Recreation and Representation: The Middle Ages on Film (1950-2006)

By Andrew Brian Ross Elliot

PhD Dissertation, University of Exeter, 2009

Abstract: In evaluating the Middle Ages on film, this thesis combines two different critical approaches, drawn from historiography on one side and semiotics on the other. In the first chapter, I argue that historiographic criticism has largely undermined our belief in a monolithic, objective History, and that modern historical enquiry contains a tacit admission of its own subjectivity. In Chapter Two, I use these admissions to argue the case for history on film, demonstrating that in terms of the construction of history, the processes of filmmaking closely resemble those of ‘doing’ history, and that criticisms of historical films are often the same criticisms which Historians raise in respect of their own works of ‘pure history’. In the remaining chapters (3-6), I look at specific examples of types of historical character, drawn from the medieval separation of society into “those who work, those who fight and those who pray”, as well as “those who rule”. In each case, I adopt a similar methodological approach, conducting close cinematographic analysis on a range of film extracts in order to see how filmmakers have tried to construct the past visually in their representation of historical characters.

Here my arguments move away from historical criticism to focus instead on aesthetics and cinematography. The overall theory is that there exist two fundamental approaches to the medieval past in film: the first iconic and syntagmatic, the second paradigmatic. Iconic approaches, I argue, work to try to recreate the lost medieval referent by using aesthetic ‘signifiers’ in order to communicate their significance to a medieval audience. The paradigm, on the other hand, works in the opposite way; in order to explain a medieval object, the filmmaker casts about for modern equivalents to use as metaphors. Where the icon recreates the object to communicate the concept, the paradigm communicates the object by re-presenting the concept.


Introduction: Over twenty years ago, in his essay “Revisiting the Middle Ages”, Umberto Eco famously noted the continued interest in and retransmission of the medieval period, claiming simply that “people seem to like the Middle Ages”. Yet when it comes to film versions of that same medieval period, we find an almost immediate resistance, principally (but by no means exclusively) among scholars: in one article, David Williams observes that for many medievalists “medieval movies at first appear to reveal a disappointing or frustrating scene”, and a few years further on we meet Stuart Airlie’s warning that “movies can be dangerous for medievalists”. In another volume devoted to the issue of history on film in general, however, Mark C. Carnes indicates that this frustration is not limited to the Middle Ages but is endemic among all historical films, musing (with tongue firmly in cheek) that “Historians love movies about the past”. So what precisely changes in the process of transforming the medieval history which popular culture finds so pleasing on the page to an equally subjective version of events on the screen, especially when filmmakers are frequently drawing their ideas from the same pool, that which Sorlin defines, in terms distinctly reminiscent of Bourdieu, as a society’s “historical capital”? The question, then, might be reframed as follows: if people seem to like films as a whole, and they seem to like the Middle Ages in general, why are they so frequently dissatisfied with films made about the Middle Ages in particular?

Click here to read this thesis from the University of Exeter