Abstract
Just as the history of cinema is haunted by the Middle Ages, the history of medieval cinema is haunted by the works of Richard Wagner. The symbiotic relationship between the medieval and the cinematic, as encapsulated in the compound “medieval cinema,” finds its early parallel in “Wagnerian medievalism.” After all, Wagner’s operas are drawn almost exclusively from medieval sources, characters, and stories, and recent research has confirmed one of the long-standing topoi of the debate on cinema’s origins, that is, that his works’ aesthetics is protoinematic.1
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Notes
See Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 31, 93–94.
Wagner & Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).
Jeongwon Joe, “Why Wagner and Cinema? Tolkien Was Wrong,” in Wagner & Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 2 [1–24].
Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 1: 38 [21–65].
On Wagner in Hollywood, see Klaus Reinke, “Richard Wagner im Film nach 1945,” Wagnerspectrum 4.2 (2008): 141–57.
Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 1:138 [69–213].
Béla Balázs, “Visible Man [1924],” in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), p. 9 [9–15].
For a fundamental discussion of medievalism in film theory, see Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011).
Richard Wagner, “German Art and German Policy,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895), 4: 77–78 [35–148].
Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2009), p. 92.
Richard Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), 1: 323 [267–392].
Richard Wagner, “What Is German?” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis , 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895), 4: 160 [149–69].
Richard Wagner, “Prelude to Tristan and Isolde,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899), 8: 386 [386–87].
Wagner A, “A Communication to My Friends,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 1: 334. On Wagner’s “Middle Ages” as palimpsest of preexisting notions, see Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Ahasvers Wandlungen (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 2002), pp. 197–208.
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, ed. and trans. Peter Bassett (Kent Town, AUS: Wakefield Press, 2006), p. 33.
On iconic tradition, see Meradith T. McMunn, “Filming the Tristan Myth. From Text to Icon,” in Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film, ed. Kevin J. Harty (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 169–80.
Hermann Kappelhoff, “Film und Schauspielkunst: Fassbinder und Brecht,” in Grauzonen. Positionen zwischen Literatur und Film 1910–1960, ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Fabienne Liptay (Munich: text + kritik, 2010), p. 257 [257–72] [my translation].
Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Hitler. Ein Film aus Deutschland, transl. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982), p. 19.
Veith von Fürstenberg, “Vorwort” [preface to a draft of the film], reprinted in Alain Kerdelhué, “Feuer und Schwert. Lecture materielle du mythe,” in Tristan et Iseut: mythe européen et mondial, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1987), pp. 193–94 [181–96] [my translation].
Michael Dost, Florian Hopf, and Alexander Kluge, Filmwirtschaft in der BRD und in Europa: Götterdämmerung in Raten (Munich: Hanser, 1973), p. 7 [my translation].
Hermann Glaser, Die Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 3 vols. (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1990), 3: 216.
The two films typify two different “cultures of reception” as defined by Mathias Herweg and myself as distinct spheres pursuing their own emphases, rules, and aims with regard to medial perception and adaptation of diachronous and/or synchronous foreign cultures and cultural elements. Mathias Herweg and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, “Mittelalterrezeption. Gegenstände und Theorieansätze eines Forschungsgebiets im Schnittpunkt von Mediävistik, Frühneuzeit- und Moderneforschung,” in Rezeptionskulturen. 500 Jahre literarischer Mittelalterrezeption zwischen Kanon und Populärkultur, ed. Mathias Herweg and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 1–14.
Kinowelt Filmverleih, Tristan & Isolde [press sheet] (Berlin: Kinowelt Filmverleih, 2006), p. 11.
Dean Georgaris, quoted in: Yon Motskin, “Tristan & Isolde,” in Creative Screenwriting 13.1 (2006): 32.
Cf. Rosemarie Lühr, “Tristan im Kymrischen,” in Tristan und Isolt im Spätmittelalter, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. 144 [141–68].
John Donne, “The Good-morrow,” in John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 70–71.
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© 2014 Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz
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Keppler-Tasaki, S. (2014). Crisis Discourse and Art Theory: Richard Wagner’s Legacy in Films by Veith von Fürstenberg and Kevin Reynolds. In: Johnston, A.J., Rouse, M., Hinz, P. (eds) The Medieval Motion Picture. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_6
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