Filming the Middle Ages

Bettina Bildhauer

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781861899279
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

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 like The Seventh Seal and The Passion of Joan of Arc and popular films like Beowulf or The Da Vinci Code cleverly use the Middle Ages to challenge modern ideas of historical progress, to find alternatives to a print-dominated culture, and even to question what makes us human. Filming the Middle Ages pays special attention to medieval animated and detective films andprovactively demonstrates that the invention of cinema itself is considered a return to the Middle Ages by many film theorists and film makers. Filming the Middle Ages is ideal reading for medievalists with a stake in the contemporary and film scholars with an interest in the distant past.

Part I

Time’s Bow

I	The Non-linear Time of Medieval Film Faust Destiny

Medieval Film: A New Understanding of Weimar ‘Expressionism’

If there is one thing we think we know about time, it is that it is linear: it flows from the future via the present into the past, irreversibly, constantly, evenly and unstoppably, in a way that can be measured by clocks and calendars. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that we did not even believe Einstein when he proved the contrary, nor modernist writers, philosophers and filmmakers, who around the same time as Einstein started to imagine what it might feel like if future, present and past were no longer sequentially ordered. The moment became a particular concern in discourses from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology to film, where the now recordable moment became contingent, one in a series of equally important moments.¹ Medieval film has played a significant but, so far, totally overlooked role in this modernist, and later postmodern, critique of time. Cinema uses the Middle Ages to imagine alternative, non-linear perceptions of time that prefigure those of the recent past, especially the importance of the moment and a sense of the future as so short that it is perceived as already present. (Or as Camelot [dir. Joshua Logan, 1967] and the Arthurian tradition have it: time becomes a ‘brief shining moment’ that was Camelot, and Arthur a ‘once and future king’.) In postulating such a non-linear sense of time for the Middle Ages, film draws on a historiographical tradition that maintains that medieval people already perceived time in just that way: as moments rather than continuities, and as living with a sense that their future was short.² Just to reiterate: I am not claiming that this is a ‘correct’ view of the Middle Ages; I am simply observing that this perception of the Middle Ages is prevalent in popular as well as academic culture. I shall explain in detail what I mean by the emphasis on the moment and the short future below, but here are a few brief illustrations of the ways in which medieval films typically mess with linear time: In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Niklashausen Journey (1970), for example, the momentary snapshot takes precedence over narrative continuity, and the characters – the preacher Hans Böhm (d. 1476) and his contemporaries as well as 1970s communist activists – hope for a better future that never comes.³ Fassbinder resists linear time by making the medieval world contemporary too, complete with cars, newspapers, machine guns and Black Panthers, thereby refusing communism’s teleological historiography even as he presents Böhm as a communist agitator. Similarly, Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981) follows the fate of a hermaphrodite in five different historical periods (a mythical age, the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1980s), where each period is shown not in the historical past, but more as historical sediment in the present, so that (again) newspapers, leather jackets and the pervasive commodity culture of capitalism are part even of the Middle Ages, as much as apocalyptic prophecies are. Mainstream medieval film likewise revels in introducing modern elements into medieval settings, the most famous example being A Knight’s Tale (dir. Brian Helgeland, 2001) with its brand logos, stadium scoreboards and modern music.⁴

Medievalism is commonly interpreted as escapism, for example by Klaus Kreimeier, who detects a ‘fear of modernity’ amongst the Weimar Germans, filled with a fantasy of an ideal medieval past.⁵ Films like Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Faust (1926) with its stunning medievalist set are for him thus prime examples of Weimar’s medievalist escapism:

Like through coloured panes of glass the eyes of the architects looked for a vague aim for their yearning in the art of the past centuries and called it ‘Middle Ages’.⁶

But, as I shall argue, the unmistakable reference of so much Wilhelmine and Weimar cinema to the Middle Ages is an attempt not to escape from the challenges of recent modernity, but to meet them, and one of those challenges was the newly problematic nature of time.

It may seem surprising that German cinema during its formative period of the Weimar Republic was deeply reliant on medievalism. This medievalist nature of Weimar film has never been spelled out, but it is actually implicit in much of the critical literature on this cinematic period that refers to it as ‘expressionist’, ‘Gothic’ or ‘Romantic’.⁷ Studying this medievalism in detail will allow us to move beyond Gothicism, Romanticism or expressionism to grasp more precisely what the recourse to historical precedents does for Weimar films. Their foundational role for German cinema – as its constant reference point, its ‘historical imaginary’ until today – also explains some of the persistence of this medievalism in transnational cinema that started out as a marketably ‘German’ interest.⁸

Medieval films engage with the newly dominant perception of time – as non-linear, with special weight given to the moment rather than to temporal sequence – creatively and productively as opposed to evading the issue by escaping into a fairy-tale fantasy.⁹ I will analyse how this non-linear temporality works in Kreimeier’s crown witness for escapism, Faust, and then explain in more detail its relationship to narrative in Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921). While all narratives, including filmic ones, are composed of linear elements (cause-and-effect chains) and non-linear elements (moments and the overall whole), particular stories or films can choose to emphasize one or the other; and medieval film usually highlights the moment and its potential. Moreover, in the Middle Ages as depicted on film, linear time in the sense of measurable clock-time is typically placed in tension with the co-presence of past, present and future.¹⁰

Heideggerian Time-images: The Co-present Moment in Faust

Faust’s shift out of linear historical timelines begins with the film’s very setting both in and outside the Middle Ages which is characteristic of medieval film, and is therefore worth some initial attention. Dr Johann Georg Faust lived from circa 1466 (or 1480) to 1540 or so, but the Historia von Johann D. Faustus, on which the most famous versions of his legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, are based, only appeared in 1587. Rather than as medieval, Faust is often interpreted to be the prototypical Renaissance man, prepared to break away from medieval reliance on God and the community in his search for scientific truth; and Faust films are not included in the emerging literature on medieval film. Nor does Murnau’s Faust look medieval to the expert eye. Its design has instead very much what Kreimeier calls an ‘Old German’ (altdeutsch) appearance, which denotes a traditional style more than a specific period, and is characterized chiefly by pre-industrial production – handmade furniture, clothes and books and whitewashed houses with thick walls, tiny windows, tiled ovens and fireplaces are typical attributes. But critics, filmmakers and promotion testify to the fact that Faust to them was very much a medieval person.¹¹ Murnau’s 1926 film explicitly aims to uncover the older versions of the legend in order to reconstruct Faust. The director himself wrote:

We have taken the old Volksbuch of Dr Faust as our basis and are looking to resurrect from the old legend and from Goethe’s work that legendary figure of the German Middle Ages who had rushed ahead of his own time in so many ways.¹²

However, this is not a precisely historically situated Middle Ages. Many reviewers and critics oscillate between labelling the setting ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ and ‘Reformation’, sometimes in the same sentence.¹³ The blurring of myth and reality typical of medieval films is also already evident in Murnau’s claim to be interested in reconstructing the historical man behind the legends, who nevertheless is still a ‘legendary figure’ and the protagonist of a film that calls itself in its title card ‘a German folklegend’. Murnau also states that he was drawn to

that time of the German Middle Ages, which is among the most imaginative times of humanity, most criss-crossed by mysteries and shadows, and which has never been revived in film.¹⁴

As is typical, Murnau claims not only that the Middle Ages appear mysterious to us, but that they were themselves a period characterized by mystery and imagination, so that reality and legend were presumably blurred even during Faust’s lifetime.

But despite this seemingly escapist rhetoric, Faust precisely faces rather than evades 1920s experiences of time, through imagining not escapist alternatives, but historical predecessors.

At the beginning of Faust, the apocalyptic riders and the devil Mephisto have been unleashed. Mephisto makes a bet with an archangel: if he can ‘destroy the divine’ in the gifted scholar Faust, the earth will be his. He strikes Faust’s town with the Black Death and then offers Faust miraculous healing powers (and all the world’s power and splendour) for a trial period of a day in return for renouncing God. Faust agrees and heals some townspeople, but they quickly work out that he is in league with the Devil, and stone him. The distraught Faust is about to commit suicide when Mephisto successfully tempts him by offering him youth for the rest of the day. He shows Faust the beauties of the world, but just as Faust is about to sleep with the attractive Duchess of Parma, Mephisto claims that his trial day is out, and Faust decides to extend the pact to eternity. He soon gets bored of a life of hedonism and returns to his hometown, where he falls in love with an innocent young girl, Gretchen. When she lets Faust into her bed, Mephisto alerts her mother, who dies in shock. Mephisto also kills her brother Valentin in a fight over Gretchen’s honour and blames the deed on Faust so that they have to flee. By winter, Gretchen has borne Faust’s baby, but the community refuses to grant the ‘whore’ shelter and the baby freezes to death. As she is about to be executed for this alleged infanticide, Faust finally notices that she is in trouble and asks Mephisto to take him to her. He can only approach her on the funerary pyre, and they kiss one last time. The angel tells Mephisto that one word means that he lost his bet: ‘love’.

My first point is that Faust’s representational strategies privilege the moment, and the co-presence of different points in time, over linear temporal sequences in a way that anticipates the ‘time images’ that Gilles Deleuze has observed. Deleuze is adamant that cinema before the Second World War showed only movement in time, while later films like Citizen Kane (1941) can directly represent the modern experience of the flow of time by means of what he calls time-images.¹⁵ Drawing on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time, he claims that this contemporary experience of time is characterized by the sense that the present always has to be in the process of passing into the past in order to make room for a new present to arrive. Each moment has one eternal component that is preserved as the past, and one chronological component that is always passing on; in other words, the past does not follow the present, it co-exists with it in each moment. A ‘crystal’ time image in Deleuze’s sense makes both the past and the present aspects of each moment visible in one frame or sequence. But while the present may be real and the past virtual, they will morph into each other and exchange places, like a photograph coming to life and reality retreating into a photo.

Long before the Second World War, this is precisely what happens in the scenes of Faust’s temptation by the devil Mephisto. At the end of his disastrous one-day trial pact with the devil, old Faust is about to kill himself. As he raises a shallow bowl filled with poison, we see from Faust’s point of view a close-up of his hand holding up the bowl, in whose dark reflective surface a young man’s face appears, giving him a ‘come hither’ look by raising his eyes to look straight at the camera and lifting his chin in a way at once flirtatious and challenging (illus. 6). Old Faust asks whether this is the seductive face of death, but Mephisto explains that it is life in the shape of Faust’s own younger self. So the image of the old man’s hand holding the bowl with the young man’s face first of all reveals the past, Faust’s youth, as still present: the eternally preserved past is visible, exceptionally, in the present. But as Deleuze demands of a crystal image, the past now becomes real and the present virtual: the old man is turned into his younger self by magic. Faust drops the bowl in shock, but Mephisto shows him his young face once more in a hand-held, round, somewhat concave mirror, from which the young man again in an almost identical pose looks out coquettishly, and now Faust is so impressed that he begs Mephisto to give him youth. Mephisto obliges with some pyrotechnics and then triumphantly withdraws his cloak to reveal a rejuvenated Faust. But another close-up, this time from the devil’s point of view, shows that past and present Faust have changed places: it is now the image of the old Faust that is reflected (or rather caught) in Mephisto’s magic mirror; the past (youth) has become real and the present (age) virtual (illus. 7). Mephisto’s mirror and the bowl of poison thus figure as visualization tools for the co-presence in each moment of past and present, and virtual and real in Deleuze’s sense.

But these time-images show not only a Bergsonian present in the process of becoming-past, but also a future. After Faust has seen his young face in the bowl of poison, there is another apparition in the bowl, shown in an almost identical close-up from Faust’s perspective: a skull that is immediately legible as the death that awaits him if he drinks the poison (illus. 8). This is Faust’s future, not past, co-present in the same frame as his hand. Deleuze acknowledges that there are time images that show the presence not only of the past, but also of the future, but he never quite manages to explain this in his Bergsonian framework.¹⁶ I suggest that this presence of both future and past in each present moment is closer to Heidegger’s than to Bergson’s view of time. Heidegger sees time not as a pre-given essence, but as the experience of a human being who at each moment is ‘always already’ born or thrown into a pre-existing world and ‘always already’ bound to die. An awareness of the fact that one is born and will be dead is essential for creating the impression that time is divisible into past, present and future. This Heideggerian idea of time as future, present and past co-existing and as derived from human experience rather than pre-existing it, challenging the commonsensical perception of time as a linear progression, had recently come to the fore in 1926. It has even been claimed to be characteristic of Western Zeitgeist precisely in the year 1926, when Being and Time was written and Faust was made (although similar ideas are of course age-old).¹⁷ This sense of time is visualized in the Heideggerian time images of the mirror scenes.

6 Faust (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1926), young Faust (the past) reflected in a bowl of poison....