“Light and Shadow – Representations of the Middle Ages in Film“

Resulting from a partnership between the Portuguese Cinematheque and the interuniversity research group “Using the Past. The Middle Ages in the Spotlight”, coordinated by Prof. Alicia Miguélez (NOVA FCSH) and with both active and occasional participation by national and international researchers, the theme of this film cycle is the presence of the Middle Ages in our imaginary and with cinema as one of its greatest expressions.

In fact, this relationship stretches back to the earliest days of that termed the seventh art. In 1900, Georges Méliès produced, in France, the film ‘Jeanne d’Arc’, focused on the medieval French martyr Joan of Arc. The first feature film to premiere in Italy in 1911, entitled ‘Inferno’, was an adaptation of the first section of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Similarly, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the production of films inspired by the medieval period has been a constant. In itself, this immense repertoire constitutes a cultural object of undeniable value and an extraordinary mirror on our times and our era.

Besides this track record, this theme is transversal to various cinematographic genres (comedy, crime, drama, epic-historical, action, adventure, fantasy, animation), different cinematographic industries and directors with very diverse interests but who, on one or various occasions in their careers, have focused on the Middle Ages. Cinema thus reveals itself as an essential field of artistic creation for understanding the usages and visions of the medieval past in the 20th and 21st centuries.