SOURCE: Lindley, Arthur. “Scotland Saved from History: Welles's Macbeth and the Ahistoricism of Medieval Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2001): 96-100.

In the following essay, Lindley considers Orson Welles's film version of Macbeth as a powerful influence on later filmic representations of the European Middle Ages.

I want to consider Welles's Macbeth in a different frame from the usual ones, viewing it less as a Shakespearean or Wellesian film than as a medieval one. From its opening words, the film stakes a claim to historicity—claiming to depict the period of Christianity's first penetration of a barbarian world—that is belied by virtually everything that follows: the visual invocations of westerns and film noir, the anachronistic grotesqueries of costuming, the fabular simplification of character to the demands of a parable about the resistible rise of gothic tyranny, what Michael Anderegg (84) has called the “post-nuclear” devastation of its landscape. In...