan of Arc (Exécution de Jeanne d’Arc, dir. Georges Hatot, France, 1898) Falcon, The (Banovi Strahinja, dir. Vatroslav Mimica, Germany/Yugoslavia, 1981) Faust (dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Germany, 1926) 26–41, 118 Ferryman Maria (Fährmann Maria, dir. Frank Wysbar, Germany, 1936) 15, 92–3 Fight for Rome Part I (Kampf um Rom Teil I, dir. Robert Siodmak, Italy/Romania/Germany, 1968) Fight for Rome Part II (Kampf um Rom Teil II, dir. Robert Siodmak, Italy/Romania/Germany, 1969) Fire and Sword (Feuer und Schwert – Die Legende von Tristan und Isolde, dir. Veith von Fürstenberg, Ireland/Germany, 1982) First Knight (dir. Jerry Zucker, us, 1995) 15 Francesco (dir. Liliana Cavani, Italy/Germany, 1989) 120 Freak Orlando (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, Germany, 1981) 26 Fury of the Vikings (Erik the Conqueror/Gli invasori, dir. Mario Bava, France/Italy, 1961)

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Genghis Khan (dir. Henry Levin, uk/us/Germany/Yugoslavia, 1965) Genoa Conspiracy, The (Die Verschwörung zu Genua, dir. Paul Leni, Germany, 1921) 118 Ginevra (dir. Ingemo Engström, Germany, 1993) Götz von Berlichingen (Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dir. Wolfgang Liebeneier, Germany, 1979) Golem (dir. Henrik Galeen/Paul Wegener, Germany, 1915) Golem and the Dancing Girl, The (Der Golem und die Tänzerin, dir. Paul Wegener, Germany, 1917) Golem: How He Came Into the World (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, dir. Paul Wegener, Germany, 1920) 53–64, 226, 238 Hamlet (dir. Svend Gade/Heinz Schall, Germany, 1921) 74–96, 240 Hard to Be a God (Es ist nicht leicht, ein Gott zu sein, dir. Peter Fleischmann, France/ussr/Germany, 1990) 63–5, 99–100, 245 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (dir. Chris Columbus, Germany/uk/us, 2002) 19 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (dir. Mike Newell, uk/us, 2005) 19 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (dir. David Yates, uk/us, 2009) 19 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (dir. David Yates, uk/us, 2007) 19 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (dir. Chris Columbus, uk/us, 2001) 19 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, uk/us, 2004) 19 High Crusade, The (High Crusade – Frikassee im Weltraum, dir. Klaus Knoesel/Holger Neuhäuser, Germany, 1994) 121 Hildegard of Bingen (dir. James Runcie, uk, 1994) Hitler – A Film from Germany (Hitler – Ein Film aus Deutschland, dir. HansJürgen Syberberg, Germany, 1977) 232

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Hour of the Pig, The (aka The Advocate, dir. Leslie Megahey, France/uk, 1993) 245 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (dir. Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise, us, 1996) 118 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (dir. Wallace Worsley, us, 1923) 118, 230, 240 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (dir. William Dieterle, us, 1939) 118–31, 230 Hundred Horsemen (I cento cavalieri, dir. Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy/Spain/ Germany, 1964) Immortal Heart, The (Das unsterbliche Herz, dir. Veit Harlan, Germany, 1935) 91–2 Jester Till (Till Eulenspiegel, dir. Eberhard Junkersdorf, Belgium/Germany, 2003) 190–91, 238 Jew of Mestri, The (Der Kaufmann von Venedig, dir. Peter Paul Felner, 1923) 93–4 Joan of Arc (Das Mädchen Johanna, dir. Gustav Ucicky, Germany, 1935) 87–90 Joan of Arc (dir. Christian Duguay, Canada, 1999) 90–91 Jörg Ratgeb (Jörg Ratgeb, Maler, dir. Bernd Stephan, Germany, 1978) 226, 240 Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, Germany, 1989) Johannes Kepler (dir. Frank Vogel, Germany, 1974) 16, 226

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King Arthur (dir. Antoine Fuqua, Ireland/uk/us, 2004) 15, 20 Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott, Germany/Spain/uk/us, 2005) 15, 224, 228 Knights of the Teutonic Order (Krzyzacy, dir. Aleksander Ford, Poland, 1960) Knight’s Tale, A (dir. Brian Helgeland, us, 2001) 9–10, 15, 26, 80 Kristin Lavransdatter (dir. Liv Ullmann, Germany/Norway/Sweden, 1995) Lady Venus and Her Devil (Frau Venus und ihr Teufel, dir. Ralf Kirsten, Germany, 1975) 78–9 Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du Lac, dir. Robert Bresson, France/Italy, 1974) Landammann Stauffacher (dir. Leopold Lindtberg, Switzerland, 1941) Legend of Holy Simplicity, The (Die Legende von der heiligen Simplicia, dir. Joe May, Germany, 1920) 231 Legend of William Tell, The (Wilhelm Tell: Das Freiheitsdrama eines Volkes, dir. Heinz Paul, Germany/Switzerland, 1934) Lion in Winter, The (dir. Anthony Harvey, uk, 1968) Littlest Viking, The (Sigurd Drakedreper, dir. Knut W. Jorfald/Lars Rasmussen, Norway, 1989) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson, New Zealand/us, 2001) 183 Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (dir. Peter Jackson, New Zealand/us, 2003) 183 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (dir. Peter Jackson, New Zealand/us, 2002) 183 Lucretia Borgia (Lucrezia Borgia, dir. Richard Oswald, Germany, 1922) 118, 238

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Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (Ludwig: Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König, dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Germany, 1972) 245 Luther (dir. Eric Till, Germany, 2003) 162–3, 173

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Mariken (dir. André van Duren, Belgium/Netherlands, 2000) Master of Nuremberg, The (Der Meister von Nürnberg, dir. Ludwig Berger, Germany, 1927) 240 Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, The (Jeanne d’Arc, dir. Luc Besson, France, 1999) 15, 245 Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1926) 194, 233 Minstrel’s Curse, The (Des Sängers Fluch, prod. Oskar Messter, Germany, 1910) Mistress of Treves (La leggenda di Genoveffa, dir. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, France/Italy/Germany, 1952) Monna Vanna (dir. Richard Eichberg, Germany, 1922) Monty Python and the Holy Grail (dir. Terry Gilliam/Terry Jones, uk, 1975) 16, 120, 226 My Sex Life as a Ghost (dir. Nicky Ranieri, France/Germany/Italy, 1992) Name of the Rose, The (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, France/Italy/Germany, 1986) 8, 120, 132, 144–8 Nasty Girl, The (Das schreckliche Mädchen, dir. Michael Verhoeven, Germany, 1990) 245 Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey, The (dir. Vincent Ward, Australia/New Zealand, 1988) 232 News of the Hohenstaufen (Nachrichten von den Staufern, dir. Alexander Kluge/Maximiliane Mainka, Germany, 1977) 223 Nibelungen, The: Part I Siegfried (Die Nibelungen Teil I Siegfried/Siegfrieds Tod, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1924) 13, 174–80, 231, 233 Nibelungen, The: Part ii Kriemhild’s Revenge (Die Nibelungen Teil II Kriemhilds Rache, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1924) 13, 174–80, 231 Nibelungen, The: Part I Siegfried (Die Nibelungen Teil I Siegfried, dir. Harald Reinl, Germany, 1966) 180–81 Nibelungen, The: Part II Kriemhild’s Revenge (Die Nibelungen Teil II Kriemhilds Rache, dir. Harald Reinl, Germany, 1967) 180–81 Nibelungen on Tour (Nibelungen auf Fahrt, dir. Erich Dumm, Germany, 1935) 244 Niklashausen Journey, The (Die Niklashauser Fart, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1970) 26 Nosferatu (dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Germany, 1922) 233 Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, dir. Werner Herzog, France/Germany, 1979) I½

Knights: In Search of the Ravishing Princess Herzelinde (I½ Ritter: Auf der Suche nach der hinreißenden Herzelinde, dir. Til Schweiger, Germany, 2008) 236

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Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d’orchestra, dir. Federico Fellini, Italy/Germany, 1978) 232 Parsifal (dir. Daniel Mangrané/Carlos Serrano de Osma, Spain, 1951) Parsifal (dir. Edwin S. Porter, us, 1904) Parsifal (dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, France/Germany, 1982) Parsifal (dir. Mario Caserini, Italy, 1912) Passion of Joan of Arc, The (La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, France, 1928) 87, 101–3 Passion of the Christ, The (dir. Mel Gibson, us, 2004) 233 Patriotic Woman, The (Die Patriotin, dir. Alexander Kluge, Germany, 1979) 223 People Preparing the Year of the Hohenstaufen (Menschen, die das Stauferjahr vorbereiten, dir. Alexander Kluge, Germany, 1977) 223 Perceval le Gallois (dir. Eric Rohmer, France/Italy/Germany, 1978) Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, dir. Paul Wegener, Germany, 1919) 201 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (Krysa , dir. Ji í Barta, Czechoslovakia/Germany, 1986) Plague in Florence (Pest in Florenz, dir. Otto Rippert, Germany, 1919) 231 Pope Joan (Die Päpstin, dir. Sönke Wortmann, Germany/Italy/Spain, 2009) 103–4, 120, 173, 236 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (dir. Mike Newell, us, 2010) Prince Valiant (dir. Anthony Hickox, Germany/Ireland/uk, 1997)

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Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950) 13, 132, 232 Rhinegold (Rheingold, dir. Niklaus Schilling, Germany, 1978) Richard Wagner (dir. Wilhelm Wauer/Carl Froehlich, Germany, 1913) 244 Robin Hood (dir. Ridley Scott, us, 2010) 20 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (dir. Kevin Reynolds, us, 1991) 13 Saint Joan (dir. Otto Preminger, uk/us, 1957) Saladin (Al Nasser Salah ad-Din, dir. Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1963) Satanas (dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Germany, 1920) Secret of Kells, The (dir. Tomm Moore/Nora Twomey, Belgium/France/Ireland, 2009) 99–100 Se7en (dir. David Fincher, us, 1995) 132 Seven Women, Seven Sins (Sieben Frauen, sieben Sünden I. Episode: Superbia, dir. Ulrike Ottinger, Germany, 1987) Siegfried (dir. Sven Unterwaldt Jr, Germany, 2005) 72–3, 245 Sign of the Pagan (dir. Douglas Sirk, us, 1954) 101, 105–14 Sir Bredow’s Trousers (Die Hosen des Ritters von Bredow, dir. Konrad Petzold, Germany, 1973) Seventh Seal, The (Det sjunde insiglet, dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957) 8–9, 13, 16, 64, 181 Stone Rider, The (Der steinerne Reiter, dir. Fritz Wendhausen, Germany, 1923) 231

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Sumurun (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1924) 232, 234 Sword in the Stone, The (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman, us, 1963) Sword of Xanten (Die Nibelungen – Der Fluch des Drachen, dir. Uli Edel, Germany/Italy/uk/us, 2004) 19, 173, 181–9 Tell (Tell – Jeder Schuss ein Treffer, dir. Mike Eschmann, Germany/Switzerland, 2007) 13th Warrior, The (dir. John Mc Tiernan, us, 1999) Thomas Müntzer (dir. Martin Hellberg, Germany, 1956) 226 Thousand-year-old Hildesheim, The (Das tausendjährige Hildesheim, dir. Emil Schünemann, Germany, 1936) 93 Till Eulenspiegel (dir. Rainer Simon, Germany, 1975) 103 Till on the Tower (Till Eulenspiegel als Türmer, dir. Johannes Hempel, Germany, 1955) Tilman Riemenschneider (dir. Helmut Spiess, Germany, 1958) Timeline (dir. Richard Donner, us, 2003) 232 Treasure, The (Der Schatz, dir. G. W. Pabst, Germany, 1922) 16 Tristan + Isolde (dir. Kevin Reynolds, Czech Republic/Germany/uk/us, 2006) 53, 173, 245 12 Paces Without a Head (12 Meter ohne Kopf, dir. Sven Taddicken, Germany, 2009)

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Vaya Con Dios (dir. Zoltan Spirandelli, Germany, 2002) 173 Veritas Vincit (dir. Joe May, Germany, 1919) 232 Vicky the Viking (Wickie und die starken Männer, dir. Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, Germany, 2009) 173 Vikings, The (dir. Richard Fleischer, us, 1958) Virgin Spring, The (Jungfrukällan, dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1960) Vision (Vision – Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen, dir. Margarethe von Trotta, France/Germany, 2009) Visitors, The (Les visiteurs, dir. Jean-Marie Poiré, France, 1993) 232 Wandering Image, The (Das wandernde Bild, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1920) 231 War of the Oxen, The (Der Ochsenkrieg, dir. Franz Osten, Germany, 1920) War of the Oxen, The (Der Ochsenkrieg, dir. Hans Deppe, Germany, 1943) 148, 237 Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, dir. Paul Leni, Germany, 1924) 15, 64–72, 118, 232 Werewolf Shadow (La Noche de Walpurgis, dir. León Klimovsky, Spain/Germany, 1978) 232 Wilhelm Tell (dir. Michel Dickoff, Switzerland, 1960) Wilhelm Tell (dir. Rudolf Dworsky/Rudolf Walther Fein, Germany, 1923) 238 William Tell (Guiglielmo Tell, dir. Ugo Falena, Italy, 1911)

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General Index

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Adorno, Theodor W. 118 Ahasver 57–62 animated film 99–100, 115–16, 190– 212, 219 antiquity 10, 55, 105–14 anti-Semitism 54–5, 176 apocalypse 26, 29, 40 apparatus theory 217 Arabian Nights 41 Aristotle 145–6 armour 10, 13, 80, 107, 110, 170, 196 Arnheim, Rudolf 216, 220 Arno, Siegfried 118 Arthur, King 9, 10, 19, 25 Attila the Hun 19, 105–14 Bakhtin, Mikhail 151, 193 Balázs, Béla 214–16, 220–21 Bauer, Ludwig 217, 220 Bazin, André 218, 220 Becce, Giuseppe 160 Behaim, Martin 91 Behne, Adolf 216, 220 Benjamin, Walter 49, 218, 220 Bergson, Henri 29, 30, 32 Berneis, Peter 118 Bible 57, 103, 110 birth 85, 91, 104, 152 blood 104, 110, 135–6, 147, 185 Böhm, Hans 26 Boellstorff, Tom 78, 94 Boese, Carl 62 Bois, Curt 118 Borgia, Cesare 153 Brauner, Artur 180 Burckhardt, Jacob 22, 151, 221 Burt, Richard 120–21 Butler, Judith 75, 94

camp 79–81 see also cross-dressing, sexuality Canterbury Tales 136, 143–4 see also Chaucer, Geoffrey castle 13, 77–8, 153, 164–5, 186 cathedral 41–2, 45, 47, 100, 105, 119–22, 125, 128, 131, 141, 143, 176 as locus of truth 138–43 in film and media theory 214–21 Cellarius, Christoph 11 Cervantes, Miguel de 115–16 see also Don Quixote Chaliapin, Fedor 115 Charles vii of France, King 88–90, 101 Chaucer, Geoffrey 136, 143–4 chivalry see knighthood Christ 57, 134 Christianity 13, 35, 121, 134, 140, 162–3 see also cathedral cinematography 106, 110, 157–8 clock 35, 48–50, 91, 190–91 see also hourglass, time Colleoni, Bartolomeo 162–3 computer-generated imagery 191–2 court 54, 56–7, 60, 175–9, 205 Crary, Jonathan 219 cross 13, 109–11 cross-dressing 74–96, 167 crown 84–5, 86, 88–90, 131 crusades 20, 133 cyborg 192, 194–8 dead, the 7–8, 12, 51, 94–6, 128, 168–9, 188, 196, 198 reanimated 51–73, 56 death 9, 29, 32, 91, 109–10, 110, 113–14, 144–8, 152, 196

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personified 41–50, 92–3, 190–91 Deleuze, Gilles 29–32 Dieterle, William 118, 129–30, 217, 220 Disney, Walt 118, 199 documentary 17, 93 Don Quixote 115–16 see also Cervantes, Miguel de dragon 19, 174, 176, 186, 191, 195, 197 dubbing 184 Dürer, Albrecht 77

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Eco, Umberto 219–20 Edel, Uli 181–2 editing 117, 154, 156–9 see also lap-dissolve Einstein, Alfred 25 Eisenstein, Sergei 217, 220 Elias, Norbert 176 Enlightenment 9, 12, 190 Esposito, Elena 218 fantasy 16, 18–21, 153, 164, 169, 183 Faust, Johann Georg 27 Feuchtwanger, Leon 118 film theory 61, 116, 213–22 Flusser, Vilém 215–6, 220 Flynn, Errol 9 Foulon, Otto 216, 220 Frank, Bruno 118 Freud, Sigmund 94 Friedrich, Jörg, The Blaze 172 Fürmann, Benno 181–8 Gabilondo, Joseba 219 Galileo Galilei 77 Ganghofer, Ludwig, The War of the Oxen 148 Germany 17–18, 26–7, 172–89 gender 74–81, 167–8, 200 ghosts 52, 95, 182, 186–7 Giovanni de’ Medici 152–71, 156–7, 169

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Goebbels, Joseph 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust 27–8 Goll, Ivan 216, 220 Gothic 27, 41, 77 see also cathedral Greenblatt, Stephen 95 Guerin, Frances 40 Gunning, Tom 46–7, 175 Haraway, Donna 192, 204 Harbou, Thea von 41, 48 Haroun al-Rashid 65–9 Hauptmann, Carl 61 Hayles, Katherine 192 Heidegger, Martin 25, 27–37, 49, 74 Henlein, Peter 91 Herf, Jeffrey 169 Herlth, Robert 216, 220 Hillier, Erwin 136 ‘Historia von Johann D. Faustus’ 27 Hitler, Adolf 153–4, 169, 180–81 Hollywood 16, 118, 130, 173, 183 Homer, Odyssey 103–4 Horkheimer, Max 118 hourglass 34–37, 46, 70 see also clock, time Hugo, Victor 118, 122, 214, 221 see also Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Huizinga, Johan 221 humanism 221 humour 103, 123, 167, 170 see also jester, parody Hunchback of Notre Dame, The 118, 122, 214, 221 see also Hugo, Victor Ihering, Herbert 55 incorporation 94–6 Ivan the Terrible 65, 69–70

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Jack the Ripper 65, 71 Jannings, Emil 36 jester 80, 103, 190–91 Joan of Arc 8, 15, 74, 87–91, 101–2 John of Florence 93 Jolie, Angelina 194 Junge, Alfred 136

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knighthood 8, 10, 13, 80, 133, 176–9 Kracauer, Siegfried 218, 220 Kreimeier, Klaus 26–7, 28 Laclau, Ernesto 154, 164 Lamprecht, Karl 221 Lang, Fritz 41, 46, 210 language 101–3, 107–8, 183–4, 186 see also writing lap-dissolve 37, 42–4, 46, 68, 156 Laughton, Charles 128–9, 130–31 Ledger, Heath 9–10 legend 20, 28, 77, 170 Leo i, Pope 109–11 Leonardo da Vinci 77, 135 Lindley, Arthur 19 literature, medieval 16, 33, 122 see also Arabian Nights, Chaucer, Song of the Nibelungs Löw, Rabbi Judah 55–63 Louis xi of France, King 119–20, 121–4, 128 Luther, Martin 91, 162–3 McLuhan, Marshall 218, 220 Märten, Lu 216, 220 magic 54, 182, 191, 199–212 make-up 81, 128–9, 130–31 Mann, Thomas 118 Manovich, Lev 219, 220 manuscript 55, 99–102, 119–31, 219

film as 145–6 see also writing Marcian, Emperor 105–14, 110 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus 27 Mary Magdalene 134–5 Mary, Virgin 57, 131, 170 Mattray, Ernst 118 melancholia 74, 94 melodrama 183 metalepsis 61–2, 82, 204, 206 modernity 7–12, 26–7, 47, 53, 117, 193, 196, 212–21 monks 7, 82, 99, 104, 132, 144–8, 162–3 monster 51–2, 192–8 see also cyborg montage 158 see also editing Moses 57 Münsterberg, Hugo 104, 216, 220 Mulvey, Laura 61 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 28 music 26, 82, 139, 141–2, 159– 61, 165–7, 170–02 see also sound Mussolini, Benito 153–4 National Socialism 90, 148, 153, 164, 169–71 Neale, Steve 13 Nevsky, Alexander 166–7 Nielsen, Asta 75–96 nostalgia 153, 169 Orient 15, 42 Orientalism 15, 41, 67, 176, 201 Panofsky, Erwin 105, 217, 220 parody 120–21 see also humour Peters, Ellis 132 phallus 84–90 Pomerance, Murray 218, 220 Pope, Alexander 135

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post-human 13, 192, 204–5 Pressburger, Emeric 135 print in film and media theory 214–21 vilified in medieval film 12, 99–101, 115–31 see also writing prophecy 108–11 Pulcheria 105–6 queer theory 74

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reading 103, 147–8 see also writing realism 18–21, 55, 66–7, 191, 199–200 Reinl, Harald 180 Reitz, Edgar 172–3 Reformation 28 Reiniger, Lotte 115, 200–1, 210 Renaissance 11, 22, 28, 41, 77, 151–3, 217 see also humanism revolution 10, 117, 123, 154, 214 Rheticus, Georg Joachim 117 Ricoeur, Paul 45, 47 Riefenstahl, Leni 180 Robin Hood 13, 19 Romanticism 10, 12, 27, 221 Rosen, Philip 61 Rothschild, Ernst 216, 220 Rubin, Gayle 84 Ruttmann, Walter 198 Salviata, Maria 152, 165–6 Santner, Eric 172–3, 184–9 Saxo Grammaticus 77 Schacht, Roland 175 Schedel, Hartmann 91 Schiller, Friedrich 90, 118 Schweiger, Til 79–80 science fiction 63, 79–81 Sebald, W. G. 172 Serner, Werner 216, 220 sexuality 74–96, 166–8 Sforza, Caterina 152

Shakespeare, William 41, 77–8, 84–5, 93–6 Sinti and Roma 118–19, 180 Sirk, Douglas 105 Sobchack, Vivian 219 Song of the Nibelungs 19, 174 sound 139, 143 see also dubbing, music spectacle 160–61, 205 Stam, Robert 117 supernatural 18–19, 210 see also magic Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 172–3 Sydow, Max von 181–2 Tetzel, Johann 164 Theoderic the Great 19 Theodosius i, Emperor 105–8 time co-presence of 26–50, 64–5, 69–72, 94–6 cyclical 38–9, 92 non-linear in Middle Ages 11, 25–6, 214–21 non-linear in medieval film 11–13, 15–16, 21, 25–96 queer 74–96 static 39, 92–3, 215–6, 218, 221 see also apocalypse, clock, prophecy time-travel 16, 45 Todorov, Tzvetan 18, 210 Tönnies, Ferdinand 221 transnationalism 17, 182 Trenker, Luis 154–6, 170 Valentinian i, Emperor 105–6 Vining, Edward P. 76 virginity 88, 92–3 visual art, medieval 100, 104–105 war 148, 186 First World War 175 Hundred Years War 122 invasion of Novgorod 166–7 Italian Wars 152, 164–5

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Second World War 29, 136, 141–2, 144, 172, 175, 186–7 Wegener, Paul 61, 216, 220 Weimar Republic 17, 26–7 Winstone, Ray 194 Wolf, Mark P. 219 Worringer, Wilhelm 221 writing as elitist power tool 125–8, 138, 146 as material object/signifier 101–5, 117–31, 133–4, 141, 143, 146–8 as text/signified 101–5, 117–31 vilified in medieval film 11, 13, 22, 99–148 see also manuscript, reading

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Zeller, Wolfgang 198, 202

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