Entre o medievalismo e a medievalística

Abstract

Since its creation with the Lumiere brothers at the end of the 19th century, cinema has been piling up productions that hail from the Middle Ages. These films, which are full of reminiscences and stereotypes about the Middle Ages, have become, from the end of the 1970s onwards, one of the main sources of research for the historian. One of the main legends adapted for cinema is that of the Arthurian cycle. Thus, this work aims to make public how the cinema builds the figure of the knight and the medieval chivalry, from the medieval imagination produced both in the medieval and in contemporary societies, in addition to clarifying and discussing notions that permeate cinema as a historical source, focusing on the differences and similarities between a knight that is produced by the film industry and the knight present in historiography, from the film “Excalibur” produced in 1981, considered one of the classics of cinema related to medieval themes.