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Medieval film' forces us into a double-take on chronology. This book argues that such a playful confusion of temporalities is a fundamental characteristic not just of the term but also of medieval films themselves. Medieval films reflect on the fact that they make present a past that was never filmable and offer alternatives to chronological conceptions of time. The book examines the contrasting uses, or non-uses, of medieval art objects in two medieval films and assesses how they contribute to the films' overall authenticity-effects. It makes tentative contribution to a list of such characteristics: that the fragmented visual profile of the medieval makes medieval authenticity-effects particularly troublesome to produce. The reliance of film theory on medievalism has never been acknowledged by film scholars. The book shows the ways in which preconceived notions of the Middle Ages filtered into and were influenced by film theory throughout the twentieth century; and to what extent film theory relies on knowledge about the Middle Ages for its basic principles. It explores to what extent medieval film engages with questions of language, and to what extent these engagements may be distinctive. Cinematic medievalism participated in and drew on a wider cultural and political preoccupation with the Middle Ages. Romanticism posited the Middle Ages as an alternative, utopian realm promising creative and political possibility. The book argues that certain films with medieval themes and settings, mostly dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, demonstrate a surprising affinity with the themes and techniques associated with film noir.
Gogh’s peasant shoes (‘one of the canonical works of high modernism’ (p. 6)) a vibrant, organic immediacy, the painting itself gloriously transforming the poverty, abjection and oppression that it takes as its subject within a ‘Utopian realm of the senses’. This artisic realm thus constitutes itself as ‘semiautonomous space’, ‘a part of some new division of labour in the body
critically ‘the field for their Dream, the stage where they painted themselves white’. For Coates ( 2014 ), reparations mean ‘the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences – is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely’. The utopian realm of theory has something to contribute but must be accountable to history and visions of
Baum’s story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Baum’s Oz is a place of fantasy and enchantment, especially in American popular culture, but it is also a utopian realm, which offers the promise of transformation and visions of a better world. In this way Siwes’s Oz can be read as belonging to the dream realm, and thus free of the burden of ownership and history attached to the
thus suggests, to varying degrees, the impossibility of fully realising the freedoms envisaged for their female protagonists within the context of the social, cultural and economic constraints that dictated many women’s lives even by the 1890s. Upon returning from the utopian realm of the Alps, Taylor loses confidence in the visions of freedom and sorority which Swiss Notes has promoted. Rather, it was the younger generation –that of the four young women who co-wrote Swiss Notes –who would be the true beneficiaries of the pathways carved out by Brontë and Taylor
in academic and political discourse, medievalism was prevalent in the realm of artistic and literary endeavour. Romanticism, in reaction to what it perceived as modernity’s obsession with function and sterile rationalism, posited the Middle Ages as an alternative, utopian realm promising creative and political possibility. 17 While the Romantic version of the Middle Ages has tended to be categorised (or
United States (ATD 373). The category of nationality comes under pressure both through the urge to escape its political limitations and through recognising the corruptibility of the language used to uphold it. The distant horizon of a utopian realm is constantly sought, as if there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the
carnival as opposed to the official culture imposed by authority. Festivals ‘were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance’. By contrast, official feasts sanctioned and reinforced the existing regime. Carnival celebrated tempory liberation from the established order – the suspension of all hierarchical rank and normative rules