Music in Films on the Middle Ages

Authenticity vs. Fantasy

John Haines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415824125
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135927769
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

This book explores the role of music in the some five hundred feature-length films on the Middle Ages produced between the late 1890s and the present day. Haines focuses on the tension in these films between the surviving evidence for medieval music and the idiomatic tradition of cinematic music. The latter is taken broadly as any musical sound occurring in a film, from the clang of a bell off-screen to a minstrel singing his song. Medieval film music must be considered in the broader historical context of pre-cinematic medievalisms and of medievalist cinema's main development in the course of the twentieth century as an American appropriation of European culture. The book treats six pervasive moments that define the genre of medieval film: the church-tower bell, the trumpet fanfare or horn call, the music of banquets and courts, the singing minstrel, performances of Gregorian chant, and the music that accompanies horse-riding knights, with each chapter visiting representative films as case studies. These six signal musical moments, that create a fundamental visual-aural core central to making a film feel medieval to modern audiences, originate in medievalist works predating cinema by some three centuries.

1 The Making of the Middle Ages

Everything in modern life is congested . . . There can be but one path of escape, and that is backwards.

—Arthur Penty, Guilds and the Social Crisis (1919)¹

People do not die in real life the way they do in the movies, when “the person’s breathing fades away in perfect harmony with the musical score”—so proclaims a recent academic book on the topic of death.² Of course they do not. Neither do we fight, have sex or converse at dinner the way people do in the movies. Film, of all the arts the most misleadingly life-like, is, like all the arts, a carefully constructed artifice, and a highly expensive one at that: every second scripted, laboriously shot, edited and sonically sculpted. A finished film is less like a photograph than a novel.³ Cinema is story-telling, always from a particular point of view. Its realism is deceiving.⁴ “Anyone seeing the highly personal statements of . . . a Bergman, a Fellini, a Truffaut,” writes Richard Schickel, “can have no doubt that what he is seeing is the statement of an artist in film, not the simple reproduction of real life.”⁵ Rather than an archaeological or historical document, film is a dazzling and deceptive verisimilitude.

Despite its evident artificiality, film is one of the arts for which authenticity is most often mandated. Before discussing authenticity in film, I should briefly mention the academic quibble surrounding authenticity in Early Music, given its relevance to medieval film. Around 1980, the Early Music authenticity debate—that academic tempest-in-a-teacup in response to the prestige of Early Music in universities, as detailed in Chapter 4—prompted lengthy discussions surrounding how one should define authenticity in historical performance.⁶ None of the ensuing semantic razzmatazz—“historically informed,” “historically aware,” “historical verisimilitude,” “historically imparted properties,” “historically voided properties,” “HIP” (historically informed performance), “aesthetic correctness,” “pastness of the present,” “constructing authentic meanings” and “contextual,” as well as “sonic authenticity,” “sensible authenticity” and “personal authenticity,” or just plain “authenticities”⁷—changed the fact that performers and audiences, then as now, just wanted to hear performances which were as authentic as possible: music “close to the elusive original,” as the beloved Thomas Binkley once claimed; music, in Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen war).⁸

Film least of all was affected by this intellectual brouhaha on musical authenticity.⁹ Still today, in and out of academia, the burden of “historical truth” (“historische Wahrheit”) lies especially heavy on films, and particularly medieval films.¹⁰ Filmmakers routinely insist on their work’s authenticity. The writers of Knights of the Round Table (1954) say they “based their script on Malory’s studious work”;¹¹ in Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962) Robert Bresson advertises his use of “the authentic texts and the very minutes of the condemnation trial” of Saint Joan; and the opening titles of King Arthur (2004) claim the film follows “historians” and “recently discovered archaeological evidence.”¹² Film composers do the same. “In Ivanhoe [1952],” relates M iklós Rózsa, “I went back to mediæval musical sources”;¹³ Laurence Rosenthal aims for the medieval Geist in Becket (1964) by evoking, “even inaccurately, the general feeling of the music of that period.”¹⁴ One would expect academic writers (including the grumpy medievalists evoked by Andrew Elliott¹⁵) and film critics to be less idealistic. But they regularly differentiate between authentic and inauthentic cinematic renditions of the Middle Ages, as if referring to a cinematic standard—maybe some long lost medieval film “revealed to us, in a sort of dream version perhaps,” to cite William Woods—against which late modern versions can be measured.¹⁶ A Knight’s Tale (2001), for example, with its famous scene of a crowd chanting a rock song during a joust, is deemed self-consciously anachronistic, whereas Dragonslayer (1981) possesses “an authentic whiff of Dark Age violence and superstition.” And, in keeping with a nearly universal consensus, Ingmar Bergman’s films The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1959) are praised as “authentic” and expressive of Bergman’s “flair for evoking the medieval world.”¹⁷ In short, “this film comes closer to the Middle Ages, while that film does not.”

In the end, certifiable historical authenticity eludes medieval film.¹⁸ To confirm the extent to which such and such scene authentically renders a given medieval moment is a challenge that would stump the most prestigious team of medieval historians, since film demands far greater aural and visual detail than the written word, sound recording or photography.¹⁹ Let’s take an example, one shot, from a lesser-known film—The Sword of Lancelot (1963)—in remembrance of the Early Fathers of Postmodernism’s fancy for the obscure.²⁰ In this now forgotten film, the scene of Guinevere’s coronation opens with a pan-shot of a cackling monk in the church tower striking two bells with a large metal rod; the shot ends with the monk gazing downwards at the church nave as the coronation procession begins. How can we ever know, to the extent that cinema demands it, exactly how the bell sounded in the specific time and place evoked in The Sword of Lancelot—assuming the film is set in the early sixth century when Arthur presumably lived, and not any one of the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries when Arthurian material was being codified and transmitted in the High Middle Ages?²¹ And even if we could pin down an exact week in time and an exact room in place to be reproduced in say, mid-sixth-century Tintagel, countless details would be needed that can never be recovered, in particular the shape, colour, size and material of the two bells and of the rod used to strike them; the exact sound of the bells; the disposition of the hairs on the monk’s face; the manner of his cackle; his tiny habitual gestures and sounds as well as the thoughts that prompted these; his height; his posture, the arch of his back, his gait; the colour and arrangement of his teeth; the cloth of his tunic, the way his tunic was worn; the look of his belt, of his footwear, of the floor, and of all the things on the floor, big, small and speck-like. This single shot from The Sword of Lancelot demands all of these details and more. Yet very few to none can be recovered with any satisfaction of veracity. Indeed, a little bit of historical knowledge, such as an isolated fact about the material of the cloth or the sound of a vowel, can potentially create a highly misleading picture in combination with so many unknowns. If authenticity is immeasurable, then, so is degree of authenticity.²²

Yet, if by the “authenticity” of, say the bell in The Sword of Lancelot, we mean authenticity to a tradition of medievalism, and specifically of cinematic medievalism, then one can confidently answer in the affirmative: yes, to the authenticity of the bell ringer as a traditional medievalist icon by the 1960s, when this film was made. Yes, to the authenticity of a monk striking a bell in a church tower as required by a centuries-old tradition of the Middle Ages as being deeply spiritual. Yes, to the authenticity of the monk’s kooky cackling as reflecting a perception of the Middle Ages as primitive for some four centuries prior to this film. Yes, to the big and booming bell as seen and heard in medievalist film from the silent era onwards. And yes, to the chant and trumpet fanfare that follow the ring of the bell, all of which belong to a cherished sound panorama of the Middle Ages in cinema, as described in the following chapters. For, as argued throughout this book, the iconic musical moments that define medieval films combine a little authenticity, in the form of carefully chosen bits of historical evidence, and a lot of fantasy, a complex cinematic world based—consciously or not—on a medievalist tradition that predates the earliest films by some four hundred years.

The Six Moods of the Middle Ages

Once upon a time, the Middle Ages did not exist, because they had just occurred. Or at least they were not called “the Middle Ages” nor even identified as a time period. From the sixteenth century all the way to the middle of the nineteenth century, the expression “Middle Ages” (medium aevum) was hardly ever used. Only in the mid-1900s did the name become standard in English and its chronological boundaries become set, roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century.²³ As for the expression “medieval music,” it did not become common coin until after the Second World War, with university programs devoted to the study and performance of music from the Middle Ages.²⁴

The historiography of the Middle Ages, however, by which I mean the construction of the Middle Ages as an historical entity, began, not in the nineteenth century, but in the sixteenth century. What we now call “the Middle Ages” developed less as the product of a systematic historiography than as an organic nostalgia for better times or “bon vieux temps,” as sixteenth-century writers first called it.²⁵ With Europe’s plundering of the Americas, followed by its international commercial expansion and then dramatic industrialization, came an unprecedented anxiety in the form of nostalgia. Moderns pined for a world that was passing and that would apparently never come back. The Middle Ages became the object of this nostalgia. In their quest for the medieval past, antiquarians typically scorned their own times. Michael Drayton, for example, called his own seventeenth century a “lunatique Age.”²⁶ As they slowly took shape, the Middle Ages became the Golden Age of modern times, inhabited by innocent folk, “simple and farre from those artificiall frauds, which some call wit and cunning.”²⁷

The medieval Golden Age was shaped in inverse relation to the modern world. If modern nations waged increasingly mechanical and lawless war, then medieval knights were said to have followed an ancient code of honour best expressed in one-on-one combat. If rational moderns fixated on the material world, devout medievals had looked for the one out of sight. Moderns accumulated objects produced by time-effi cient technologies; spiritual medievals owned few things. The one demanded increasingly sophisticated entertainment; the other made do with the simple and the carnivalesque. The industrial modern city sprawled under toxic skies; the small medieval village sat in sylvan bliss. An ever hungrier modern North-West colonized and ransacked the East and the South, the ocean and the skies; but medieval Europe lived mostly selfsuffi ciently, still weaning itself from its ancient Mediterranean mother.

Gradually, from 1500 to 1900, this nostalgic medieval complex became a house with many rooms. Six distinct stereotypes or moods came to be associated with the Middle Ages, each a different aspect of prevailing modern attitudes towards the past. The word “mood” when referring to stereotypes of the Middle Ages is an appropriate one for the topic of film music. Throughout the history of film, music has been a key tool for establishing “in the minds of audience members a sense of mood or locale,” as James Wierzbicki has put it.²⁸ During the silent-film era, musical anthologies such as Erno Rapee’s well-known 1924 Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists grouped short pieces according to the requirements of a film scene in which they were most likely to be used. Categories included...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 The Making of the Middle Ages
• 2 The Bell
• 3 The Horn Call and the Trumpet Fanfare
• 4 Court and Dance Music
• 5 The Singing Minstrel
• 6 Chant
• 7 The Riding Warrior
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Filmograpby
• Index