New Book: Bildhauer's Filming the Middle Ages

This is apparently the decade of monographs on medievalism in film, and Reaktion Books has just published Bettina Bildhauer's Filming the Middle Ages. Details as follows:

Filming the Middle Ages
Bettina Bildhauer

234 x 140 mm
264 pages
100 illustrations

Hardback
978 1 86189 808 1
February 2011
£25.00

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 the silent films of Weimar Germany to Hollywood productions and then to recent European co-productions. Bildhauer provides incisive new interpretations of classics like Murnau’s Faust and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and rediscovers some forgotten works, such as Douglas Sirk’s Sign of the Pagan and Asta Neilsen’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 and provocatively demonstrates that the invention of cinema itself is considered a return to the Middle Ages by many film theorists and filmmakers.

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.


Contents (from WorldCat):
What is Medieval Film? An Introduction Part I: Time's Bow 1. The Non-linear Time of Medieval Film (Faust, Destiny) 2. The Medieval Dead Reanimated (Golem, Waxworks, Seventh Seal, Hard to be a God, Siegfried) 3. Queer Time (Hamlet, Lady Venus and her Devil, Abelard, Dreamship Surprise, Pope Joan, Joan of Arc, Ferryman Maria, The Immortal Heart) Part II: Lethal Letters 4. The Dangerous Power of Writing (Sign of the Pagan, Pope Joan, Passion of Joan of Arc) 5. The Printing Press vs the Cathedral (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Don Quixote, Copernicus) 6. Detecting the Middle Ages (A Canterbury Tale, Name of the Rose; War of the Oxen, The Da Vinci Code) Part III: Human Limits 7. The Birth of the Leader from the Collective (Condottieri, Alexander Nevsky, Luther) 8. The Nation's Lost Past (Nibelungen films, 1924, 1966, 2004) 9. Animation and the Human between Animal and Cyborg (Beowulf, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, Jester Till) Film's Reliance on Medievalism: a Conclusion



Bettina Bildhauer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood (2007), and co-editor of The Monstrous Middle Ages (2003) and Medieval Film (2009).


‘In this seriously smart book Bettina Bildhauer demonstrates that “medieval film” is a genre that, far from merely providing an escape hatch for a pressured and disillusioned modernity, takes up and meets head on the challenges modernity poses . . . In a series of brilliant readings Bildhauer opens up the strange temporalities and posthuman bodies of medieval film, situating them at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century concerns.’
– Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English, New York University

‘Filming the Middle Ages maps a cinematic landscape of surprising compass, directing our gaze from the Weimar films Faust and Destiny to the CGI spectacle of Beowulf. Space and time, the perennial subjects of film study, acquire a charged potential in this exceptional book, which marks a fresh beginning in genre analysis. With lucid intelligence, Bettina Bildhauer has created a brilliant, engaging work that will define the field.’
– Robert Burgoyne, Professor and Chair of Film Studies, University of St Andrews