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Arch-mediator between the divine and the mundane, the angel is an enduring figure in the Western world. It has been interpreted as an externalization of repressed fantasies, a projection of the self as other, and a metaphor for modern estrangement. This book is the first comparative study of sacred medieval images of angels and their cinematic treatment, including reference to both the medieval and modern imaginations. The text traces the traditional functions of angels and their reworking in film, then takes particular note of new icons like the female angel and others who become models for our connection with transcendence.
The legends of King Arthur have not only endured for centuries, but also flourished in constant retellings and new stories built around the central themes. With the coming of motion pictures, Arthur was destined to hit the screen. This edition of Cinema Arthuriana, revised in 2002, presents 20 essays on the topic of the recurring presence of the legend in film and television from 1904 to 2001. They cover such films as Excalibur (1981) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), television productions such as The Mists of Avalon (2001), and French and German films about the quest for the Holy Grail and the other adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
How are the Crusades portrayed in popular culture today? Have the medieval images of chivalric and military heroes survived the eras of Orientalism and decolonization? The first of its kind, this comparative study examines representations of the Crusades in both European and Arab medieval texts and in 20th and 21st century transmedia recreations. It follows the cartography and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages through modern, hybridized narratives in novels, film, comics and gaming. The shifting literary tastes, political agendas and cultural exchanges of audiences on both sides of the Mediterranean reflect their anxieties and ideals.
Studies of the influence of the middle ages on aspects of European and American life and culture from 16c to the present day.
Collective Trauma and the Psychology of Secrets in Transnational Film advances a methodological line of inquiry based on a fresh insight into the ways in which cinematic meaning is generated and can be ascertained. Premised on a critical reading strategy informed by a metapsychology of secrets, the book features analyses of internationally acclaimed films—Guillermo del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, Jee-woon Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters, and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others. It demonstrates how a rethinking of the figure of the secret in national film yields a new vantage point for examining heretofore unrecognized connections between collective historical experience, cinematic production and a transnational aesthetic of concealment and hiding.
In this groundbreaking account of film history, Bettina Bildhauer shows how from the earliest silent films to recent blockbusters, medieval topics and plots have played an important but overlooked role in the development of cinema. Filming the Middle Ages is the first book to define medieval films as a group and trace their history from silent film in Weimar Germany to Hollywood and then to recent European co-productions. Bildhauer provides incisive new interpretations of classics like Murnau’s Faust and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and she rediscovers some forgotten works like Douglas Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan and Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet. As Bildhauer explains, both art house films l...
Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance. Academia has never been immune to corporate culture, and despite the persistent association of medievalism with escapism, perhaps never has that been more obvious than at the present moment. The six essays that open the volume explore precisely how financial institutions have promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the middle ages. In the second part of the book, contributors explore medievalism in a variety of areas, juxtaposing specific case studies with broader investigations of the discipline...
This collection of original essays presents new scholarship on nearly three dozen feature-length films, including silent films, animated films, films in black and white, and films in technicolor, along with other, shorter examples of cinematic medievalism. Written by contributors from around the globe with a wide variety of backgrounds, the essays in this volume take a critical approach to one of the most popular forms of medivalism. This book presents a full century of cinematic depictions of the Middle Ages, with new examinations of works such as The Seventh Seal, God's Fool, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Saladin the Victorious, Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, and A Knight's Tale, among others.
The early thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is the first comprehensive volume devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and its medieval legacy. The twenty essays in this volume, all by internationally known scholars, locate the work in its social,...