Queer Movie Medievalisms

Tison Pugh, Kathleen Coyne Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351907125
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How is history even possible, since it involves recapturing a past already lost? It is through this urge to understand, feel and experience, that films based on medieval history are made. They attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality leading to the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism. Queer Movie Medievalisms is the first book of its kind to grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present, as registered on the silver screen, queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time. It will be of great interest to scholars of Gender and Sexuality, Cultural and Media Studies, Film Studies and Medieval History.

Chapter 1
The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice

Lisa Manter

Having just murdered her father François de Cortemare (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), Béatrice de Cortemare (Julie Delpy) sits in profile with her bloody hand resting on the face of a wooden statue of the Virgin, their mirrored postures creating a closed form.¹ On the film’s soundtrack, Lili Boulanger’s uncanny voice adds a musical commentary to the image: “Pie Jesu domine/Dona eis requiem” (Merciful Lord Jesus/Give them rest). This mesmerizing closing shot of Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice (1987) presents a haunting portrayal of gynocentric insularity that stands in stark contrast with the public validation of medieval patria potestas that opens the film. Between these two scenes unfolds the film’s queer project, a critical examination of the insalubrious roots of the modern conception of the heteronormative family.

The initial sequence of La Passion Béatrice underscores the tie between the patriarchal power of the father and aristocratic privilege by opening with a priest blessing the Lord de Cortemare (Béatrice’s grandfather) and his family in preparation for the lord’s departure for war in the presence of his extended household. The ensuing voice-over introduces this opening flashback as the sine qua non of the upcoming conflict between Béatrice and her father:

Il est des histoires comme de certaines arbres dont il est necessaire de connaître la racine pour mieux saisir la maladive contorsion des branches, l’afflux de sang dans le feuillage, le poison dans la sève.

(There are some stories that are like certain trees, of which it is necessary to know the roots in order to better grasp the sickly twisting of the branches, the rush of blood in the foliage, the poison in the sap.)

This statement, in Tavernier’s own voice,² accompanies an image of François as a ten-year old boy running from his mother to his departing father, shouting “Père! Père!”, establishing cinematically the importance of the triangular paradigm of the heteronormative family, with the son abandoning the mother to pursue his allegiance to the father. The flashback’s closing scene of the young François stabbing his mother’s lover to preserve his father’s honor drives home Tavernier’s presentation of the aristocratic family as the locus of the exercise of power, both sexual and social.

When François becomes the Lord de Cortemare in his turn, his brutal exercise of patriarchal power—which reaches its climax with the rape of his daughter—becomes the focus of Tavernier’s study of the perversity of the gendered familial roles handed down to young François. The ideology of paterfamilias in the film, rather than prohibiting François’s abusive excesses, makes possible the very terrors it promises to prevent: murder, pillage, rape, and incest. Even more scandalous is that his cruelties are visited on those the system vows to protect, namely his family and his subjects.

In juxtaposition to François’s excesses, which reveal a system that is “both culpable and morally insupportable, a system of terrifying perversion,”³ is the passion, in all senses of the term, of young Béatrice. As the “good” daughter, Béatrice at first attempts to uphold her father’s privilege; then, in the face of François’s unrelenting viciousness, she seeks recourse through other patriarchal channels. Finally, as she discovers the queer kernel of the Law of the Father, she institutes her own law, enforcing her personal claims to power by taking up the phallic dagger and using it against her father. Out of her process of suffering, purgation, and sacrifice emerges the possibility of manifesting an alternative, although equally queer, space from which to heal the “sickness that twists the branches” of the heteronormative family.

As in a Mirror, Queerly: Projecting (on) the Past

“The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

The broad outlines of Tavernier’s film are taken from the “true crime story” of the Cenci family. In brief, the story, recorded in legal documents, chronicles, and popular legend, concerns the patricide of Francesco Cenci, a Roman nobleman, who had a record of violence and sexual license. After years of abuse, his wife Lucrezia, eldest son Giacomo, and daughter Beatrice (both from a previous marriage) arranged to have him killed. Their conspiracy came to light, and Pope Clement VI sentenced them to public execution in 1599. The youngest son, Bernard, was spared but forced to watch his family executed.⁴ The sensationalist elements of the case, including the possibility of incest between Francesco and his daughter Beatrice, captured the public’s imagination and became a popular theme for writers and artists.⁵

La Passion Béatrice clearly shows the influence of these earlier works, in particular Percy Bysshe Shelley’s influential dramatization of the legend, The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, written in 1819, and the work of Tavernier’s two compatriots, Stendhal and Antonin Artaud, whose versions of the story draw upon Shelley’s.⁶ A number of elements, however, set Tavernier’s version apart: 1) the shift in setting from Renaissance Rome to late medieval France, 2) a greater development of the character of the father, 3) an emphasis on misogynistic discourse and Béatrice’s uneasy relationship to it, 4) an explicit portrayal of the father-daughter incest, and 5) the ending of the story with the death of François at the hands of Béatrice. Tavernier’s temporal and spatial shift of the story from early modern Italy to rural medieval France is placed at the forefront of my analysis of these directorial alterations because it is this decision regarding the setting of the story that underwrites the remaining dramatic changes.⁷

During the development of the screenplay, Tavernier asked his wife Colo Tavernier-O’Hagan to transfer the setting of the story from Renaissance Rome to southern France during the Hundred Years’ War.⁸ Although the script of La Passion Béatrice follows its predecessors in its focus on Beatrice as a beautiful and spirited young woman faced with an impossible dilemma, the story is sharply dissociated from its early modern urban backdrop. Tavernier is thus able to take advantage of the popular belief in a “vast epistemic shift [between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance] that ushers in modernity”⁹ while at the same time making use of the Middle Ages as a time that, as Umberto Eco cannily observed, has “never been reconstructed from scratch” but has always been “mended or patched up, as something in which we still live.”¹⁰ Béatrice makes use of this “queerness” of portraying the Middle Ages on film by playing upon the distancing effect of an amorphous and alien “Dark Ages” and the popularity of medieval settings in cinema as a space of continuous re-examination of issues of Western culture. In this sense, the film appears to participate in what Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger label “the logic of the queer” because it “effects a disturbance of temporality that is precisely ‘preposterous’” and because there needs to be a “certain stabilization of temporal sequence into narratives of causation” if “sexual norms [are to] be given their necessary and inescapable history.”¹¹

But it may be argued that by projecting this Renaissance story backward onto the Middle Ages, to a time of shifting norms and instability, the narrative of Béatrice can be read as supporting a history that is “continuist and teleological” since the events of the tragedy should never have occurred in the modern period.¹² In other words, if the brutality and sexual deviance of the Cencis are transferred to the de Cortemare family, with their roots firmly planted in a period considered, if not lawless by modern standards, at least less subject to centralized power than Renaissance Europe, then the dramatic action is fittingly barbaric rather than perverse. In that case, the behavior of François de Cortemare, especially his pursuit of father-daughter incest, can be read as merely part of the medieval “color,” and therefore not subject to modern heteronormative constraints. The film would thus seem to support “mainstream historicism[’s insistence] on understanding the ‘flow of time’ as uninterruptedly ‘progressive.’”¹³

On the other hand, the film could be seen as exploiting the ahistoricity of “medieval” film so that the Middle Ages symbolically functions as the unconscious of our present period. Such a reading is supported by Tavernier’s epigraph that appears before the opening images of the film, which provides a justification for his characters’ freedom from the constraints of modernity:

Leur univers est à la fois vaste et féroce, hanté par les puissances de l’Au-delà, un univers où le Sacré côtoie la Barbaric…. Ce sont des enfants sauvages. Ils sont ce que nous sommes encore la nuit, dans nos songes. Ils sont notre inconscient.

(Their universe is at the same time vast and fierce, haunted by the powers from up above, a universe where the Sacred brushes daily with the Barbaric…. These are savage children. They are what we still are at night, in our dreams. They are our unconscious.)¹⁴

Seen as a reflection of our culture in its “infancy,”¹⁵ the Middle Ages can be posited as a mythic period where we can examine what we have repressed as a culture, that which we would consider “savage” because it has been successfully repressed by modern law and its enforcement.¹⁶ The medieval setting of Béatrice thus allows Tavernier to create a bleak archetypal dreamscape that reshapes the singularity of one family’s criminal history into a type of historical “screen memory.” Viewing the medieval elements of the film in this way makes Freud’s comments on the ahistoricity of screen memories particularly suggestive:

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time.¹⁷

Such a dehistoricized approach fits traditional psychoanalytic views of incest as an unspeakable fantasy rather than a lived reality under heteronormative family politics.

Both of these “straight” readings are troubled, however: the first by the “historical fact” that the film is based on events that occurred during the Renaissance, with its accompanying intricate social and judicial systems, and the second by the centrality and explicitness of the incest in the film, which underscores its existence as a realistic incident rather than as an unconscious fantasy. Neither reading, therefore, fully allows for Tavernier’s adaptation of the Cenci myth to be tamed into becoming part of a “straight chronology” of the family.¹⁸

In sum, La Passion Béatrice points out 1) the “preposterousness” of reading the Cenci family drama as early modern, even though historically it was, for to do so would point out that modern “law” produces Francesco Cenci’s behavior, and 2) the “preposterousness” of seeing the father-daughter incest as nonnormative, even though it is perverse, for it appears to be the logical outcome of the film’s medieval misogyny and patriarchal privilege. Through medieval film’s queer historical potential, Tavernier is able to have it both ways, and his reconstruction of a Renaissance myth in a realistic medieval setting heightens the story’s function as a critical commentary on western heteronormativity. As Emily Zants notes, it is typical of Tavernier to use realism to “engage the viewers in a familiar world, [and] then [pull] the rug of habit from beneath them, leaving them questioning their own habits and prejudices as well as those of their society.”¹⁹ As a filmmaker, he takes advantage of our willingness to see ourselves as both separated from the Middle Ages and at the same time inheritors of its traditions as a means of helping us see beyond our modern (and even postmodern) ideologies surrounding heteronormativity.

The complex set of historical “vibrations” set off by this juxtaposition of the medieval setting, the early modern material, its nineteenth- and twentiethcentury retellings, the contemporary technology of cinema and its post-Freudian viewers all encourage a queer reading of the film, a reading that “finds those queer touches that its culture has tried to disavow, opens up their denaturalizing perspective on heterosexual identity and can thus contribute to the mapping of heterosexuality’s long and varied history.”²⁰ As Carolyn Dinshaw notes in her work on the queer “vibrations” to be found in a juxtaposition of historical material and postmodern theory, the result of such queer work is that it “empties out the natural, the essential, empties out the conventional foundations of representation and identity, [and] shakes … the heterocultural edifice.”²¹ Tavernier’s medievalization of the Cenci story, therefore, not only queers the import of the original story to the history of sexuality but encourages us to queer our own understanding of “the norms of [our] time and place and … to contest that normativity by tracing other kinds of relations”²²—in this case, the links among the heteronormative family, gender roles, sexuality, power, and the incest taboo. For this reason, I retain the use of queer for both my discussion of the perverse elements of the Law of the Father and for Béatrice’s rejection of traditional familial roles. Tavernier’s exploration of the patriarchal family highlights the ways in which the term queer has been reclaimed by queer theorists to unsettle our sense of the normative, the perverse, and their relationship to each other. As David Halperin argues, “Queer … does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions, rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.”²³ By retaining the term queer, with its manifold reverberations, I hope to preserve the ever-shifting ground of the idea of the family, especially in relation to issues of gender a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Queer History, Cinematic Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality
• 1 The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice
• 2 Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on Stage and Screen
• 3 “He’s not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?”: Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades (1935)
• 4 “In the Company of Orcs”: Peter Jackson’s Queer Tolkien
• 5 The Eastern Western: Camp as a Response to Cultural Failure in The Conqueror
• 6 “In my own idiom”: Social Critique, Campy Gender, and Queer Performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• 7 Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc
• 8 Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages
• 9 Will Rogers’ Pink Spot: A Connecticut Yankee (1931)
• 10 Danny Kaye and the “Fairy Tale” of Queerness in The Court Jester
• 11 Mourning and Sexual Difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal
• 12 Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film
• Afterword
• Index