Abstract
Cinematic images of the Middle Ages are necessarily bound to medieval images. Modern films often betray a fascination not simply with visually imagining the Middle Ages but also with the visual sources for creating their fictional medieval worlds. Frequently, this results in medieval films employing references to well-known medieval artworks as markers of authenticity, but even more so as a reflection on how the Middle Ages and its different media cultures were themselves engaged in complex processes of image-making and tale-telling, processes which often combined different forms of art at the same time because medieval media refused to be separated into neat modern binaries such as the visual versus the verbal, the oral versus the literate, or music versus poetry. It is the contention of this book that, through its penchant for aesthetic layering, cinema possesses a specific affinity to medieval culture, and that in its fascination with the multidimensional mediality of medieval works of art, medieval film proves capable of imitating, recreating, and adapting the way medieval men and women envisioned concepts of history.
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Notes
Jeffrey Richards, “Robin Hood on the Screen,” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 436 [429–40]; first printed in Robin Hood: The Many Faces of that Celebrated English Outlaw, ed. Kevin Carpenter (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg, 1995), pp. 135–44.
Robin and Marian was the first of several medieval films starring Sean Connery, such as The Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1984), The Name of the Rose (1986), Robin Hood—Prince of Thieves (1991), First Knight (1995), and Dragonheart (1996). As Tison Pugh notes, Connery’s medieval films do not simply continue the Bondlike superhero formula of his early career but “queer [its] alpha-male construction of heroism . . . thus allow[ing] the actor to escape the typecasting that trapped other [Bond] actors” (Tison Pugh, “Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages,” in Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh [Farnham: Ashgate, 2009] p. 148 [147–64]).
Admittedly, the final fight scene looks “disturbingly realistic” (Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994] p. 237).
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, “Introduction: The A-Chronology of Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 15 [1–19].
William F. Woods, “Authenticating Realism in Medieval Film,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2004), p. 38 [38–51].
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 1.
Martha W. Driver, “What’s Accuracy Got to Do with It? Historicity and Authenticity in Medieval Film,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2004), p. 20 [19–22].
See also Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 48,
and Sarah Salih, “Cinematic Authenticity Effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 28–29 [20–39].
For a concise description of the triptych’s basic characteristics, see Shirley Bloom Neilsen, Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 3–7.
A more detailed analysis focusing especially on the triptych’s meaning and function, see Lynn F. Jacobs, Opening Doors: The Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 1–20.
For an earlier discussion of the rotten/rotting apples see Christian Kiening, “Einleitung: Mittelalter im Film,” in Mittelalter im Film, ed. Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, Trends in Medieval Philology 6 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 46–47 [3–101]. For Kiening the apples symbolize the point at which Robin Hood’s heroism achieves its final mythical quality: an “apotheosis” without body or transcendence.
Andrew Higson, “‘Medievalism’, the Period Film and the British Past in Contemporary Cinema,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 210 [203–24].
R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 1. 725.
Seth Lerer, “On fagne flor: The Postcolonial Beowulf,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 77–102.
See also Nicholas Howe, “Anglo-Saxon England and the Postcolonial Void,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 35 n.27 [25–47].
Emily V. Thornbury, “Eald enta geweorc and the Relics of Empire: Revisiting the Dragon’s Lair in Beowulf,” Quaestio 1 (2000): 82–92.
Andrew James Johnston, “Beowulf and the Remains of Imperial Rome: Archaeology, Legendary History and the Problems of Periodisation,” in Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings. Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English, ed. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt, vol. 30 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009), pp. 127–36.
Monika Otter, “‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 407–8 [387–414].
Robin and Marian, dir. Richard Lester (US: Columbia Pictures, 1976).
see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) pp. 22–26.
For treason as a tragic way to substantiate a character’s heroic nature, see Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello
Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers (London: Continuum, 1984), pp. 49–70.
St Francis was one of cinematic medievalism’s more visible hippie-style heroes of the 1970s. Franco Zeffirelli, already famous for investing a seemingly conventional Romeo and Juliet with f lower-power-elements in 1967, had directed his “visually arresting” Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna [Brother Sun, Sister Moon] in 1972 (Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films About Medieval Europe [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999], p. 39).
Francis of Assisi, The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Paschal Robinson, (Philadelphia, PA: Dolphin Press, 1906), p. 153.
The film’s skeptical view of political utopianism is already present in the medieval outlaw tradition. For an analysis of how the popular romance The Tale of Gamelyn systematically buries its own utopian hopes, see Andrew James Johnston, “Wrestling in the Moonlight: The Politics of Masculinity in the Middle English Popular Romance Gamelyn,” in Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Stefan Horlacher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 51–67.
Uccellacci e uccellini [The Hawks and the Sparrows], dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy: CIDiF, 1966).
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© 2014 Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz
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Johnston, A.J. (2014). Marian Rewrites the Legend: The Temporality of Archaeological Remains in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian. In: Johnston, A.J., Rouse, M., Hinz, P. (eds) The Medieval Motion Picture. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_10
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