Thursday afternoon episode-drafting thought:
Is Baz Luhrmann the modern director with perhaps the MOST Arthurian ethos given how almost his entire filmography is dedicated to collapsing the imagined temporality of cultural memory?

In a Luhrmann film, there is no line separating the past and present. R+J features contemporary costume and setting dressing up Shakespeare's script. Moulin Rouge, conversely, puts contemporary language into the mouths of past characters, some of them historical.

Gatsby is perhaps best of all in how the modern elements are almost all non-diegetic. The characters exist strictly in the past, but its mediated to the audience through film with a hip hop soundtrack that those characters mostly can't hear.

Arthurian lit (and medieval lit more broadly, honestly) generally works the same way. Gawain, a "6th-century" character, visits 14th-century castles in 14th-century armor throughout SGGK. Hell, he speaks English.

Even back in Geoffrey's Historia, the 6th-century setting--which is EXPLICITLY 6th-century in a way that it's not necessarily in romances--is a nod to authority more than a guide for historical accuracy. The crusader speech of Bishop Dubricius is 1138 to the letter.

The idea is to *evoke* the past, when things were ostensibly different, to show how they actually weren't.

So much of that gets lost in translation now that "the medieval" has such a strong aura. That intense presentism throughout the period is very hard to parse.

Luhrmann is a really great example, I think, of what a lot of Arthurian media would have looked like to a medieval audience. It's not "authentic" and it's not trying to be. It's using the imagined past very creatively for a rhetorical purpose.