Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
Europe, medieval, modern
Abstract
This essay is part of a larger project on the representation of women in twentieth-century medievalist films, a dimension that has largely been ignored in previous scholarship, which has tended “to privilege the masculine experience.”
The gendered pedagogy of medievalist cinema has on the whole been conservative and even reactionary. In the overall trajectory of medievalist film “heroines” over the course of the century, the dangerous (even bloodthirsty) femme fatale has been a stock character in the cinematic repertoire; invented in the silent film era, she has repeatedly reared her ugly head right through the end of the century, as an anti-feminist response to pro-feminist “threats.” But she has also frequently retreated from the scene, sometimes for substantial periods of time, to be replaced by alternative – and positively coded - types such as eager helpmeets or passive beauty queens. My project follows these changes throughout the entire course of the twentieth century, in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America. This essay, effectively a draft for the first chapter of an eventual book, focuses only on the negative character of the femme fatale, with a particular focus on two representative medievalist fantasy films: “Die Nibelungen” (dir. Fritz Lang; Germany, 1924) and “Excalibur” (dir. John Boorman; U.K., 1981). The two films were made many decades apart, in radically different contexts. The appearance of the figure of the destructive domina in two such superficially different films indicates that she represents one of the fundamental female types of twentieth-century cinematic medievalism.
Keywords
film
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Destructive Dominae: Women and Vengeance in Medieval Fantasy Films
This essay is part of a larger project on the representation of women in twentieth-century medievalist films, a dimension that has largely been ignored in previous scholarship, which has tended “to privilege the masculine experience.”
The gendered pedagogy of medievalist cinema has on the whole been conservative and even reactionary. In the overall trajectory of medievalist film “heroines” over the course of the century, the dangerous (even bloodthirsty) femme fatale has been a stock character in the cinematic repertoire; invented in the silent film era, she has repeatedly reared her ugly head right through the end of the century, as an anti-feminist response to pro-feminist “threats.” But she has also frequently retreated from the scene, sometimes for substantial periods of time, to be replaced by alternative – and positively coded - types such as eager helpmeets or passive beauty queens. My project follows these changes throughout the entire course of the twentieth century, in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America. This essay, effectively a draft for the first chapter of an eventual book, focuses only on the negative character of the femme fatale, with a particular focus on two representative medievalist fantasy films: “Die Nibelungen” (dir. Fritz Lang; Germany, 1924) and “Excalibur” (dir. John Boorman; U.K., 1981). The two films were made many decades apart, in radically different contexts. The appearance of the figure of the destructive domina in two such superficially different films indicates that she represents one of the fundamental female types of twentieth-century cinematic medievalism.