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pedigree in philosophy, sociology and art history, among them Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Erwin Panofsky. They all enthusiastically elaborated on the link (or contrast) between film and the Middle Ages. 1 The central idea of early film studies – that (silent) film is a purely visual medium that opens up a new way of seeing – was based on the analogous assumption of medieval art as
medieval films while also emphasising their relevance for film studies and medievalism in general. In this, it makes possible a move away from the frequent critical dismissal of medieval film, which is justified by its perceived failure to measure up in terms of content to academic standards of historical veracity, or (often in terms of genre) to a sufficiently sophisticated or up-to-date standard of entertainment
The question of language is at once perennially present and strangely absent within film studies, which has tended as a discipline to think of film as language, rather than as a medium which incorporates language as an expressive resource. 1 This chapter is part of a larger project discussing the problems posed to film, since the advent of sound film, by foreign language (that is
the arguments I have developed elsewhere about period films with British connections. 1 I work from the perspectives of film studies rather than medieval studies (so, for instance, when I refer to the epic, it is the epic film genre rather than the literary genre that I have in mind). As a film historian I am more interested in historical specificity than grand theory, and seek to examine textuality