Lora Ann Sigler is clearly a super fan of silent film, alongside other cultural artifacts of the early twentieth century such as women's fashion and architecture. Her tremendous enthusiasm for these topics has resulted in a highly opinionated book that will likely be enjoyable for similarly inclined super fans, but that does little to advance scholarship on medievalism (cinematic or otherwise).
A portion of Sigler's book is devoted to the argument that the design for the sets and costumes of silent films, both European and North American, was "demonstrably and profoundly influenced by medieval art" (p. 1), that designers "drew lavishly and often directly from the art of the medieval period for their inspiration" (p. 2), and that "early cinema costume and set designers chose to borrow lock, stock, and barrel from the medieval past to clothe their 'unsatisfactory present'" (p. 173). Sigler's argument is not limited to the arena of silent film, for she asserts that "both costume designers for the movies and couture designers for streetwear were virtually obsessed with the Middle Ages for inspiration" (p. 90). The author is certainly able to point to scattered individual examples of costumes or sets that could justifiably be said to have been influenced by a taste for medievalism, but these are too few and far between to make the case that the overall "look of silent film" owed a debt to medieval European art. Even her strongest individual examples ultimately undermine her (untenable) larger argument; unquestionably one character in Ernst Lubitsch's 1922 The Loves of Pharaoh "is the very image of a German maiden from the ninth to twelfth centuries" (p. 74), but all the other characters in the relevant still (Figure 31) look resolutely and accurately ancient Egyptian, and even the costumes in Fritz Lang's 1924 Die Nibelungen, which adapts a medieval German text set (including on film) at the late ancient/early medieval courts of the Burgundians at Worms and of Attila the Hun "borrow from every possible source, classical, medieval, even a hint of Asian" (p. 81).
More importantly, however, most of Sigler's individual examples are not strong (although there is neither space nor reason to address more than a select few of them). I am unconvinced that the street scenes in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Student of Prague (1913) and Nosferatu (1922) were intended to invoke a medieval town or village (pp. 15-21 and 25-30). Speaking from my own experience visiting, living in, and studying Europe over the past forty-five years, I suggest that the scenes in question were more likely to evoke the present state of the locales in question for their contemporary audiences (in Vilnius, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in Český Krumlov, and elsewhere) than the medieval "past." The Nosferatu example is particularly infuriating: Sigler claims that a still from the film (Figure 9) shows a "Medieval-style village" (p. 27) when it clearly shows a typical twentieth-century central European town; I was therefore not surprised to learn (on pp. 29-30) that the exterior shots for the film were taken on location in the actual town of Wismar (as well as in the Salzspeicher in Lübeck, built between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries), thereby in fact anchoring the film squarely in the reality of 1922, and decidedly not "establishing the medieval setting of the entire proceedings" (p. 30). Even allowing for the fact (buried in an endnote on p. 201) that Sigler is "using the term 'medieval' rather loosely" to extend into the sixteenth century, many of the artifacts that inspired the designs discussed in this book date (like the Salzspeicher in Lübeck) from even more recent times, such as the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century structures quoted in the Spanish Revival, Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival, and Mission Revival architecture that is the focus of Chapters Six and Seven. I am equally unconvinced that the Art Deco Erté wedding gown in Figure 42 shows "much the same outfit" (p. 88) as is worn by Aelfgyva in the so-called Bayeux Tapestry (shown in Figure 43), purportedly in both cases including high necks that resolve into wimples, or that the film costumes in Figures 38 and 39 are based on illustrations in Braun and Schneider's guide to historical dress (1861-1890) reproduced in Figure 40, since the characteristics of "medieval" dress are listed as "sleeves nearly to the floor, belt well below the waist, and...edging on the sleeves" (p. 85) whereas the relevant silent film dresses pictured both lack nearly-floor-length sleeves (indeed, one is entirely sleeveless), belts, and edging. It is indisputable that something is going on with sleeves in the fashions of the era but it is questionable whether the inspiration for garments with elaborate sleeves was necessarily the European Middle Ages, given that Chinese and Japanese traditional designs (just to take two examples) also sport capacious sleeves. But the most glaring weakness in terms of evidentiary rigor is this: Sigler provides no examples of creators of the items in question naming the European Middle Ages as a source for their work, or of any contemporary commentators indicating that they perceived the items as medieval(ist).
The book is also beset by a number of structural weaknesses. Information is presented in what seemed to this reader to be random order. I could not discern any principles governing decisions over what deserved inclusion beyond being of interest to the author, independent of relevance to the book's thesis. For instance, Sigler includes a section on Achmed Abdullah that admittedly has nothing to do with her topic because he "was the star of a life story so out of an adventure novel, it deserves to be included" (p. 42), and one on Marion E. Wong's The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916) that is peripheral to her theme because "she deserves to be commended for her contributions to film in general, design in general and women's participation in particular" (p. 163); the section on Wong was not suddenly rendered miraculously relevant by the baffling subsequent assertion that her film "gave us glimpses of the unaltered medieval traditions of the Chinese in America" (p. 172). And why are we told that Carl Theodor Dreyer's "films often dealt with religious themes, possibly owing to the feeling of being unloved" (p. 38)? Finally, at least in terms of organization and thesis, Sigler's arguments concerning the influence of medieval art on the costumes and set designs of silent film continue only through p. 102; the remainder of the book consists of a series of chapters and appendices on a variety of more or less tangentially related topics: female fashion in general, including a discussion of belts for sanitary pads that Sigler claims look "quite a bit like medieval chastity belts" (p. 120), a disturbing assertion in a study of medievalism given that "medieval chastity belts" are one of the most problematic myths known to specialists in the field [1]; the design of movie theatres (some of which did indisputably include medievalist elements, but which on the whole seem better described as eclectic); Spanish Revival, Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, and Mediterranean Revival domestic, public, and ecclesiastical architecture; women in early film production; mechanization; Audrey Munson; Erté and Georges Barbier; James Laver, and Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner's ideas about some of the same films treated by Sigler.
I have other areas of concern as well. The many errors and sloppy scholarship in the book also make it an unreliable guide to the cultural dynamics and visual cultures of early twentieth-century transatlantic cinema. Sometimes it is a question of simple errors such as "Gustave Dorè" for Gustave Doré (p. 9), the "Soviet Socialist Republic" for the USSR or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (p. 25), "Heiligan-Geist-Kirche" for Heiligen-Geist-Kirche (p. 30), "Marmosaal" for the Marmorsaal at the Berlin Zoo (p. 30), schlöss for Schloss to designate a castle (p. 45), Siegfried: Kreimhild's Revenge for Die Nibelungen: Kreimhild's Revenge as the title of an important 1924 film (p. 67), the placement of St. Gallen in Germany when it is in fact in Switzerland (p. 84), and so forth. Some comments fail to take account of transnational histories of the silent film era, such as when Sigler describes Andrei Andrejew as having "worked under more variations of his difficult name than there is room to list" (p. 52), as if immigrants to the United States from countries that did not use the Roman alphabet personally and voluntarily butchered and multiplied the spellings of their "difficult" (!) names, or when she expresses astonishment that a person of Scandinavian heritage (Aenne Willkomm) should have been born in Shanghai in 1902 (p. 80), indicating that she had never heard of the Shanghai International Settlement. Sometimes it is a question of substandard citational practices, such as telling readers that "archived copies of [Albin] Grau's own notes [are] available to students of film" (p. 31) with no indication of where that might be, or where she herself obtained this information; or telling readers what "one historian has suggested" concerning the Bayeux Tapestry (including that she does "not see what he sees") with no indication of the name of the offending historian or the work in which he made his unfortunate assertions (p. 89); or providing incomplete references and/or omitting references from the Bibliography (e.g. the Neil Gabler article referenced in the endnotes on p. 213). Sometimes it is a question of outright incorrect information, such as a citation to the Wikipedia article on the "Eight-hour Day" to support the (to Sigler, surprising) "fact" that "Russia was the first to institute the eight-hour day in 1917, immediately following the October Revolution" (p. 117), when the article itself clearly states that Uruguay was the first nation to adopt the eight-hour day (in 1915).
My final area of concern relates to how much of the book is devoted to idiosyncratic personal commentary that some readers might perhaps consider charming but that I found to be both irritating and distracting from my ability to focus on the argument. Sigler treats her own preferences and predilections as universal, particularly in connection with heteronormativity (e.g. pp. 68 and 107) and stereotypical gender roles. For instance, in reference to a 1908 film that included shots of "scantily-clad, young, pretty girls," Sigler assures her readers: "My thoughts were pure, but I can't speak for the male audience of the time" (p. 59). I have bad news for Sigler: she can't speak for the female audience of the time either, although she mistakenly believes that she can, such as when she asserts that "surely" all members of "the distaff half of the audience" would join her in coveting a pair of "high-heeled, zebra-patterned pumps" worn by Gloria Swanson (p. 69). Readers are imagined as unquestioningly sharing her views; for instance, after noting that F. W. Murnau "spoke in nostalgic terms of his visits to Paris as a teenager," she comments that this was "Only natural, for what better time to go to Paris than one's teen years?" (p. 31). Hardly a page goes by without some sort of snide or judgmental comment, such as that The Road to Yesterday was so poorly edited that it "was evidently given to several preschoolers to concoct" (p. 162), or that the feminist movement has evolved to the point "where sex object seems to be the highest goal, and stripper the ultimate career objective" (p. 111).
I can imagine that some readers might be entertained by Lora Ann Sigler's wealth of trivia and breezy anecdotes, like the one about how Pia Zadora tore down a house in the Hollywood hills built for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks because she thought it was haunted by the ghost of a laughing woman, leading Sigler to the punch line: "[i]t has been slyly hinted that the laughter resulted from seeing one of Zadora's performances" (p. 139). But any reader who would be irritated by such commentary, or who is in search of a serious scholarly monograph on medievalism in silent film, would probably not find this book valuable.
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Notes
1. Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Sigler also evokes the myth of "the bra-burning feminists of the 1960s and 70s" (p. 111).