Introduction: Film before and after New Media, Anec-notology, and the Philological Uncanny

Abstract

Studies drawing analogies between the media of the premodern and early modern past (scrolls, manuscripts, books, tapestries) and the electronic and digital media of the postmodern present (computer screens, pdf, film, DVD) have by now become familiar.¹ Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media follows in the tracks of this scholarship: I read the historical film, focusing chiefly on Day of Wrath (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943), El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, 1961), Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott, 2005), and The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1981), and a number of films I link to the “schlock of medievalism” (Burt 2007c), in relation to the history of the film by comparing transitions from manuscript to printed book to the transitions from celluloid to digital film. In so doing, my ambition is to put into dialogue scholarship on illuminated manuscripts, textual marginalia, and the history of the book in medieval and early modern literary studies with scholarship on the cinematic paratext in literary, film, and media theory.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on the train to activate the emergency brake.

—Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena” to “On the Concept of History”

The power of an unknown, genuine language that is not open to any calculus, a language that arises only in pieces and out of disintegration of the existing one; this negative, dangerous, and yet assuredly promised power is the true justification of foreign words.

—Theodor Adorno, “On the Use of Foreign Words”

It is painful and difficult for the ear to hear something new; we are bad at listening to strange music. When listening to another language, we arbitrarily try to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and more like our own.

—Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I am a philologist, not a philosopher.

—Paul de Man, “An Interview with Paul de Man”