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The Long Path Back: |
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Dedicated
to the memory of Peter Wollen (1938-2019)
I.
I
am not a professional medievalist. But, as a cinephile, it is hard not to
become aware of the constant pressure of medieval influence coming from two
sides: on the one side, from popular culture; and on the other side, from the
most progressive aspect of international art cinema.
In
popular culture, we have the endless variations on Dungeons and Dragons-type video games; post-Star Wars (1977) “space operas”;
the “punk medievalism” of Mad Max (1979) and its progeny; superhero
Batman as The Dark Knight (2008); or
the Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and Harry Potter (2001-2009) film franchises – not
to mention the never-ending genre of medieval rock music, or the sudden but
perfectly predictable eruption into a series of TV’s America’s Next Top Model (USA 2003-2009) of a Glamour vs. Gladiators
photo shoot. David Wain’s riotous comedy Role
Models (2009) has given us the Adventure Playground apotheosis of this pop medievalism.
In
progressive art cinema, recent signs of neo-medieval activity may be a little
less high-profile, but no less resonant. Éric Rohmer’s final film – as well as
the conclusion of an occasional series of medieval projects – confounded even
some of his champions: Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, 2007),
set in the time of the Druids and derived from a sixteenth century text by
Honoré d’Urfé. Roberto Rossellini’s The
Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966)F has been the subject of a lavish and
fastidious DVD release by Criterion, timed to coincide with a box-set devoted
to Rossellini’s History Films,
including The Age of the Medici (1973)
– and these made-for-television films, once judged extremely difficult and even
unwatchable, are now being hailed as pioneering experiments in historical
recreation.
A
key to understanding this presence of the medieval within the contemporary can
be found in a brief but brilliant essay by Peter Wollen titled “Delirious
Projections”. (1) Coming to terms with a clutch of films released throughout
the 1980s and the early ‘90s, from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) to Tim
Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) –
films featuring “fantastic cities” in a 20th century cinematic
tradition that also includes Metropolis (1927) and the original King Kong (1933)
– Wollen diagnoses the flourishing of a rampant Expressionism that seems rather
more than an obligatory nod to the style-conscious, often superficial
postmodern appropriations common to the present-day moment. Indeed, “the return
to Expressionism seems only a retro-fitted way-station on the long path back to
medievalism”. Wollen concludes:
It is as though the polarisation and
disorder of society has led to a situation where melodrama, with its lurid
polarities of innocence and evil, or the grotesque, with its juxtaposition of
the rotten with the lofty, are more representative of the city in a post-modern
age than they have been for decades. As we leave behind the values of the
Keynesian welfare state, we find the need for a new aesthetic which surfaces,
like the Penguin and his gang [in Batman
Returns], in startling and unexpected ways. (2)
The
idea is paradoxical and rich: the return (“path back”) to medievalism, its ubiquitous revival in contemporary culture,
is not a nostalgic reflex, but a source of newness,
a tool for dealing with our cultural present – and future. This notion fits a
mode of critical thinking that could be called – adapting a term from the Russian
writer-critic-theorist Yuri Tynianov – archaic-innovative.
Indeed,
this negotiation of worlds and world-views – by the contemporary of the
medieval – finds itself reflected in many current cultural phenomena. For
example, in a pop vein, the plot device beloved of current storytelling in all
media: the Quixotic figure of the displaced Knight – “a long way from home”, as
Deep Purple once sang – out of time and exiled from his proper domain, whether
the dreamer-hero (both fool and idealist) of Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991), or the
comedic characters hurled by time-travel from the present to the past in films
from Les visteurs (1993, remade in
USA as Just Visiting, 2001) to Black Knight (2001). Or, in a more
rarefied aesthetic domain, the singular case of
filmmaker-dramaturg-novelist-poet Eugène Green, who swapped his American
upbringing for French citizenship and language, and has steadfastly stuck (even
in his contemporary-set pieces such as Toutes
les nuits, 2000) to a highly artificial, Baroque-styled mode of speech,
action, performance and courtly behaviour:
The sentences are
constructed according to grammatical principles which aren’t observed in
everyday speech: for example, questions are always made by the inversion of the
verb and the subject, something very rarely done in spoken French today. But I
do it specifically in a cinematographical context, with a cinematographical
goal: to give the actor a text which is going to release a maximum of energy
when he says it. […] I simply ask the actors, when speaking them, to make all
the liaisons […] thanks to that filter there’s no danger of a psychological
interpretation. (3)
Tellingly,
even Green’s description of himself and his self-taught ventures into the arts
tends to the Quixotic: “I am often not in the same sphere
of reality as most people”. (4)
While
all this has been going on, however, a certain widespread discourse about
medievalism has been keener to align itself with the greatest box-office hits
of popular culture than with progressive art forms or innovative thinking. A
passing item in The Australian Higher
Education Supplement in early 2008 bears witness to the trend: it is
reported that Sean McMullen, prolific Australian novelist for the young adult
fiction market, has (in his PhD research) “found similarities between [Chrétien
de Troyes’] compositions and films such as A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949), Ivanhoe (1952) and El Cid (1961)”. There are “common traits”, he claims, “in medieval stories and modern
films set in the period”. A self-proclaimed “recipe” of seven ingredients
follows:
“The elements are a knight, a lady, a
castle, a journey, courtship, magic and combat”, Mr. McMullen said. The trick
is using them in the right balance. […] “De Troyes was the first author who hit
on a winning combination of the seven elements”. (5)
Hollywood
in its turn (according to McMullen) has “reworked books such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court into movies that were truly medieval in structure”. Likewise, the Lord of the Rings films are “way closer
to Chrétien’s model than Tolkien’s original book”. (6)
This
type of discourse is a variant on the kind of universalist populism that runs rife these days, especially in
screenwriting manuals: mass art has its internationally appealing (and commercially
successful, hence “winning”) genres or narrative templates, and they remain the
same from (to take the terms of this argument) the medieval narrative saga to
contemporary movie blockbusters. But what is this “truly medieval structure”
that can miraculously survive such a journey through time and space, history
and cultures? John Boorman – whose neo-medieval credentials for directing Excalibur (1981) were well-established
by both his early ‘70s Tolkien-approved Lord
of the rings adaptation (never made) and his delirious, futuristic, sci-fi
riff on grand heroic themes in Zardoz (1974) – does not hesitate to iron out the cultural kinks in the historical
transmission of medieval mythology:
“The thing about myths”, Boorman declares, “is that they’re a body of stories completely homogenous and interrelated. You can rearrange the order of events quite liberally without destroying the meaning. The essentials that make them popular, the resonances, remain the same […] I think it’s fascinating to see how the great European myths re-emerged in the American genre film, particularly the Western”. (7)
But
this is a quite modest claim compared to that found on the Internet site Dandalf the Dragon in its rumination on
“The quest for the Hollywood grail: John Boorman’s Excalibur, and the mythic development of the Arthurian legend”: “Listen
carefully to the echoes of myth. It has much more to tell us than the petty
lies and insignificant truths of recorded history”! (8)
Umberto
Eco’s well-known reflections on the representation of the Middle Ages offer a
useful riposte here. (9) As if in response to the likes of McMullen and the
market-taste for recipes of narrative composition, or Boorman blithely
standardising (as George Miller is equally happy to do) all the world’s
mythologies, Eco stresses that most representations of the medieval are dreams,
fantasies or (as he calls them) hypotheses,
“as if we were setting out to fabricate a Middle Ages and were deciding what
ingredients are required to make one that is efficient and credible”. (10) Eco
playfully multiplies, rather than reduces or concentrates into a universalist
template, the standard present-day imaginings of this complex piece of history:
his famous list of the “ten little Middle Ages” includes the barbaric, the
Romantic, the decadent, the nationalist, the philosophical … (11) But he also
helpfully deduces what he takes to be the “world-scenario model” that informs
most depictions of the Middle Ages:
First of all, a great peace that is
breaking down, a great international power that has unified the world in
language, customs, ideologies, religion, art, and technology, and then at a
certain point, thanks to its own ungovernable complexity, collapses. It
collapses because the “barbarians” are pressing at its borders; these
barbarians are not necessarily uncultivated, but they are bringing new customs,
new views of the world. (12)
This
model indeed covers an enormous amount of medievalist fiction, from Robert
Bresson’s severe and elliptical Lancelot
du lac (1974) to Robert Zemeckis’ digitally animated spectacular, Beowulf (2007). But the deepest point of
Eco’s argument is that this world-scenario model is not simply an attempt
(successful or otherwise, authentic or otherwise) to imagine the past; it also
serves the needs of the present –
consciously or unconsciously, or both. A clear example which resurfaced on DVD
after nearly four decades of invisibility is the remarkable A Walk with Love and Death (1969), an
adaptation of Hans Koningsberger’s pop-medievalist novel that director John
Huston offered as a transparent allegory of youth in the turbulent 1960s – all
the way down to the resolutely non-historical gestures and manners of his
teenage and young adult stars, respectively Anjelica Huston and Assaf (Assi) Dayan (there are echoes, in this
casting, of Bresson’s use of Florence Delay in Procès de Jeanne d’arc [1962] – or, before that, Otto Preminger’s
choice of Jean Seberg to play the same part in Saint Joan [1957]).
The
argument is more complexly illustrated in the discussion of Japan’s medievalism
– and its mediations in fiction and film – by Dudley Andrew and Carole
Cavanaugh in their book on Sanshô dayû (Sansho the Bailiff). (13) Their
analysis distinguishes three historical levels: firstly, the thousand-year-old
medieval Japanese legend which poses, in the tale of Sansho, the basic scenario
of a family torn apart and (partly) reunited, within the broader social context
of a time of crisis, wars and displacement of people; secondly, Mori Ôgai’s
retelling and “cultural revival” of the tale; and thirdly, Kenji Mizoguchi’s
classic 1954 film version. Arguing against the imaginary phantom of Japanese
tradition, unchanging through time, which has bewitched so many Western
commentators, Andrew and Cavanaugh discern the distinct political gestures
performed by Ôgai and Mizoguchi through their respective art practices: for the
former, the Sansho story offers a platform for a Neo-Confucian appeal to the
need for return to military order and hierarchy (the barbarian element in this
telling belongs to what is progressive and modern); while for the latter, what
is at stake is a “new individualist humanism” that is precisely anti-Confucian,
and directed towards the post World War II reconstruction of Japanese society.
Where Ôgai presents a fairy tale, Mizoguchi crafts a bleak “cosmic tragedy”.
And one can only dream of the version that Terrence Malick has workshopped in a
theatrical setting and contemplated bringing to the screen …
The
process of rewriting through time that Andrew and Cavanaugh outline is not
placid, respectful or simply accumulative; they refer to it as the “overthrow
of history”, and they ask the pertinent question that can be addressed to all
modern-day medievalism: “Why else rewrite history, if not to activate it for
the present?” (14)
II.
Alongside
the general question – why revisit the Middle Ages? – sits the eminently
practical one that consumes every filmmaker drawn into this arena: how do you do it? What look, what
design, what soundtrack, which narrative mode? There is no simple, singular
answer to this question, since there is no rigidly set convention governing the
recreation of history (any piece or period of history) in cinema. And it is
precisely this lack of convention that opens up many possibilities – possibilities
often overlooked in much mainstream medievalist scholarship that overwhelmingly
focuses on Hollywood narrative.
Let
us begin this exploration with a simple paradox, known to every art director or
production designer who has ever worked on a so-called costume drama or historical
recreation. How brand spanking new should things – houses, clothes, streets –
look? Even if, within the logic of the plot or diegesis, they have just been
built or made? At certain moments, things that look too new, too shiny, too
well-scrubbed in a film can seem to spectators – and, before that point, to
their producers or directors – as (in a leap across the rails of logic)
therefore not old, i.e., not convincingly historic! As a result, so much of a
production designer’s work has to follow the illogical path of making
everything look somewhat ancient, weathered, lived in for centuries – as they
would look to us now, viewing them from the present, not as they would look (or
feel) to those living within the period.
A
similar, purely associative logic governs the mania (which ebbs and flows in
cinema history) for depicting the past (especially the early twentieth century
past) in the glowing, yellow-brown tones of sepia, or in some tricky simulation
of black-and-white or greyish tones (even when the film is shot in colour!).
Often, when it is a question of a single flashback sequence, this sepia or
black-and-white comes overdetermined also with frame-jumps, carefully contrived
scratch marks and (my favourite touch) the off-screen sound of a whirring old
film projector! (This overload of signifiers of pastness is the subject of
constant parody in the works of Guy Maddin.) Of course, the link here is to
early forms of cinematic representation in the silent era. Films such as Martin
Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) are elaborately built on the chintzy conceit that the
depiction of stages in the passing of twentieth century time should follow the
various technological evolutions in classical Hollywood film form. But, once
again, this is an idea – Raúl Ruiz has had fun with it, both in his film work
and his theorising – that envisages the depiction of history precisely from the
vantage point of a viewer: a typical film viewer now or then, or an imaginary
contemporary viewer looking in on the past through the filter of audiovisual
media.
As
can be seen from these standard examples of filmic practice, modes like realism
or naturalism – the supposedly more authentic, true-to-life forms of
representation – usually come with their own in-built paradoxes, contradictions
and tripwires. It could even be said that mainstream (and also much
independent) historical reconstruction in cinema tends to catch itself in an
endless back-and-forth loop between two broad tendencies: stateliness and spontaneity.
Stateliness is the default option, beloved of cinema and television alike:
everything is calm, majestic, clean, static, disposed for the contemporary
view. Then comes the backlash: for a film wave or two, suddenly everyone and
everything is dirtied up a bit, the dialogue delivery is more frantic, and a
handheld camera (not “of the period”, to use the frequent irrational
description of this technique by piqued reviewers) captures scenes on the fly.
Mira Nair’s take on Vanity Fair (2004) provides a textbook case,
but even Excalibur, in its early ‘80s
moment, was conceived thus by Boorman: “I want it to have a primal clarity, a
sense that things are happening for the first time. I tell the actors that they
are not re-enacting a legend. They are creating it”. (15) And then we switch
from such contrived, in-the-moment naturalness back to the picturesque and
stately … A key mid-way moment in this stylistic history was provided by
Stanley Kubrick in his William Makepeace Thackeray adaptation, Barry Lyndon (1975): an endlessly
fascinating amalgam of stylised, minimalist tropes and the type of “authentic
realism” provided by, for example, candle lighting.
A
completely different angle into these questions has been provided via the intermedial approach to contemporary
costume drama offered in recent years by Belén Vidal. (16) In contrast to the
idea that historical reconstruction is all about a blending of elements in order to frame the illusion of a seamless
(or at least coherent) fictional world – whether that is the stately world of Jefferson in Paris (1995) or the rawer, more rambunctious world of Jude (1996) – Vidal proposes a notion of intermediality that is stronger than
the now common scholarly appeal to intertextuality (which has ended up, rather uselessly, being posed as the sine qua non of all texts). The intermedial text is one in which
the various, different levels – pre-existing pieces of theatre, literature,
design, but also of the social practices of cultural tourism, reading groups,
media spectaculars, and so on – are held apart from one another, more or less
unsutured and left for the inspection (and pleasure) of the modern
consumer-viewer (hence, for example, the emphasis on the physical words on a
printed page, and the act or gesture of reading itself, in so many recent
literary-classic adaptations). Here the past is not depicted (truly or falsely) so much as it is figured – and figured in a multiple layering of texts and
references, echoes and allusions, times and spaces.
Again,
this returns us to Eco’s idea of an instrumental, working hypothesis of a historical period. The hypothetical mode of filmic
practice – which lays out its elements, often in a literally flat way (such as
via a presentational technique of
frontal framing) (17), and with their qualities of artifice heightened – is
central to Sergei Eisesntein’s extravagant historical reconstructions in Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (Russia 1944); and
also to Andrei Tarkovsky’s method, especially in Andrei Rublev (1966), where the appeal to archaic forms in
religious icon-culture – plus his felt need to constantly and explicitly posit
cinema as the endpoint of a lineage of pre-existing high arts of music, theatre
and painting – leads to a constant layering and virtual citing of materials,
documents, texts … (18)
A
key precedent for Vidal’s work is to found in a celebrated 1977 essay by
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much”. (19) Comolli here
zeroes in on the major support for the various and varying regimes of our
belief in an unfolding fiction: the actor’s body. It has become commonplace in
the years since this piece (and others in the same vein) to gesture towards the
split levels of actor, character, body and figure that always operate (more or
less obviously, more or less happily) within cinematic fiction, the levels that
superimpose to form what we regard as a filmic being or creature. Comolli’s
interest, however, is quite specific: he pinpoints the interplay between a known
(or unknown) actor on the one hand, and on the other hand the always hovering archive of depictions that comprise our
knowledge of a historic personage: paintings, prints, stories, myths, legends,
gossip, parodies, other films … Historic fiction in film then becomes a
perilous juggling act: its naturalness must ceaselessly be won in the face of
our encroaching awareness of the real actor’s body (necessarily marked by the
history of its own time – for Comolli’s subtitle can also mean “one body too
many”), and in the way it manoeuvres the passage of its central sign (the hero
of history) between many, often contradictory incarnations in many
representational media … Comolli well describes the canny and radical game that
Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938)
plays with the vague but pre-established “memory image” of Louis XVI that
spectators come in with:
No question in La Marseillaise of attempting to obliterate the memory image. On
the contrary, its persistence is allowed to float, it is played on as a kind of
embarrassment, a screen, a rival for the current image. As if it were necessary
that it could survive throughout the struggle unleashed against it by the image
of the actor’s body for that struggle really to take place. (20)
The
effort to congeal the body-too-much and the mass of converging historical
representations into what Eco called an “efficient and credible” historical
fiction exhausts the entire craft of many medievalist films – at most, they
might manage to work (as Boorman does) on a double register of History and
Mythology (which is what, to take a comparative case, cinephiles have always
praised John Ford’s history films for doing: they show the often raucous
immediacy of a reality unfolding, while also majestically inscribing the legend-to-be
on the horizon of a history that will written in retrospect …). (21) More
interesting are the mainstream limit-cases (frequently bordering on the zany)
that admit to the multiplicity of their sources, such as Oliver Stone’s
intriguing Alexander (2004). Or, better yet, the openly adventurous art films inspired by the model
proposed by Rossellini in the 1960s and ‘70s.
In
this progressive type of cinema, the intermedial effect arises in part from the
layering of different regimes of
representation: cinema, literature, theatre, musical performance, and so,
each laid out, in turn or simultaneously layered, in terms of certain of their
recognisable, coded, classic or modern forms. Eugène Green begins to give a
sense of this complexity when he evokes the differences, in his practice, between
theatre and cinema (or cinematograph,
in the Bressonian usage) – media he in fact combines, alongside others
including the musical recital, in his own films:
Even though theatre
and cinema can arrive at the same spiritual result, the means they use are
completely different, and even opposite. […] For me the reality of theatre is
always based on something completely false, and assumed as such; that is, for
the theatre to be real, the actors and the audience have to be aware at all
times that they are in the theatre, and that they are using and recognising
codes: it’s through the absolute falsity of these codes that they arrive at an
absolute truth. Whereas in the cinema – which is of course also a
representation – the basic raw material is always a reality, whether it’s that
of a human being, an inanimate object, some sort of material, a tree, or an
animal: in every case, the shot contains a real energy. The specificity of
cinema is to capture fragments of reality, and to make the spectator see in
them things that he wouldn’t have been aware of had he observed them in their
natural context. (22)
For
much progressive cinema since the 1970s, such exploration of the blatantly
intermedial – darting between and complicating the perceived poles of the
theatrical-artificial and the cinematic-real – begins with Éric Rohmer’s
remarkable adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes in Perceval le gallois (1979) – but an equally potent starting point,
less known outside its country of origin at the time, could have been provided
by Manoel de Oliveria’s work in that period, such as Amor de Perdição (Doomed Love,
1978). In these films, we see the flowering of a particular inflection of the
archaic-innovative approach: the appeal (however re-imagined or reinvented) to
a medieval aesthetic provides a way of inventing a cinematic modernity (or
later, from the ‘80s inwards, a mannerist post-modernity). The literary weight of recited text is insisted upon; the
action stops for a song or dance or intermedial demonstration of some sort. And
theatrical artifice – whether the literal stage sets visible everywhere in
Oliveira’s work or the wonderful constructed-painted unnatural backdrops in Perceval – is proudly displayed and
explored at every turn, creating all manner of deliberate anachronisms within
the conventions of historical depiction. Raúl Ruiz’s work, too, goes
increasingly in this direction, especially in a multi-layered fiction such as Combat d’amour en songe (Love Torn in Dream, 2000).
There
is a large pool of fascinating cinema which has yet to be fully discussed in
this neo-medieval light: apart from key figures already cited, such as Green
and his artistic mentor Bresson (whose Lancelot drew from praise for its kinship to the modernist medievalism of e.e. cummings’
poetry), there is also the Trilogy of Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Il Decameron [I1971], I racconti di Canterbury [1972] and Il fiore della mille e una notte [I1974]),
the historical fantasias of Sergei Parajanov (Tini zabutykh predkiv [Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors, Russia 1964, Sayat nova [Colour of Pomegranates, 1968)
and Walerian Borowczyk (Goto, l’île
d’amour [1968], Blanche [1971]),
or Hans-Jurgen Syberberg with his transposition of Wagner’s opera version of Parsifal (1982) – among much else.
Rather
than the endless seesaw between stateliness and spontaneity, these films
reflect the influence of another major historiographical approach: they seek to
exaggerate, rather than to eliminate, the strangeness of the past, ita alienness and unreadability – its alterity – in relation to our present-day codes and mores. (Science
fiction regularly faces the same issue: should the future be any more
comprehensible than the past – perhaps it will be even less so – to the
present?) In academic medievalist discourse, the debates on this point were
crystallised by the discussion started by Hans Robert Jauss in a landmark 1979
issue of New Literary History. (23) In cinema studies, the influence of alterity and the archaic-innovative has
seeped in more through a classic work of literary criticism and philology,
Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature. (24) Many passages in this
book bearing on medieval aesthetics – and especially the trope of parataxis (the “varied repetition of the
same theme”) (25) – have a striking applicability to the most progressive art
cinema of the past three decades:
The things which happen are stated
with a paratactic bluntness which says that everything must happen as it does
happen, it could not be otherwise, and there is no need for explanatory
connectives. […] [Events] are posited without argument as pure theses: these
are the facts. No argument, no explanatory discussion whatever is called for.
(26)
Varied repetition of the same theme is
a technique stemming from medieval Latin poetics, which in turn draws it from
antique rhetoric […] Whether one comprehensive representation is replaced by a
reiterative enumeration of individual scenes similar in form and progress;
whether one intense action is replaced by a repetition of the same action,
beginning at the same starting point time and again; or whether finally,
instead of a process of complex and periodic development, we have repeated
returns to the starting point, each one proceeding to elaborate a different
element or motif: in all cases rationally organized condensations are avoided
in favour of a halting, spasmodic, juxtapositive, and pro– and retrogressive
method in which causal, modal, and even temporal relations are obscured. (27)
The
value of Auerbach’s philological poetics is in the way it takes us back to
fundamental questions of – and options within – the entire historical span of
narrative representational form. What, after all, is the “complex and periodic
development” to which the plot is submitted in Excalibur, the digital Beowulf or King Arthur (2004)? This
development derives from a relentless, finely honed centring on character – and
on the driving of historic events through the category and force of the
character’s Will. (28) Boorman in fact summed up Excalibur as the myth that expresses “man taking over the world on
his own terms for the first time”. (29) But is this specific representational
regime, with its ingrained assumptions of agency, causality and so on, really a
given of film narrative – let alone the complex movement of real history? The
constant attempt in popular culture to forge a strong, unbroken, cultural link
between a distant past (such as the Middle Ages) and a mercantile present –
whatever its other ideological sins – simply takes too much for granted, and
leaves too much behind, in the global history of representation.
To
watch even the opening shots of the “Erzsebet Bathory”
episode of Borowczyk’s Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales, 1974) – a film that
systematically proceeds backwards, by episodes, through history into
ever-stranger alterity – is a salutary shock to every single convention of the
mainstream neo-medievalist plot. Landscapes insist monumentally, outside of
narrative time; and when characters such as Bathory (Paloma Picasso!) are
introduced it is as tiny figural specks in the very bottom corner of the frame;
from the first signs of conventional costume-drama we are whisked to a peasant
farming community where signs of physical deformity reign and clothing is
swapped for the sake of a literal body-too-much: nude bodies, female and male.
And, at every point, we are confronted with the stark frontal (and often
serial) framing of Borowczyk’s archaic-innovative aesthetic, whether of parts of
faces framed by gaps in the décor, lined-up parades of marauding guards, the
limbs of animals or the genitals of humans …
Borowczyk
was also a pioneer in intermediality: his fictional worlds always had (in a
manner he bequeathed to the Quay brothers in the UK) an evident air of op-shop
bricolage. When he devoted a short study to the sex toys and pornographic
image-trinkets of another, lost era, he simply filmed … his own private museum, Une collection particulière (1973),
using his own body parts, dissected by the camera and drolly set in
illustrative, demonstrative poses in relation to this profusion of enigmatic
objects. Such a film is exactly the neo-medieval, avant-garde solar-lens we
need to crack open, all over again, the baroque splendours of Josef von
Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), A Walk with Love and Death, Combat d’amour en songe … or even, for
that matter, Gladiator (2000).
1. Peter Wollen, “Delirious Projections”, Sight and Sound, Vol. 2 No. 4 (August
1992), pp. 25-26.
back
2. Ibid, p. 26. back
3. Kieron Corless, “Standing on Earth”, Vertigo, Vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 2006); accessed 11 January 2020. back
4. Ibid.
back
5. Jill Rowbotham, “The right recipe for a knight to
remember”, The Australian Higher
Education Supplement, 6 February 2008, p. 22.
back
6. Ibid.
back
7. Harlan Kennedy, “John Boorman – in Interview”, from American Film (March 1981), accessed
11 January 2020
8. Anonymous, “Dandalf the Dragon”, no longer on-line
in 2020. For more on such mythomania, see my Phantasms (Melbourne: Penguin, 1994).
back
9. Umberto Eco (trans. William Weaver), Travels in Hyperreality (New York:
Picador, 1986); the section “The Return of the Middle Ages” contains the influential
essays “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” and “Living in the New Middle Ages”. back
10. Ibid, p. 74.
back
11. Ibid, pp. 61-72.
back
12. Ibid, p. 74.
back
13. Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh, Sanshô dayû (London: British Film
Institute, 2000).
back
14. Ibid, p. 19.
back
15. Kennedy, “John Boorman”. back
16. See Belén Vidal, “Labyrinths of Loss: The Letter
as Figure of Desire and Deferral in the Literary Film”, Journal of European Studies, 36/4 (2006), pp. 418-436; “Playing in
a Minor Key: The Literary Past Through the Feminist Imagination”, in Mireia
Aragay (ed.), Books in Motion:
Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp.
263-285; and “Classic Adaptations, Modern Reinventions: Reading the Image in
the Contemporary Literary Film”, Screen,
Vol. 43 No. 1 (2002), pp. 5-18.
back
17. On the politics and aesthetics of frontality in
cinema, see Paul Willemen, “Regimes of Subjectivity and Looking”, UTS Review, Vol 1 No 2 (1995), pp.
101-129; and Adrian Martin, “Sergei Parajanov
and Frontality” (2007). back
18. See V.N. Lazarev (trans. Robert Bird), “Historical
Documentation on Andrei Rublev”, accessed 7 January 2020;
Mikhail Iampolski, “Russia: The Cinema of Anti-modernity and Backward Progress”,
in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (eds), Theorising National Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006),
pp. 72-87. The latter offers a far-reaching discussion of Tynianov’s
archaic-innovation concept, referring inter
alia to Eisenstein’s stance of “backward progress” in relation to “archaic
essentialism as super-modern” and “art moving forward into the future retrogressively”
(pp. 79-85).
back
19. Jean-Louis Comolli (trans. Ben Brewster), “Historical
Fiction: A Body Too Much”, Screen, Vol.
19 No. 2 (1978), pp. 41-53. Originally published as “Un corps en trop”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 278 (July 1977),
pp. 5-16.
back
20. Comolli, “Historical Fiction”, p. 49.
back
21. See Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). See
also Sam Rohdie, “Ribbons of Time”, Screening
the Past, no. 22 (2007);
and his posthumously published book Film
Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 153-155.
back
22. Corless, “Standing on Earth”. back
23. See the dossier in New Literary History, Vol. 10 No. 2 (Winter 1979), especially: Hans
Robert Jauss, “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature”, pp. 181-227;
Eugene Vance, “A Coda: Modern Medievalism and the
24. Erich Auerbach (trans. Willard R. Trask), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974); see also
William D. Routt, “For Criticism (Parts 1 & 2)”, Screening the Past, no. 9 (2000). back
25. For a discussion of parataxis in contemporary
cinema, see Michel Chion, The Thin Red
Line (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
back
26. Auerbach, Mimesis,
p. 101.
back
27. Ibid, p. 105.
back
28. See Raúl Ruiz (trans. A. Martin), “Three Thrusts
at Excalibur”, Screening the Past, no. 26 (December 2009). back
29. Kennedy, “John Boorman”. back
© Adrian Martin June 2009 |
