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Filming the Middle Ages. By Bettina Bildhauer. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011. Pp. 264; 100 illustrations. $40.

Bettina Bildhauer has written an impressive study of medievalism in German cinema. Unfortunately she and/or her publishers have represented it as a “groundbreaking” account of medieval film as an international genre. That ground has, in fact, been broken a number of times since Kevin Harty’s The Reel Middle Ages (1999), notably by John Aberth in A Knight at the Movies (2003), Nicholas Hay-dock in Movie Medievalism (2008), and especially by Laurie Finke and Martin Schichtman in Cinematic Illuminations (2010). Sixteen years ago, when I first tried to identify a genre of medieval film, I could claim to be entering a mostly empty field. That time has passed. If this book is not groundbreaking, it is also not, alas, a persuasive account of “a coherent filmic tradition” (p. 13) that operates across cultures and eras. One should be wary of a study that begins by dismissing the most mainstream examples of the genre it pretends to define, especially while conceding their “influence on the genre” (p. 13). The omissions include the most popular medieval film of the last twenty years, Braveheart (1995); that perennial favorite of film students, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975); virtually all Arthuriana; the many versions of Robin Hood; and all of Asian cinema, aside from a couple of paragraphs on Rashomon. The remaining list is almost as remarkable for its eccentricity as its exclusions. Of all the St. Joan films, we get three pages on Dreyer’s classic La Passion (1928) and four (pp. 87–90) on an obscure Nazi version, but nothing on Bresson, Besson, and the rest. At least two of the films discussed by Bildhauer—Hard to be a God and Dreamship Surprise—are technically science fiction. A number of others—Sign of the Pagan, The Immortal Heart, Condottieri—are set outside the supposed parameters of 500–1500 AD. The films often seem to have been selected to fit the thesis.

As a study of the German tradition, however, this is an intelligent, densely argued, demanding book. It comes with the enthusiastic endorsements of Carolyn Dinshaw, John Ganim, and Robert Burgoyne. Even outside that remit, it is usefully provocative. It certainly belongs in most film libraries. If it is not the first attempt [End Page 403] to define the genre, it is, so far, the most systematic. It has commanded my attention through three full readings. If in what follows I am seriously critical, it is because I take its arguments—and the problems they raise—seriously.

Bildhauer means to fill the genuine need for an account of the “genre as process” (p. 17), defined not by subject but by what it does. The paradigm is deceptively simple. There is, she argues, “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” (p. 213). This is not, as she says at the beginning, “a book about the Middle Ages” (p. 11); it is about cinematic manifestations of three myths about the Middle Ages, each of which gets one of the book’s three sections. The first imagines the medieval as a timeless, literally prehistoric period in which linear progression is suspended both for communities and individuals; past and future are compressed into the present, creating a “co-presence” in which different entities appear in the same moment and/or different moments appear in one. The career of Faust in Murnau’s 1926 version can be condensed into a day, and the aged Faust can morph into his youthful self. The second myth sees the Middle Ages as a visual culture before the domination of print. The third follows Burckhardt in imagining a world of medieval collectivity before the invention of individuality. All three tendencies, Bidlhauer argues, allow the medieval to serve as a validating surrogate for film—and later media—culture in its struggle against the hegemony of print and modernism. This simple structure is developed through often complexly argued case studies of particular films, mostly German. Even the apparent exceptions—Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale—are likely to be identified as the work of exiles and thus part of the German tradition. As long as she stays within that comfort zone, she is generally authoritative.

When she gets out of it, however, the results are more dubious. She discusses the Pressburger film, for example, in a section devoted to the opposition between movies and print history without noticing that movie-going is central to its story. Bob, the American soldier, wants to go to Canterbury not to see the cathedral but the cinema. Peter, his English counterpart, is a movie organist who wants to be a church organist. Colpeper, the local historian, complains about movies destroying history in the midst of a movie dedicated to commemorating it. Bildhauer discusses Name of the Rose (1986) as a detective story without knowing that Eco defined it as a “failed detective story,” a very different genre that should lead her to very different conclusions.

This focus creates at least two larger problems. As she makes clear, German cinema’s relation to its medieval past—thanks to the Nazis’ appropriation of it—is radically atypical of other European traditions. She devotes a whole chapter, for example, to the difficulty post-World War Two German filmmakers have had in coming to terms with their history. At the same time, however, she insists that the “genre of medieval film was moulded in Germany” (p. 17) and thus its traits are universal. They’re not. Weimar medieval films reflect Weimar concerns—with gender fluidity, for instance, and dream experience—that are historically situated. Those concerns, which are central in Section One are largely forgotten in Section Two when she has moved on to later and more international films. She is, in fact, dealing with a particular national cinema, but her focus leaves her with no other cinema with which to compare it. What do the French do differently? Or the English? Or the Americans, given that the US, which has no medieval history of its own, produces [End Page 404] so many medieval films? Instead, she simply refers vaguely to the fact that “many non-German films”—unspecified—do things differently (p. 173).

Still, this might be a useful paradigm if it worked. It doesn’t, for a number of reasons. Few of her criteria, for example, are common enough to be definitive. Medieval film, for example, is one of the most hetero-normative of all genres, one of the few places where you can still present manly men—in Braveheart, say—and womanly women largely without irony. You can’t define it in terms of gender subversion unless you stay almost entirely within the limits of Weimar. Even the camp parody of Dreamship Surprise depends on the straightness of what it is parodying.

Other criteria are more persuasive, but none of those are exclusive or even particular to medieval film. If disrupting linear time is a “medieval” trait, then Back to the Future is a medieval film, and so, for that matter, is a German film Bildhauer should know: Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (1999), in which the heroine keeps repeating the same dash across Berlin until, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993), she gets it right. The most elaborate example of supposedly medieval “co-presence” that I know of is Sliding Doors (1998), in which Gwyneth Paltrow, due to a time-slip, both does and does not catch a tube train. For the rest of the film, she lives two radically different lives—in the same place, at the same time, involving the same people, but in contemporary London, not the Middle Ages. In Chapter Nine, Bildhauer tells us that medieval film subverts the “modern human subject” (p. 190) by dissolving the boundaries between humans and animals. That certainly happens in a medieval film she doesn’t mention, Ladyhawke (1985), but also happens in everything from children’s cartoons featuring talking ducks and kung-fu fighting turtles, to Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and of course Planet of the Apes (1968 and 2001). The morphing of humans into machines and vice versa may occasionally be medieval, but it is much more characteristic of science fiction: think of Hal the computer, Robbie the Robot, and Marvin the Paranoid Android.

These porous categories do not, unfortunately, add up to a unique whole.

One fundamental problem with this book’s argument is that there is no incremental progression. Asta Neilsen’s Hamlet is “medieval” in one way, Hunchback in another, Condottieri in a third. We have a paradigm—the one cited above—but no single film that embodies it, though I could suggest one that comes close: John Boorman’s Excalibur, dismissed as just another boys with swords movie on p. 9. It does nonetheless meet her three major criteria, as very few other films do. All that really unites these traits is the argument that they are part of an ongoing “war between literature and film” (p. 115). If film and medieval culture share the same qualities, then filming the Middle Ages can be seen as striking a blow to the tyranny of print. If this were the case, of course, one would expect medieval films to make up a rather larger percentage of the whole than they do. One would also assume that there was a collective agreement that film was a collective art, but there isn’t. Auteurism is alive and well; it is the core belief of reviewers everywhere who write unquestioningly about the qualities of, say, a “Woody Allen film.” One would also expect films of the Middle Ages to be in the business of validating their period. With remarkable consistency, however, medieval films are hostile to the medieval. The characters we are asked to identify with—William Thatcher in A Knight’s Tale, Balian and Sybilla in Kingdom of Heaven, Wallace in Braveheart—are the ones like ourselves, protomoderns trapped in a primitive society. Their enemies—Adhemar, Guy de Lusignan, Edward Longshanks—are [End Page 405] the ones identified as medieval. The good guys rebel against or escape from the medieval norm. That’s no way to overthrow modernism.

Of course, many filmmakers and theorists do think as she suggests. Of course also, I am being harsh on a useful book by a talented critic. Many of my objections would diminish if this work were presented more cautiously as simply an account of how medievalism has played out in German cinema, with occasional reference to other European films that seem to share common qualities. I doubt, myself, that there is a single genre of medieval film. We might better think, as elsewhere in Medieval Studies, of medievalisms, of a number of local and idiosyncratic traditions copresent in the same field. Anyone hoping to define, say, American or British medievalism will, from now on, have to reckon with Bettina Bildhauer’s version of the German tradition. [End Page 406]

Arthur Lindley

The Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham