Reviewer: Erin Lee Mock (emock@westga.edu)
Writing
about “period” film as “period film”
is rife with difficulty as William F. Woods admits in The Medieval Filmscape: Reflections of Fear and Desire in a Cinematic
Mirror. Beyond the question of
period itself, all studies of genre or subgenre present the problem of
“quality,” and the “medieval filmscape” does so more than most. A responsible scholar must attend to a
variety of texts which include, to use Rick Altman’s term, the “semantic”
elements of that genre, including many films which are frankly terrible. Simultaneously, most scholars who undertake
subgenre study do so to argue for its critical function. Woods manages this problem structurally and
through one major metaphor (the mirror), which is his greatest strength.
Woods
opens his introduction, “Our Lady of Pain: The Subgenre of Medieval Film,” by
marking the breadth of the subgenre in terms which are both neutral and
indicative of its variable quality.
“Blood-soaked epic, mystical sword and sorcery, legalistic monkish
psychodrama—these are the medieval movies” (3).
Such a list brings to mind the subgenre’s possibilities: a committed
film scholar can think of examples that run the gamut of grade and importance. The remainder of the (quite comprehensive)
introduction breezes through films like Christian Duguay’s Joan of Arc (1999), which was devastated by critics and a
box-office bomb, but nonetheless typifies the subgenre. Wood also acknowledges his own “guilty
pleasures” and his enjoyment of a “gloriously bad movie,” which squares with
his genial and reader-friendly style and lends credibility to his inclusive
approach (26, 30).
Wood then
uses Part I to address three significant issues in the study of the medieval
filmscape before transitioning to case studies in Part II. This has become a familiar sequence for genre
study, but Wood’s list of “issues” (Authenticity, Simplicity, and Spectacle) is
not precisely about what is contained or addressed in the filmic texts
themselves. This choice is to his
credit. Rather than adopting what Rick
Altman famously called a “semantic” approach to the subgenre, Wood’s three categories
address important questions about the very existence of the subgenre: why it
continues to exist, why filmmakers and viewers return to it again and again,
what is at stake in its recurrence [1]? His
simple argument is that the viewer is better able to understand her own life
and struggles through seeing their representations in a medieval context.
The
chapter on “Authenticity” is the most difficult undertaking. Woods announces in the chapter’s first page
that “despite their mythic overtones and romance coloring, medieval movies,
like medieval histories, have to deliver a convincing picture of life” and he
connects this to “cinematic realism” (23).
Theories of “cinematic realism” abound and scholars and viewers have
been discussing the topic since the origin of cinema itself. Historical adaptation study is a field almost
entirely concerned with fidelity and authenticity. Sarah Salih’s essay, “Cinematic
authenticity-effects and medieval art: a paradox,” alone would have done some
heavy lifting [2]. Major monographs and collections on these issues appear to
this day, but Woods consults only two of them.
A deeper sense of the field would have been to his benefit.
Chapter
2 on “Simplicity” is short, solid, and convincing. The “mirror” argument—that we see ourselves
in the medieval context—falls easily in line.
“Spectacle,”
Chapter 3, is the strongest because it is the most original. Woods expands the category of spectacle such
that it is not the joust or the battle which suffices. He reads royalty and religious figures as
spectacles in themselves. Because Woods
presents a unique idea, he might have taken it further, perhaps exploring how
such a reading might offer deeper critiques of institutions and hierarchies in
both medieval and modern societies. If
these films are indeed mirrors, they supply abundant opportunities to reflect
on the superficial, corrupt, and unsavory elements of modern power
structures.
Woods
does, however, grapple a bit more with the potential for critique as he moves
into Part II, his case studies. Two of
these chapters (three case studies) rise above the others for their
ambition. These first two chapters not
only add nuance to Woods’s earlier themes, but regard films which are strange and
aesthetically overwhelming.
Woods begins
Chapter 4 by considering The Advocate
(Megahey, 1993), a rich and sophisticated text.
As Woods puts it, “[i]n perhaps no medieval film are audiences so
insistently invited to scrutinize, evaluate, and go beyond the information
given” (62). Without a thorough
knowledge of the subgenre, I’m inclined to agree. The film portrays Richard Courtois (Colin
Firth), a wealthy French lawyer based on Bartholomew Chassenee and is cynical
nearly to the point of nihilism.
Courtois is an animal advocate and the film is rife with images of
animals which are beautiful, but just as often disturbing. Woods addresses this visual landscape as a
backdrop for a what he calls “protocols,” rituals which make the experience
more “real” for the viewer as they seem so particular to the world of the film
(68-9). While some of the connections he
makes (Thoreau, for example) seem like non sequiturs, I admire his willingness
to confront such a complex film.
Chapter
5 in Part II may be even bolder, taking on canonical films by canonical
filmmakers, The Seventh Seal (1957)
by Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). Woods immediately dispatches with this,
moving immediately from their reputations to their purpose in The Medieval Filmscape, writing that
“they are less interesting as icons of high modernism than for the powerful
ways that they exploit the conventions of medievalism. . . . in each case an
unrelenting focus on a spiritual quest that has never seemed so nakedly and
humanly genuine as it does in these two films” (76). He offers a consistent summary and
description of The Seventh Seal,
especially contemplating the opening scene, arguing as he has that the medieval
context allows the viewer to ponder the merging of the “mundane and the
transcendent” in our own lives, as our character Jof has one. Regarding La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Woods makes the point, familiar to film scholars,
that Dreyer’s close-ups create an intense intimacy with Jeanne d’Arc (Maria
Falconetti). Woods’s mirror metaphor is most apt and powerful in this example
(86).
Chapters
6-8 consider texts which seem less interesting to this cinema-minded reader,
though a medievalist is likely to see their importance more clearly (i.e. lesser
works by important filmmakers like Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le gallois and Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, as well as films by less well-known directors,
including Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose [1986] and Daniel
Vigue’s The Return of Martin Guerre [1982]). For example, aesthetic quality aside, French
Arthuriana more than merits a chapter. I
was interested again though by Chapter 9, in which Woods begins to apply his
notion of the “mirror” to a more specific modern context, writing on Ridley
Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
(2005). Here, Woods even mentions the
filmmaking context: “Scott issued copies of the early script to historians and
others whose opinions might carry weight with the public, it became apparent
that the crusades themselves, let alone the Iraq war, had not ended” (155).
Woods argues then that Scott’s script requires a “privileging of eastern
culture,” even as it indulges in what is “unashamedly a celebration of
Orientalism” (166). Though Woods himself
does not make this argument particularly, this Orientalism—the film sets up
Jerusalem as a place for Balian (Orlando Bloom) to “find himself”—may in fact
“mirror” American notions of the Middle East at the time (166). Woods argues later that “the measure of
ethical authority in this film is ultimately the culture of the East,” but that
the East allows a sort of wealth that Balian ultimately rejects, and it’s hard
not to see Scott imploring Western divestment from the conflicts—and the oil—of
the Middle East (174). This more explicit
politics of the “mirror” elevates the metaphor as Woods nears the end of his
argument.
Oddly,
in the Epilogue Woods seems reluctant to put his finger on that which is
reflected in the mirror, even as he gestures toward “the self-made man,” “the
striver,” “the Pony Express,” “freedom and equality,” and “two political
parties,” among other things. Is it a
version of modern American-ness that he is arguing is reflected or
reflecting? I suppose I wish he’d told
us. The end of the book however
justifies its premise: the “mirror” is not the tautological or trite metaphor
it may seem, but a way of thinking through “period” and genre which has the
potential for multifaceted uses.
Erin Lee
Mock
University
of West Georgia
[1]
“A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23.3 (Spring 1984): 6-18.
[2] In Medieval Film, eds Anke Bernau and
Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).
