Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages

The opening two chapters introduce the rapidly burgeoning field of medieval film studies, viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuzian philosophy of the time-image. The first chapter explores how a vast array of films (including both auteur cinema and popular movies) contributes to the modern vision of life in the Middle Ages, while the second is concerned with how time itself functions in cinematic representations of the medieval. The remaining five chapters offer detailed considerations of specific examples of representations of medievalism in recent films, including , and . The book also surveys important benchmarks in the development of Deleuze's time-image, from classic examples like Bergman's and Kurosawa's through contemporary popular cinema, in order to trace how movie medievalism constructs images of the multivalence of time in memory and representation. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.