Seeking the Human Image in The Advocate

Summary

A useful taxonomy for medievalism, and one often quoted, is Umberto Eco's “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” which appeared in 1986 as a chapter in Travels in Hyperreality. Here, Eco offers “Ten Little Middle Ages” – ten kinds of medievalism, as he sees it – including “The Middle Ages as the site of an ironical visitation” (like Monty Python and the Holy Grail), “The Middle Ages as a barbaric age” (early Bergman, “shaggy medievalism”), “The Middle Ages of Romanticism” (“stormy castles and their ghosts”), and so on. This handlist is both a description of common pre-conceived visions of the past, and a suggestion of where these attitudes are rooted, some springing from popular culture, some from academia, others from political or artistic nostalgia, or from an interest in the occult. For my present purpose, trying to assess the significance of an historical film, Eco's first category, “The Middle Ages as a pretext,” appears to be central. In works that serve this vision,

[t]here is no real interest in the historical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters… Thus in historical novels fictional characters help one to understand the past (and the past is not taken as pretext), while in cloak-and-dagger novels the past (taken as a pretext) helps one to enjoy the fictional characters. (68–69)

In essence, Eco is here distinguishing between novels – or films – in which the Middle Ages are the substance of the work, and those where the Middle Ages are accidental – mere decoration, a setting that has nothing to do with the action. This classic distinction works nicely for what I consider bad, or obvious films. It works less well for the good ones, I think, yet it does lead us to the crucial question of what a film is really about. For example, one of the best films ever made about fifteenth century France, in regard to casting, quality of dialogue, accuracy of setting, the substantial treatment of themes and problems typical of the fifteenth century, and the hard-to-define quality of “ambiance,” is the relatively unknown British/French production originally released in Europe as The Hour of the Pig, and retitled The Advocate for distribution in the U.S.A. But is this a good historical film about the Middle Ages, in Eco's sense, or is it a carefully prepared, “historically accurate” medieval package for modern themes?