Middle Ages in film

While the conclusions of academic research and findings of archeology have advanced knowledge of the Middle Ages, nothing has had more widespread influence on more people than the images created by film.

Influential European films included Fritz Lang's two-film series Die Nibelungen: Siegfrieds Tod and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924), Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), while in France there were many versions of the story of Joan of Arc.

[1] The French historian Marc Ferro had already devoted his seminal work Cinéma et Histoire (1977) to precisely this question, he asks in Chapter 16, "Can a filmic writing of History exist?

One year later, in 2004, the eminent French historian François Amy de la Bretèque published his L'Imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental, in which he proposes a number of useful theories to finally break out of the circle of historiography vs historiophoty.

Listed here are some of the best and most significant films in both quality and historical accuracy as determined by a consensus poll of medieval students and teachers at Fordham University.