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Cathedral Cities in the Movies: Italy

By moviejourneys On September 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Cathedral Cities, Early Europe, Uncategorized

Renaissance Rome There are a few cities in Europe where ancient ruins still occupy significant plots of urban real estate. Rome and Athens come immediately to mind. Rome is very nearly perfect in its display of the three tiers of history over the last 5000 years. There are monumental ruins around almost every corner, some [...]

Cathedral Cities in the Movies: France

By moviejourneys On September 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Cathedral Cities, Early Europe

Notre Dame / Chartres Of the many medieval cathedrals in France, there are two that hold surpassing reputations in the popular imagination. The oldest of them is Notre-Dame de Paris, which was begun in 1163 and completed in 1345. The fame of Notre-Dame rests not so much on its role as a marker in the [...]

Cathedral Cities in the Movies: Germany

By moviejourneys On September 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Cathedral Cities, Early Europe

On a 2013 visit to Prague, we came upon a massive statue in the Old Town Square dedicated to Jan Hus (say Yan Hoos). Knowing nothing of what this man had done to earn his monument, we listened to our local guide. Hus was a master at Charles University in Prague. He led an early [...]

Cathedral Cities in the Movies: British Isles

By moviejourneys On September 23, 2014 · Add Comment · In Cathedral Cities, Early Europe

After the Romans, England had its share of invaders, among them the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans, but on the whole it seems to me that the kingdom’s history of domination is an inside job. Driving across the rolling green landscapes of this hallowed isle, there are castles, vast estates, and royal palaces that [...]

Joan of Arc: Five Films

By moviejourneys On April 29, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Joan of Arc

This segment of MovieJourneys forms an epilog to the Crusades and a prolog to the Renaissance (see Part II of this collection). Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431. She was barely 20 years old. The Roman Empire had collapsed almost a thousand years earlier. The Holy Land Crusades [...]

Movies About the Russian Revolution

By moviejourneys On April 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Russian Empire

The Battleship Potemkin; or Potemkin (1925) – Eisenstein Following my previous blog post on Movies About the Russian Empire, it seems only right to return to the films of Sergei Eisenstein to set the scene for the Russian Revolution. Indeed, his widely-known masterpiece, Potemkin does exactly that. It tells of a 1905 event in Odessa, [...]

Movies After the Russian Revolution

By moviejourneys On April 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Russian Empire

This is the penultimate post in my movie capsule of the Russian Empire. Let me begin with two movies that make a bridge between the time before the Revolution of 1917 and the present. Anastasia (1956) Ingrid Bergman plays a poor young woman who may or may not believe that she is actually the Grand [...]

Russian Cultural Memory in the Movies

By moviejourneys On April 24, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Russian Empire

There are two films in my archive that reflect the efforts of early Russian filmmakers to reject the aristocratic conventions of the past and invent new ways of viewing the demands of life in modern times. Despite populist sympathies, the two experimental films were not well received by the Soviet government, which saw them as [...]

The Medieval Imagination

By moviejourneys On April 5, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Medieval Europe

Roger Shattuck* once observed that there are only two great myths produced by the Western “postclassical” tradition. They are King Arthur and Faust. King Arthur and the legends that arose from his emblematic role in the transition from Roman domination to the foundations of early Europe have received ample attention in the movies. Faust, on [...]

Dragonslayers

By moviejourneys On April 5, 2014 · Add Comment · In Early Europe, Medieval Europe

Humanity has known or at least suspected tales of dragons for most of its existence. To the north and east of the Mediterranean, the dragon has always been a chaos principle, a threat to the safety of individual citizens and their villages, impervious to city walls or castle defenses. The dragon is the enemy of [...]

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