Silent medievalisms : reimagining the Middle Ages during film's foundational era / edited by Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Pugh, Tison, editor.

Weisl, Angela Jane, 1963- editor.

Series:

Interventions: new studies in medieval culture http://id.loc.gov/resources/hubs/94744044-d9b1-2d8c-b76a-821c93388a7b

Interventions : new studies in medieval culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Silent films--History and criticism.

Silent films.

Medievalism in motion pictures.

Middle Ages in motion pictures.

Medievalism--Political aspects.

Medievalism.

Medievalism--Social aspects.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"Examines how early silent films used medieval stories and tropes to propagate contemporary political, national, and social messages at a time of technology-driven shifts in the creation and consumption of narratives. Includes analysis of films such as Cecil B. DeMille's Joan the Woman, Allan Dwan's Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, and Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, among others"-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Introduction : On silent films, medieval sites of intelligibility, and the Thanhouser Company’s Oh, What a Knight! (1910) / Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl

The magic mechanic : Georges Méliès’s cinematic medievalism / Carol L. Robinson

Making presence in silence : Milano Films adapts Dante’s Inferno (1911) / Elizabeth Coggeshall

Lucius Henderson’s Tannhäuser (1913), Richard Wagner, and their imagined Middle Ages / Laura E. Wangerin

“While helpless whites looked on” : Intersections of white nationalism and medievalism in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) / Sabina Rahman

Virginity, allegory, and orgiastic visuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1916) / Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl

Medievalism, generic fluidity, and (maybe even) proto-feminism in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922) / Kevin J. Harty

Bad blood : The spectral Jew and mimetic rivalry in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich / Alfred Thomas

Queen of love and beauty : Fictions of Marian’s sovereignty in Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922) / Valerie B. Johnson

Medievalism, trauma, and vengeance in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) / Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand

What’s past is not prologue : Temporal and spatial dislocation in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) / Robert Squillace

Wilding the tame : Roy William Neill’s The Viking (1928) from adaptation to genre archetype / Kimberly Ball

The lost music of medieval silents / John Haines

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (JSTOR, viewed April 3, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version: Silent medievalisms

ISBN:

9780814285305

0814285309

9780814284896

0814284892

OCLC:

1583037541

Publisher Number:

CIPO000355656