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James Chapman, Filming the Middle Ages, Screen, Volume 53, Issue 3, Autumn 2012, Pages 330–332, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs025
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Extract
A characteristic of recent scholarship on the historical film has been the emergence of bodies of critical literature examining the cinematic representation of particular historical periods and epochs. The Ancient World in film, for example, has become a special subject in its own right, attracting contributions from classicists as well as from film and cultural historians.1 There is also a substantial critical historiography of the filmic Middle Ages. Much of this work has been done by mediaevalists, particularly historians and specialists in mediaeval literature, rather than film studies scholars.2 Accordingly the emphasis has generally been on questions of historical authenticity and textual adaptation. It would be fair to say that the quality of this work is mixed, though to some extent this is a reflection of the nature of the subject matter itself. Unlike the Ancient World, where the epic is the dominant type of film, the representation of the Middle Ages has been characterized by a diverse range of film styles and practices that includes historical epics (Braveheart [Mel Gibson, 1995]), art house (The Seventh Seal [Ingmar Bergman, 1957]), literary adaptations (The Name of the Rose [Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986]), swashbucklers (The Adventures of Robin Hood [Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938]), comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975]) and the musical (Camelot [Joshua Logan, 1967]). How can we find a theoretical framework that adequately covers films as far removed from each other as Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981)?
