‘Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval’

Abstract

This article traces a trajectory of medieval allusions in McDonagh's film, beginning with Arthurian aspects, moving on to a context of pilgrimage, and using this as a point of departure for a discussion of film as an artistic medium against the theoretical background of Walter Benjamin's ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. In claiming for film those very auratic qualities that Benjamin denies it by defining it against an essentialized notion of religious medieval art, ‘In Bruges’ draws attention to the constructedness of the ‘medieval’ experience. The film juxtaposes different media to rethink our relationship with the ‘distant’ past, while charting the role the cinema can play in this rethinking.

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