English 83

Film buff here chiming in on the excellent double-feature. I feel like I just ate a communion wafer followed by an overstuffed jelly donut – you can guess which film I watched first.

Robert Bresson’s minimalist Lancelot du Lac strikes me as simultaneously the most thematically Christian and most stylistically modern Arthurian vision we’ve encountered. The bland realism reduces the romances to mere day-to-day life, forcing the viewer to search, like Arthur’s knights, for the transcendent. I would suggest that within Bresson’s audiovisual “economy,” the transcendent is anything unique, unrepeated. Repetitive montages of visors going down and horses being saddled or running to joust suggest the banal emptiness of battle, the horse legs in particular depersonalizing the combatants identified only by flags, and the kinetic pleasures of violence elided, only the grisly aftermath shown. More heavy-handed is the repetition of animal noises to signify lust – sex, like violence, is not shown. What is shown, but not so often as to become ubiquitous? What does Bresson value? Perhaps the foregrounded cross Lancelot prays to, or a horse’s soulful eye, shown in close-up towards the beginning, and at the tragic conclusion near-pierced by an arrow, like nature violated (how else to explain the arrows fired into the trees…?). The other Bresson film I’ve seen, Pickpocket, ends with the protagonist finding happiness after ascetic endurance, but the knights in Lancelot don’t pass that test, succumbing to sex and war in a way that the audience is not allowed to do. An interesting comparison piece might be George Romero’s more conventionally American film from a few years later, Knightriders, which I have not seen but which looks like some kind of anti-capitalist hippie fable. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ed Harris. He’s not trying to be a hero; he’s fighting the dragon:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mtY_hnP3Uvk

John Boorman’s Excalibur, on the other hand, has no problem skinning the proverbial rabbit, with enough neon lighting, shiny objects, Playboy nudity, and jelly donut gore to send the masses home blind and diabetic. The fetishistic visuals and pseudo-satirical porno-militarism struck me as typical of Reagan-era Hollywood spectacle, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail played “straight” with music by Wagner and costumes by Robocop. Nicol Williamson’s Merlin as chrome-dome drag queen was a personal favorite. Two facts proving the director is a bit odd – he cast his daughter as Igrayne in Excalibur, and he cast Sean Connery in this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kbGVIdA3dx0

Lancelot du Lac and Excalibur exemplify, for me, the peculiar sensual powers of cinema to frustrate and to stimulate, respectively. Which one you liked more might suggest both what you expect from a movie and what you expect from Arthurian myth.