Film Theory, the Sister Arts Tradition, and the Cinematic Beowulf

Summary

This essay contributes to a larger discussion on the relationships between medieval studies and medievalism that has occupied an increasing number of scholars in recent years. Concerning the sub-field of movie medievalism, how can we put into productive relation the all-too-obviously disparate projects of writing a critical essay on Beowulf and adapting the poem for the silver screen? This essay revisits the question of homologies between scholarly and cinematic approaches to Beowulf by posing the question in another register – that of inter-media comparisons as informed by what is commonly known as “the Sister Arts Tradition.” My working thesis is simply this: inter-arts comparisons occupy the borderland between these two different realms, where the crossovers and continuities between traditional scholarship and movie medievalism are most readily apparent. Such a project offers an example of how scholars of medievalism might begin to move beyond the parochial tendencies of a sub-discipline – one that typically overemphasizes medievalism's exotic, egregious departures from original sources – into a more open, level field of play. Specifically, I provide evidence of interactions between scholarship and popular culture that are anything but one-sided or unidirectional; rather, scholarship can be seen taking its cues from cinema, and cinema decoding scholarly approaches to texts and then encoding them in nuanced, subtle ways. Such filiations between scholarship and popular filmmaking have not always been registered by academics who tend to focus on dialogue and plot to the virtual exclusion of any concern with how images and their collocations function in film.