Acesse a tradução “O MONGE NEGRO EM O NOME DA ROSA” de Luiz Guerra.
Richard Utz (Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech)
Those used to current depictions of medievalist subject matter in movies and TV shows take the inclusion of characters and actors of color for granted. Director David Lowery’s 2021 feature, The Green Knight, casts British-Indian actor Dev Patel as Sir Gawain; the Netflix series The Witcher (since 2019) casts black British actress Mimi Mimî Michelle Ndiweni (since 2021 credited as Mimî M. Khayisa) as Fringilla Vigo; Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (since 2022), casts a Puerto Rican of African descent, Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, a Silvan Elf, and Sophia Nomvete, an actress of Iranian-African descent, as Princess Disa, a Dwarf; finally, House of the Dragon (since 2022) features House Velaryon of Driftmark, an entire black family, most notably casting Steve Toussaint, a black British actor of Barbadian background, as Lord Corlys.
This inclusion of characters of color in House of the Dragon marks a conscious step away from the original Game of Thrones universe which, despite being a work of fantasy, presented a medieval-like world populated almost entirely by white actors. This deliberate change reminds us that the film and television industry have, until recently, subscribed to the notion that all depictions of the historical Middle Ages or narratives situated in medieval-like worlds needed to be exclusively Eurocentric. Whenever such notions and casting norms were challenged, audiences balked at the allegedly anachronistic depiction of medieval European stories. One such adversarial response happened in 1991, when director Kevin Reynolds included the character of Azeem, played by black American actor Morgan Freeman, in adventure movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Given the setting of the movie in 12-century England, critics argued that the inclusion of a moor was too much of a creative license. And some read one of the most endearing scenes of the film as a political message directed more towards early 1990s American audiences than as representative of medieval England:
Azeem: Salaam, little one.
Small girl: Did God paint you?
Azeem: Did God paint me? [laughs] For certain.
Small girl: Why?
Azeem: Because Allah loves wondrous variety.
Since the the legend of Robin Hood is a fictional narrative tradition without any single “original” source, it is ridiculous to claim that the inclusion of a single character of color renders the story anachronistic. In addition, research over the last three decades, for example William Chester Jordan’s studies on converts from Islam in thirteenth-century France, rendered the existence of at least some persons of color more probable. Most recent films and TV series acknowledge the possibility for the presence of at least some people of color throughout medieval Europe.
Even before the 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the film version of Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel, Il nome della rosa (1980, English translation The Name of the Rose, 1983), set a signal for other modern medievalist media. While based on an entirely fictional narrative, the producers and directors for the English language feature film version, The Name of the Rose (1986), starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, and Christian Slater as sleuths investigating a series of murders in a medieval monastery, demanded the highest degree of authenticity to create historical verisimilitude: The indoor shots were made at the Cistercian abbey of Eberbach in Germany. For the exterior shots, including the 30–meter–high library tower, Constantin Film erected one of the largest sets in the history of European film making. In fact, the production designers and cinematographers created such a high degree of authenticity – from the smallest kitchen utensils and hand-woven monk’s habits to the large bathing vats, massive iron candelabras, and pews and desks – that science educators would later pick the film as an authoritative source for the teaching of the birth of modern science. The manuscript pages visible during the film were viewed by experts to be so beautiful and historically accurate that some are now on display in European museums.
And, unlike the vast majority of medievalist movies and TV series from the 1960s through the 1990s, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud extended his desire for authenticity to the selection of his cast. When U.S. casting companies only proposed “white faces,” he insisted on including “a moor” for one of the main roles. His simple rationale, which he explained to the actor selected to play the dark-skinned translator, Venantius of Salvamec, was that in the Middle Ages, “[the moors] were the intellectuals.” In the story, Venantius translates Greeks texts into Latin, an ability that makes him a sought-after expert.
The actor Jean-Jacques Annaud chose to play Venantius was the Swiss Urs Althaus. While many of the other actors hired to play the monks in the monastery were clearly selected because they represent various physical deformities and evoke shock and revulsion, Althaus was the exact opposite, an attractive ex-model who had in the past been gainfully employed by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Armani, Gucci, and Kenzo. At the age of 21, Althaus had become the first black model to be featured on the cover of American fashion magazine, GQ. At the age of 30, in The Name of the Rose, he also became one of the first actors of color cast in a major feature film set in medieval Europe. Surprisingly, the challenges raised against the historical legitimacy of including Morgan Freeman’s character in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves were not leveled against Althaus. Somehow, his non-white character did not alienate viewers and critics as unrealistic and in need of explanation. Perhaps The Name of the Rose, with its focus on less accessible intellectual traditions (medieval nominalism and realism, the survival of Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, the conflict between the medieval papacy and the Franciscan order), was protected from such attacks because audiences approached it without the genre expectations they had for a retelling of the traditional Robin Hood narrative.
In 2009, Urs Althaus published an autobiography, provocatively entitled Ich, der Neger. Mein Leben zwischen Highlife und Pleiten (“I, the negro. My biography between highlife and failures”), which became a bestseller in Switzerland. In the book, which openly discusses his descent into drug use, Althaus denies ever feeling excluded or discriminated against when growing up in an entirely “white” country. His first experience with racism happened when he moved to New York at the age of 21. He realized that taxis would not stop for him and he would never be paired with a white model together in the same photo shoot. What he remembers most vividly about his first gig as an actor, in The Name of the Rose, was when the world-famous Sean Connery, at a press conference, approached the completely unknown Althaus, extended his hand, and said, “You must be Venantius. I am Sean.”
Further reading:
Althaus, Urs. Ich, der Neger. Mein Leben zwischen Highlife und Pleiten. Glockhausen: Wörthersee Verlag, 2009.
Clark, R. E. “Azeem and the Witch: Race, Disability, and Medievalisms in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” Open Library of Humanities 9(1) (2023). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.9796
Guerra, Andrea, and Marco Braga. “The Name of the Rose: A Path to Discuss the Birth of Modern Science.” Science and Education 23.3 (2012): 643-54.
Jordan, William Chester. The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Salih, Sarah. “Cinematic Authenticity-Effects and Medieval Art: A Paradox.” In Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 20-39.
Utz, Richard. “Authenticity, Neoliberalism, and Socialism: The Name of the Rose (1986).” In Kevin J. Harty and Scott Manning, eds. Cinema Medievalia. New Essays on the Reel Middle Ages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, forthcoming: 2024, 270-287.
Publicado em 24 de Setembro de 2024.
Como citar: UTZ, Richard. The Black Monk in The Name of the Rose. Blog do POIEMA. Pelotas: 24 set. 2024. Disponível em: https://wp.ufpel.edu.br/poiema/the-black-monk-in-the-name-of-the-rose. Acesso em: data em que você acessou o artigo.
