The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages: Wegener's Der Golem and Chaucer's Knight's Tale

Abstract

Besides thinking about the adaptation of medieval literature in modern film, we could, I think, achieve more creatively and critically by trying to imagine the prefiguration of cinematographic expression in medieval literature. Along with an examination of the literal representation of cinematic experience in an early twentieth-century film about the Middle Ages, Paul Wegener's Der Golem, I present a discussion of the presaging of cinematic technique in the ekphrasis of Mars' Temple in Part 3 of Chaucer's Knight's Tale in order to more fully theorize the relations of film and the Middle Ages using the tactics of narratology, semiotics, historicism and Deleuzian (schizo)analysis.

Keywords:

• MIDDLE AGES AND FILM
• ALLEGORY
• TYPOLOGY
• EKPHRASIS
• CHAUCER
• WEGENER
• GOLEM