Films are not a substitute for history books, but films can evoke the ambience and sensibility, as well as the visual locus, of the Middle Ages, not only in a supplementary reinforcing and entertaining manner, but sometimes in a distinctly perceptive and persuasive way. Here are the ten best films ever made with a medieval context, ranked approximately in order of merit. The story lines of three of them occur outside the conventional medieval era, but nevertheless describe scenes and events that are still medieval. One takes place in Japan, but in a social context that directly parallels the European situation. It will be noted that among the directors of these films are some of the greatest directors of all time: Eisenstein, Bergman, Kurosawa, Olivier, Pasolini, Russell.
1. The Seventh Seal
Ingmar Bergman’s incomparable masterpiece, set in Sweden at the time of the Black Death, is in a class by itself when it comes to evoking medieval sensibility about life and death.
2. Ran
Akira Kurosawa’s film is loosely based on Shakespeare’s King Lear and is set in late medieval Japan. It perfectly captures the violence and beauty of the chivalric world.
3. Henry V
Laurence Olivier made this film of Shakespeare’s play in 1944 as a patriotic gesture, and hence he cut two scenes in which the Bard accurately indicated the downside of the Hundred Years’ War. These scenes were restored in Kenneth Branagh’s neo-Brechtian 1989 version. Yet Olivier’s version is much closer than Branagh’s to the ambience of the fifteenth century, and he had the whole Irish army to fight the Battle of Agincourt.
4. The Name of the Rose
This careful and expensive adaptation of Umbert Eco’s best-selling novel was a commercial failure despite a wonderful performance by Sean Connery as a Franciscan friar modeled on William of Occam. If it had been explained to the history-ignorant audience at the beginning of the film that the pope and many Franciscans were at loggerheads in the fourteenth century, the film’s plot would have made much more sense.
5. Alexander Nevsky
Sergei Eisenstein made this film in 1938 about the prince of Novograd’s fight with the Teutonic knights as patriotic anti-German propaganda with Stalin’s support. The film had to be suppressed during the era of the Hitler-Soviet pact, but it came back strong after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Eisenstein’s German expressionist 1920s kind of dramaturgy is a bit off-putting today, but it fits in well with the iconology of Byzantine and late medieval kingship.
6. The Return of Martin Guerre
This film depicts a crisis in an affluent peasant family in France in the early sixteenth century, based on the research of Princeton’s Natalie Zemon Davis, who acted as historical adviser for this French production. The story closely follows the record of a court trial. The peasants are a bit too articulate for historical accuracy, at times the ambience seems more twentieth than sixteenth century.
7. The Navigator
About half this 1988 little-known New Zealand science fiction film is convincingly set in a northern English coal-mining village during the time of the Black Death and is obviously under Bergman’s influence. It is closer to the reality of medieval peasant culture than is The Return of Martin Guerre.
8. Black Robe
This stunning French Canadian film, made in Quebec in 1990, about Jesuit missionaries among the Canadian aborigines in the early seventeenth century, is fiercely accurate and evocative of an important and underwritten segment of medieval church history—missionary work among the heathens on the frontier. Think of St. Boniface and the Frisians in the eighth century.
9. The Gospel According to St. Matthew
The life of Jesus, as written by Matthew, is bleakly depicted by the Italian Communist director Pier Pasolini. The result is much closer to late medieval Sicily, it is not surprising, than to ancient Judea.
10. The Devils
Ken Russell’s characteristically over-the-top version of Aldous Huxley’s novel about hysteria and witchcraft in early seventeenth century France nevertheless captures persuasively important aspects of the medieval religious experience. Even its remorseless anticlericalism replicates a prominent ingredient of late medieval culture.