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

Author / Editor
Paxson, James J.

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

Published
Exemplaria 19 (2007): 290-309.

Description
Medieval allegory "prefigures cinematic consciousness." In Wegener's film "Der Golem," "Judaeo-Christian figural allegory, coupled with the narratology and the phenomenology of film," shifts "the deep past into the present in centrifugal, shocking, and transformative ways." In KnT, Chaucer describes murals that contain "an implicit and illusory movement," like film, moving the viewer "from one perspective to another in mobile fashion." KnT "bespeak[s] a proto-cinematic consciousness."

Chaucer Subjects
Knight and His Tale