KNIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!

From the heroic glamour of Henry V to the heady nationalism of Braveheart, the medieval era has proven a rich source of material for film directors. Robert Bartlett charts Hollywood's long obsession with the Middle Ages

-  Robert Bartlett

The 1890s turned out to be a significant decade for William Wallace, Richard the Lionheart and Joan of Arc. That’s because it witnessed the birth of an art form, one that would present their extraordinary stories to a global audience: the moving picture. The pioneers of this new medium went quickly from single-shot novelty pieces to short narratives, to films an hour or more in length. Meanwhile, thousands of custom-built venues popped up across America, Europe and beyond. In the dying days of the 19th century, a new industry was born.

That industry was greedy for stories, and by the dawn of the 20th century, it was mining many of these tales from the distant past. There has never been a genre of ‘medieval film’ in the way that there has been of westerns or ‘sword-and-sandal’ epics like Ben Hur or Gladiator. But the past 130 years have witnessed a deluge of movies inspired by the Middle Ages. These have been based on real persons or events, such as El Cid or Joan of Arc; inspired by medieval legends (King Arthur and Robin Hood); or, if we stretch our definition, have been set in imaginary worlds with medieval features, like The Lord of the Rings.

What kind of Middle Ages do these films present to us? The technology of moving pictures may have been new in the 1890s but cinema was marked by the culture into which it was born: late Romantic European nationalism. This is clear both from the music of early cinema (‘silent films’ were never silent) and from the acting styles of those early films, which borrowed from theatre and opera and often strike modern audiences as melodramatic. It is also evident from the film-makers’ assumptions about heroism, nationalism and romantic love.