from Medieval Academy News

The Parchment Screen
by Gustavo P. Secchi

Web-savvy film buffs have known for several years about the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com), essentially a search engine for an enormous, hyperlinked datebase containing every single film or TV program ever made. Each movie on the database has been assigned to one or more genres or “plot keywords” and so, in theory, one should be able to type “medieval,” or “mediaeval,” or “middle ages,” and receive a list of all movies so classified. This is not the case, however, since the classification system is capricious at best and plain wrong more often than not. Scholars have argued about many issues concerning Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales, but no one would deny that it belongs in a listing of “medieval films”; the IMDB, however, assigns it only the keywords “based-on-novel” and “sequel.”

So even in this wired era, we should welcome the ink-and-paper publication The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999; 316 pp.; $78.50), by Kevin J. Harty, which lists 564 films about the period, from the Soviet Abu Reikhan Biruni to the Hungarian A Zsarnok sziva avagy Boccaccio Magyarorszagin (a.k.a. Boccaccio in Hungary).

Harty’s volume takes the form of a comprehensive list alphabetized by title. The entries include alternate and English titles, place of production, director, production company, and a brief alphabetical cast list, followed by a brief description of the film’s plot and a useful bibliography of reviews and scholarly articles.

If the reader knows the title of the film he or she is looking for, the search will be fairly easy. However, more complex (but rather more usual) searches (for example, trying to find all films ever made about Joan of Arc or medieval films made in a single year or country) will leave the reader regretting the absence of indexes by theme, year, or place of production. Harty tries to make up for this lack with his introductory essay, where he gives an overview of the book’s contents based on Umberto Eco’s “10 dreams of the Middle Ages,” a reasoned list of ways in which the present uses “the medieval” as a concept.   

The usefulness of The Reel Middle Ages could have been enhanced by a list of recommendations or “quality rating” system. A reader would need to comb through the entire volume (a task which can, admittedly, be quite entertaining) to find Harty’s enthusiastic recommendations of gems such as Christensen’s Häxan (1924), Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), Borowczyk’s Blanche (1971), Jarman’s Edward II (1991), and Megahey’s L’Heure du Cochon (1994). This lack of a list of recommendations or ratings does a disservice to obscurer films like Love’s Crucible and Stealing Heaven, which Harty rightly considers “overlooked.”

Despite these minor quibbles, I found The Reel Middle Ages a thoroughly enjoyable, enlightening work both to read and look at. The film stills, a specialty of McFarland’s movie volumes, give the reader the opportunity to chart the varieties in representation through the decades of Connecticut Yankees, Quasimodos, and Joans of Arc. Other visual pleasures include Alan Ladd in The Black Knight (1954) looking very uncomfortable in coat of mail and oversize helmet, the always mesmerizing Klaus Kinski hewing down Saracens in La Chanson de Roland (1978), and a disproportionate assortment of Caucasian actors playing dubious-looking Asian warlords (e.g., Orson Welles in The Tartars, John Wayne in The Conqueror, Zero Mostel in Marco).

The most striking result of reading through the volume is the discovery of the two most substantial fields of medieval representation in film history: the silent film era and the Italian sex comedy genre. The former includes gems like Edwin S. Porter’s 1904 Parsifal (Harty includes an astonishing still of the majestic hall of the Grail King) or Aimsir Padraig, a 1920 Irish film about the conversion of the island by St. Patrick.

The latter includes, well, dozens upon dozens of movies with titles combining the words “Boccaccio,” “Decameron,” “forbidden,” “lustful,” and the like, which Harty patiently lists among the stately Bergmans and Langs. Teachers of medieval literature will recognize with horror the “genre” of the 1972 film Novelle Licenziose di Vergini Vogliose (Licentious Tales of Lustful Virgins), the plot of which could have been lifted from the final exam of some hapless student: “As he composes the tales of ‘The Decameron,’ Boccaccio falls asleep and finds himself in Hell where Geoffrey Chaucer is his guide. As they travel through the circles of Hell, Chaucer tells Boccaccio the stories of the people they meet. When Boccaccio awakens, he fears he himself will go to Hell because of his writings. He vows to burn all his works, but Petrarch prevails upon him not to do so.”

Still, for all the strange silliness that seems to have guided the cinematic rendition of our scholarly field, the book suggests some interesting points of departure for intelligent analysis of the intersection of film and the Middle Ages. Surprisingly, intriguing artifacts of the twentieth century abound: Gustav Ucicky’s Das Mädchen Johanna (1935), a retelling of the Joan of Arc narrative for Nazi propaganda purposes; Gabriel Axel’s The Prince of Jutland (1994), an adaptation of the original Hamlet story from Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, starring Gabriel Byrne, Helen Mirren, and Christian Bale; or a 1951 version of Murder in the Cathedral featuring the acting talents of none other than T. S. Eliot.

Editor’s note: Gustavo P. Secchi, a graduate student in English at Harvard University, spends a significant proportion of his time keeping tabs on the international film industry. For other on-line “medieval” movie sources, try http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/cmrs/cinema or http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/medfilms.html.