Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I recollect that the "look" of contemporary depictions of the middle ages originates with Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky. Gilliam conceived of a great unwashed age, in which everything is covered in mud, shit, and blood. Even movies that still indulge in the mythology of chivalry and the romance of history seem to have adopted this aesthetic these days, and it's the main feature of movies that deliberately deconstruct them both. Mud and blood are prominent features in Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising (2009). I'll assume that shit is a component, too. Fortunately, cinema doesn't convey smell to the audience.
Valhalla Rising is a period piece that presents history as a kind of terrifying dream fugue. It's not about facts. It's deliberately vague on the facts. It's about mood and texture. It's pretty damned creepy, actually. The story here is pretty simple: a one-eyed pit slave whose name we never learn escapes from his captors and exacts his revenge. Afterward, he falls in with a band of Christians bound for the holy land, but get lost on the journey and land, instead, in the New World, where they come to believe that they've actually landed in Hell. It's the way it's filmed that renders all of this portentous. Refn seems to be channeling an action movie through the sensibilities of, say, Michelangelo Antonioni by way of Apocalypto. This is all about figures against landscapes. Some of this film's shot composition have a kind of stately classicism about them. Every so often, these shots are interrupted by outbursts of outrageous violence. There's a stillness throughout most of the movie that amplifies the violence when it comes. It reminds me a bit of one of those Philip Glass pieces in which one note is repeated over and over again until it becomes a shock when it changes.
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