[Artemisia] Medieval Movie Night

[Catherine Helm-Clark]

This is being posted to both the baronial list and the Aerie, so my 
apologies to those who may see it twice.  This medieval movie night 
review is the longest I’ve written in a long time, and it’s been awhile 
since any medieval movie night review appeared on the Aerie.  Since 
there was interest in the past on the Aerie in our film series here in 
M i’s, I thought that this would not be inappropriate fare for folks in 
general.  (As an aside, I have been working at collecting and rewriting 
past medieval movie night reviews to put up on my website - coming soon 
to a website near you  ;-)

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Medieval Movie Night
Weds.,  Jan. 7, 2004; 7:30 pm
at Viscountess Lynn’s, Ammon, ID (call or email for directions)

If the weather is bad, please don't risk plastering yourself against 
the side of the road in the snow.  We'll cut a raincheck (snowcheck?) 
if the weather is bad and you wanted to see the this month's film, and 
reshow it at some later date.

The movie this month is the Roman Polanski's Macbeth.
Graphic, gritty, gory, gruesome, dark, gloomy, depressing, chilling, 
and seriously creepy. Not for wimps.  Shakespeare as horror flick.  
Many people consider it the best Macbeth on film.  It has a Rotten 
Tomatoes rating of 87%, which is you're familiar with their ratings 
system, is quite high.  It was rated R under the old rating system for 
violence and some nudity.

Leave the kids at home.  Consider leaving the teenagers at home.  No 
joke.  Not a film for the faint of heart.  It's Shakespeare, so there's 
no bad language per se, but there is some nudity in 3 scenes. It's all 
probably the least erotic nudity on film, even more so than the parade 
scene in Prospero's Books, and its portrayal is more horrific than 
anything else. You get to see a lot of Lady Macbeth's skin in the hand 
washing scene; you get to see some kids in the buff just before and 
after they get murdered by Macbeth's badies; and you get to the see the 
witches in the second coven scene, a score of them, ugly, aged, 
flaccid, toothless and of matted hair, all completely unclothed while 
practicing their black arts upon the heath, just as one would expect of 
witches according to the infamous 1486 witch-hunting manual, the 
Malleus Maleficarum.  Hollywood soft porn this is not.

The acting: overall, really good.  The McClellan and Dench/Royal 
Shakespeare Co. version and the Orsen Welles version are both better by 
about a hair, but only just.  A few film critics have stated that the 
Polanski Macbeth is comparable to Kurosawa's all-time classic film 
Throne of Blood, which would be the logical double-feature flick to 
show after the Polanski Macbeth if we only had the time.  Some purists 
have commented that the Polanski version suffers from the fact that 
Polanski made some cuts and rearranged some scenes, but these changes 
make sense in the context of adapting the play to film - and he didn't 
do anything different from what Olivier did in his Shakespeare films.  
The portrayal of Macbeth by Jon Finch (who starred in the Hitchcock 
film Frenzy) as a guy who starts out okay and slopes down into evil and 
depravity is done nicely.  Lady Macbeth is perfect as the ambitious, 
pushy and conniving wife.  Don't expect subtlety in this film, however, 
because there isn't any. This is Shakespeare with a big stick.  The 
fight scenes look more like real-life bar fights than like movie 
fencing - lots of good stuff to watch here, despite the bucket of 
blood.

Scenery and Sets: Northumbria and Wales sub in for Scotland.  Macbeth's 
castle is a real castle in Gwynneth.  The sound stage sets of castle 
interiors come complete with rushes and great halls, servants and 
minions, hunting dogs and bear baiting.  There's little wrong here with 
the sets.  The coronation scene is as accurate as a Medieval Scottish 
coronation can get, except that they didn't have the real Stone of 
Scone to use for the movie.  The one special effect in the movie isn't 
too bad, especially for a movie this old.  If you look hard, you can 
see the matting screen around the floating glowing dagger - but you do 
have to look hard.  The cinematography is excellent, with a pervasive 
damp, drippy, wet and rainy atmosphere all too near to the actual 
climate of Great Britain, done by the same guy who did the 
cinematography for the first Star Wars movie.

Costumes and Related Stuff: solidly 13th C. with a few odd exceptions.  
Where in the world they got that bodice-thingy that Lady MacDuff wears 
is beyond me.  But the tents on the battle field for Banquo and Macbeth 
are made of Holstein skins - I gotta have one! Like totally MOO!

Armour: strangely enough, it seems to be a mix of 13th through early 
14th century stuff, with a few mid-12th century helms throw in for good 
measure.  The armour is the least consistent part of the film.  Good 
spears though.  With spears like that, we'd win Estrella hands down, 
yeah.  The heraldry, on the other hand, is everything a heraldry addict 
could want.  Probably a little late in artistic style for the 13th C., 
but dead on if this is really supposed to be an early 14th century 
setting.

Violence: this movie deserves a violence discussion above and beyond 
the obvious and prosaic.  These days, the violence of this movie is 
nothing as far as ratings are concerned - which is more a commentary on 
the crappiness of most modern movies more than anything else.  And yet, 
for a movie that's "dated," the violence of this movie is profoundly 
disturbing on multiple levels.  To understand this requires several 
layers of explanation.  First, for those not old enough to remember, 
and for those who are trying to forget, there was a trend in the late 
60s and throughout the 70s to make movies in a "gritty and realistic" 
fashion, a counter-cultural reaction to 50 years of Hollywood glitz and 
one of the examples of the zeitgeist of those times.  This trend 
unfortunately generated some truly bad movies, some "good" bad-movie 
cult classics like Killer Tomatoes, and some bad "realistic" movies 
like the Burt Lancaster "Moses" which many of us wish we had never even 
heard of, much less actually seen.  It was a bad time for film.

Polanski's Macbeth is well within the late-60s-to-70s "gritty reality" 
genre of film, but it's one of the few that succeeded in this idiom.  
Actually, it's one of the few that's done well and is very effectual in 
its portrayal of the reality of real Medieval life, not "the Middle 
Ages as they should have been," but the Middle Ages as they likely 
were.  The Polanski Macbeth has a Tuckmanesque Medieval miasma to it 
that reminds one of Hobbes' description from _The Leviathan_:

"continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, 
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The second aspect of violence in this film is not the violence itself, 
but the creepiness of it all.  We're talking Roman Polanski here, a guy 
who survived the Nazi era as a child by escaping the Krakow Ghetto 
alive and roaming the countryside of Europe during the latter days of 
WWII (other members of his family died in Nazi concentration camps).  
He started acting in and making films in the late 50s in Poland.  He 
cut his Hollywood teeth making horror flicks in the 60s.  While he is 
extremely controversial in the US for his flight to France after 
pleading guilty to statutory rape in California, he's gone on to make 
some very notable films, especially the Oscar-nominated Tess (1979) and 
later The Pianist (2002) for which he won the Oscar for best director.  
The film he made immediately before Macbeth, however, was nothing near 
as high-brow.  That film was the 1968 occult-thriller classic 
Rosemary's Baby - his second American-made horror movie.  After 
Rosemary's Baby, he then transitioned to Shakespeare.  Macbeth is 
probably the closest Shakespeare comes to the modern horror genre and 
Polanski manages to bridge the gap.  The first ten minutes of the movie 
has more icky dead bodies and body parts, or people in the process of 
becoming dead bodies and/or dead body parts, than many modern horror 
flicks.  To be honest, it's not the blood-fest that Carrie was, but you 
do get to hear the neck snap loudly at the hanging of the Traitor of 
Cawdor and there are gallons of blood all over the place in all the 
other death scenes - really creditably yucky stuff says this Medieval 
movie reviewer who once was trained as a California EMT and rode 
ambulances in LA.  Not for the faint of heart.

The last thing we need to mention about this film is that Polanski was 
once married to the actress Sharon Tate of Valley of the Dolls fame, 
who had a promising but prematurely-short Hollywood career.  While 
Polanski was off on a business trip in 1969, the eight-months-pregnant 
Sharon Tate and a number of house guests, included the Folgers' 
heiress, were brutally mauled to death by members of the Manson Family 
in their twisted quest to precipitate Charles Manson's end-times 
scenario called Helter Skelter.  For those of you who weren't around 
then, or were too young to be reading the papers or watching the news 
back then, the Manson murders were way beyond your normal 
run-of-the-mill Bundy or Son-of-Sam serial murders.  They were and 
still are seriously creepy to contemplate.  If you haven't read the 
book _Helter Skelter_ by Bugliosi, one of the LA country prosecutors 
who tried Manson and his compatriots, you should - but do it on a nice 
sunny afternoon - it's not bedtime reading by a long shot.

What does this have to do with Macbeth?  Polanski started shooting the 
movie immediately after the murder and finished it soon after the 
conviction.  Many film critics and cinema "experts" have remarked on 
the similarity of the Tate murders in Polanski house in Beverly Hills 
and the scene where Mac Duff's family get murdered by Macbeth's bad 
guys.  So read the book and watch the movie and make up your own mind.

Polanski's Macbeth, 1971, 140 minutes
Medieval Movie Night, Weds., 7 Jan. 2004, 7:30 pm
Viscountess Lynn's place
Be there and be scared.