This 27-minute film was made for the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society held earlier thus year. Sarah Higley, from the University of Rochester, created this film based on three stories from Confessio Amantis: The Travelers and the Angel, The Tale of Machaire and Canace, and The Tale of Florent.
Higley explains: “It was originally three films that I put into one with a nod paid to Gower’s complex and allegorical Frame Tale. All adapted film is a reduction, in some ways, of a literary text, but I hope to have shown people that machinima is up to the task of representing the Middle Ages because it operates a little bit like a manuscript page in its multi-media: text and illumination and the voice that reads (here represented by the student and her book) along with music and moving image work together to bring a story meant for the imagination into a new art form. I find the artistic environments in Second Life, many of them surreal, especially suited to the iconic and allegorical nature of so many medieval tales. This was a directorial debut for me: never before have I attended a live showing of any film of mine. I don’t know if I ever will again. “Florent” got all the laughs, because the first two are as grim as Moral Gower himself. I needed to end on one of his high notes, and that’s the story of the Loathly Lady. Contemporized.”
This 27-minute film was made for the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society held earlier thus year. Sarah Higley, from the University of Rochester, created this film based on three stories from Confessio Amantis: The Travelers and the Angel, The Tale of Machaire and Canace, and The Tale of Florent.
Higley explains: “It was originally three films that I put into one with a nod paid to Gower’s complex and allegorical Frame Tale. All adapted film is a reduction, in some ways, of a literary text, but I hope to have shown people that machinima is up to the task of representing the Middle Ages because it operates a little bit like a manuscript page in its multi-media: text and illumination and the voice that reads (here represented by the student and her book) along with music and moving image work together to bring a story meant for the imagination into a new art form. I find the artistic environments in Second Life, many of them surreal, especially suited to the iconic and allegorical nature of so many medieval tales. This was a directorial debut for me: never before have I attended a live showing of any film of mine. I don’t know if I ever will again. “Florent” got all the laughs, because the first two are as grim as Moral Gower himself. I needed to end on one of his high notes, and that’s the story of the Loathly Lady. Contemporized.”
Click here to go to Sarah Higley’s faculty webpage. You can follow her on Vimeo at VimPickens
See also her book In Three Dimensions: Art, Machinima and the Virtual University
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse