Part VII: Arthur on Film
32
Remediating Arthur
One of the most memorable set pieces in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is the Black Knight sequence. Its hilarious parody of cinematic violence signals simultaneously Arthur’s comic failure as a political leader and the persistence of his reputation for orchestrating lavish spectacles of violence. As the Python troupe recognized, Arthur’s legendary status as “King of the Britons” has always depended upon his ability to harness violence as a mechanism for achieving political legitimacy. The exaggerated comic violence of the sequence, with Arthur hacking away at the defiant Black Knight’s limbs until he is reduced to a sputtering torso, depends upon the medium’s ability to represent spurting blood and gore as simultaneously realistic and stylized.
At the end of a decade when directors were breaking away from the constraints against violence imposed by censorship, the Python parody exposed the extent to which audiences’ viewing of “realistic” cinematic violence depended less upon their own experience of blood and gore than upon their prior viewing habits (Sam Peckinpah’s [1971] Straw Dogs provides the relevant intertext, already parodied in the Monty Python television series season three “Salad Days” skit). The Black Knight gag, however, transported word for word to the stage thirty years later in Spamalot, Eric Idle’s 2005 Broadway musical adaptation of Holy Grail, falls flat on its face. Reduced to a Penn and Teller magic trick, complete with red streamers pouring out of hacked off limbs, the sequence has been silently buried in the second act. It makes at best a perfunctory and unmemorable appearance most likely to appease the film’s fans, who can probably recite the lines from memory. One YouTube reviewer, ZackyV68, describes the Vegas version of the scene:
it’s really funny in the play version I saw at Wynn, here at Las Vegas. The Black Knight gets pegged on the wall and Arthur uses the swords to slash his legs off (looking like nothing was hit) and the Black Knight was like “haha you missed!!” then the Knight’s legs fell off lol [laugh out loud].
Why, we might well ask, does a sequence that has become a classic comedy routine fail so miserably (YouTube reviewers notwithstanding) when transported to a new medium? This, in essence, is the question we pose in this essay. What role do the media that transmit the legend have in shaping it?
That the Arthurian legend has been retold innumerable times since the twelfth century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae created a stir among the Norman aristocracy, has become a commonplace ritualistically rehearsed in scholarly works on the subject. That these legends have taken shape in a variety of different media is perhaps as frequently remarked. Arthurian legends have been the subject of countless written texts (poems, romances, histories, novels), but they have also appeared in other media, in paintings, operas, musicals, films, and more recently rock songs, comic books, and video games. While previous studies have explored adaptations of Arthurian stories in particular media – for example, Richard Barber’s collection on Arthurian music (2002), a whole spate of recent books on Arthurian film, or Elizabeth Sklar and Donald Hoffman’s collection on King Arthur in popular culture (2002) – there is little scholarship that examines the effects that media themselves have on adaptations of the material.
This chapter, rather than offering a synoptic survey of Arthurian legends in different media, articulates a theory and method for investigating the mediating role of media in perpetuating and adapting Arthurian narrative. We explore the relevance for the Arthurian legend of recent work in media studies, particularly Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s concept of “remediation,” paying attention not only to the “formal logic by which new media refashion prior media” and their contents (1999: 273), but also the ways in which that refashioning causes us to revisit older media, asking of them new kinds of questions. We investigate the mechanisms through which the cinematic apparatus mediates (and indeed remediates) our experience of medievalism, complicating the reception of the original medieval text, the intermedial intertexts, and the films themselves. Drawing upon Joshua Logan’s Camelot (1967) and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982), we explicate the work of adaptation that makes film a unique site for the synthesis of multiple media – literary, theatrical, musical, cinematic, political. We end by demonstrating the ongoing nature of this remediation by considering how our reception of films (like John Boorman’s [1981] Excalibur or Monty Python and the Holy Grail) may be further shaped by emerging media – DVD formatting and internet sites like YouTube – into which they have recently been adapted.
What is a medium? We might be tempted to think of media, as The Oxford English Dictionary does, simply as the material or technological apparatuses – film, television, radio, newspapers, and more recently, the internet – through which we view (and note the metaphor of transparency) our world, focusing only on the channel of communication. Bolter and Grusin, however, argue that our ability to recognize these technologies as media “comes not only from the way in which each of the technologies functions in itself, but also from the way in which each relates to other media. Each participates in a network of technical, social, and economic contexts; this network constitutes the medium as a technology” (1999: 65). We must understand all media not simply as neutral carriers of content, but as a complex hybrid network of material, technological, social, political, cultural, economic, and signifying practices. Bolter and Grusin define media as “the formal, social and material network of practices that generate a logic by which additional instances are repeated or remediated, such as photography, film, or television” (1999: 273). This definition makes a good starting point for a consideration of film as a medium; it has the advantage of pointing out the ways in which media bring together material and technological and semiotic practices. For our purposes, then, film must be understood as a form of contemporary mass media, not distinct from all the others but thoroughly integrated into a network of visual and aural communication that makes claims both to immediacy and hypermediacy, transparency and opacity.
Bolter and Grusin use the term “remediation” to describe “the process by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior media forms” (1999: 273). Newer media, they argue, “refashion prior media” through a doubled logic that multiplies media at the same time it tries to erase all traces of mediation (1999: 5). A new medium oscillates between claims to “immediacy” and what they call “hypermediacy,” which they define as the tendency of media to call attention to their status as media: “Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or more authentic experience, this promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium” (1999: 19). This process, they argue, has “expressed itself repeatedly in the genealogy of Western representation” (1999: 56).
Although film, which has been around for more than a century, does not offer the same kind of novelty as the so-called “new media” (to which we will return at the end of this chapter), it does illustrate quite handily this double logic of remediation. Let us consider figure 32.1, a single shot from Joshua Logan’s (1967) film Camelot, itself a remediation of the Lerner and Loewe musical, which remediated T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King. This is the final shot of Act I; as the music swells, the knights begin to assemble around the Round Table Arthur has just invented. The shot is meant to thrill the viewer with its monumental scope. By way of contrast, in book two of The Once and Future King, The Queen of Air and Darkness, as Arthur is supposed to be preparing to go to war to establish his legitimacy as ruler through violence, he, Sir Ector, and Kay sit in his pavilion debating the details of Arthur’s dream of democracy, of a Round Table “with no top,” capable of seating a hundred and fifty knights. Kay, with a plodding pragmatism, insists that this is mathematically impossible.
“Say it was fifty yards across. … Think of all the space in the middle. It would be an ocean of wood with a thin rim of humanity. You couldn’t keep the food in the middle even, because nobody would be able to reach it.”
“Then we can have a circular table, not a round one. I don’t know what the proper word is. I mean we could have a table shaped like the rim of a cart-wheel, and the servants could walk about in the empty space, where the spokes would be. We could call them Knights of the Round Table.” (White 1987: 265)
Figure 32.1 Camelot (1967), directed by Joshua Logan.
Image not available in this digital edition
What White considers a subject of amusement, the physical impossibility of a round table that would hold – as Sir Thomas Malory had it – one hundred and fifty knights, Logan embraces as an opportunity to imagine the grandeur of the Arthurian court. But even as he endeavors to reproduce a moment that never happened, the gathering of Arthur’s knights around a colossal table – one considerably larger than the supposedly “real” Round Table on display in Winchester’s Great Hall – Logan primarily succeeds in calling attention to the medium in which he is working. Logan’s Round Table is, perhaps, more than anything else a product of the economics of the Hollywood blockbuster. As lavish as the Broadway production of Camelot might have been – written by Lerner and Loewe, the team behind My Fair Lady, and starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, Camelot was, by any standard, a major Broadway musical – it was nevertheless limited in scale by the size of the theatre, the size and shape of the stage, and the difficulty a crew would encounter in having to move an enormous prop on and off stage, night after night. Logan, on the other hand, could construct his Round Table in a massive Hollywood soundstage where it could serve to create one breathtaking shot and then be disassembled, never to be used again.
For Logan, size matters. His Round Table fills the cinemascope screen. Cinemascope, with its flattened horizontal space, provides the perfect medium for recreating the inflated romantic aspirations of the Arthurian legend, which fantasizes a king so open, so noble, so popular that nobles would flock from throughout Christendom to serve him, a king so wealthy and powerful that he could provide appropriate accommodation for this onslaught of aristocrats and control their violent tendencies. Logan’s Round Table repudiates and remediates White’s bemused mockery of the overblown ambitions of medieval romance, constructing the spectacle that Malory could only have imagined. This single shot of Arthur assembling his knights around his newly installed Round Table, filmed from above as a crane shot, offers its viewers a sense of immediacy that neither book nor stage could achieve. In its epic scope the shot is an example of what Tom Gunning has described as the “cinema of attractions.” It is pure visual spectacle, demonstrating the way in which the logic of hypermediacy can insinuate itself even into the logic of immediacy (Bolter & Grusin 1999: 155). Audiences are invited to marvel at the ability of film to create authentic illusions, to make fantasies seem almost real, even when we know them to be fictions. In Logan’s hands, the cinema of attraction becomes a mechanism for connecting the fantasies of medieval romance to the romantic self-fashionings of America in the late 1960s, where middle-class suburbanites continued to believe in the efficacy of might for right, the expansion of the American imperium – even to the moon – and the need for larger movie theatres with even larger, more spectacular screens to display the limitlessness of their own potential.
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Arthurian vision may even be more expansive than Logan’s. It is certainly more overtly hypermediated. Unlike Logan, Syberberg is completely uninterested in creating illusions of reality; for him, cinema is quintessentially hypermedia; it should call attention to its own artifice. His 1982 version of Wagner’s Parsifal posits film-making itself as the Holy Grail – a blender through which all media are remediated. The film provides a space in which high art – the music dramas of Richard Wagner, for instance – can co-habit with the detritus of western civilization, where hundreds of years of genius and junk can be brought together in the service of a fantasy that is simultaneously bound by the past that has produced it and also capable of resisting the limitations of history. Let us look at one simple shot from the extraordinarily complex opening sequence of the film (figure 32.2).
Figure 32.2 Parsifal (1982), directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
Image not available in this digital edition
Filmed in front of an enormous death mask of Richard Wagner that serves as a set for the film, this shot depicts a woman, a queen as indicated by the crown on her lap. She is reclining on a couch, holding a book – an illuminated manuscript – in which we can just make out a picture of King Arthur and his Round Table, one of the few references to the matter of Britain in the film. The presence of the book in the shot indicates the extent to which Syberberg’s remediation of Wagner’s opera is also a remediation of earlier German texts such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. As such, it both embraces and rejects the discourses of Germany’s many pasts; it both accepts the narratives offered by medieval poetry and nineteenth-century musical drama and seeks to transcend them. The medium of the book, however, denies the image both the immediacy and the grandeur Logan’s shot gives to the Round Table. It reduces the Round Table to a story, a fairy tale. Syberberg takes all the pomp and ceremony of the matter of Britain suggested by Logan’s Round Table and reduces it to a tiny picture in a book, which can then be closed and put away, freeing both Wagner and Syberberg to create their own remediations of the legend.
Syberberg’s struggles with the many media that gave form to the German version of the Grail story are evident in the opening sequence, which remediates Wagner’s overture. In an opera or musical drama, the overture is instrumental music designed to signal the audience to take their seats, that it is time for the show to begin. As such it marks an artificial transition in the physical space of the theatre, equivalent to dimming the house lights. The overture is conventionally performed with the theatre curtain down so there is nothing for the audience to look at while they listen to the music. In remediating this theatrical experience, a film must provide some visual entertainment to accompany the music, ensuring its immediacy – the immediacy promised by the medium of film. Syberberg’s complex overture sequence, however, creates a hypermediated experience that does not just occupy viewers as they listen to the overture; it overwhelms them. Syberberg multiplies media, filling the screen and bombarding the audience with the visual detritus of Western media culture, not only with music, but with photographs, stages, models of stages, puppet shows, books, and props for the opera. Syberberg’s remediation of Wagner’s opera will be a history of the media that have served to transmit the legend of Parsifal. Before beginning the opera’s narrative – which will play out in his 4-hour 25-minute film – Syberberg, with astonishing brevity, at least to anyone familiar with either Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century medieval poem or with Wagner’s nineteenth-century music drama, prefigures the Grail catastrophes – the onset of the waste land and the initial failures to locate redemption – through the medium of photography. The film opens as the camera pans across a series of pictures of ruins as the overture to Parsifal plays. These photographs are scattered like so much rubbish on a table, along with a dead swan, its bloody body pierced by an arrow.
As if this initial representation of the Grail waste land as the detritus of media events was insufficient to remind viewers of the opera’s plot, however, or simply not long enough to cover the overture, Syberberg proceeds to remediate the story yet again, this time miming all of the events of the story that lead up to the opening of Act I through the medium of the puppet show, an art form popular in the middle ages, the nineteenth century, and among the twentieth-century German avant-garde. The puppet show is watched simultaneously by the film’s audience and by child actor David Luther – soon to be identified as the movie’s eponymous hero, and, perhaps, as he is dressed in pseudo-medieval garb, already filling that role. This telescoping of time, along with its compression of audiences, past and present, suggests Syberberg’s consciousness of his role in the remediation process, his understanding that this film is but one instance of the media procession hypermediating the Grail text, but by encompassing all media, it can perhaps be the last.
As the puppet show and Wagner’s overture approach their conclusion, Syberberg leaves his audience one final image, the shot reproduced in figure 32.2 – the fulfillment of the overture montage. Just before the film segues into the first act of Wagner’s music drama, Syberberg’s camera locates the actress Edith Clever, who plays both Parsifal’s mother – she has already had a brief, maternal scene with David Luther, during which she presents him with a bow and arrow and attempts to kiss him – and Kundry, the wandering, disturbing, tragic, erotic presence that haunts Wagner’s Grail community. Here she seems to be miming her role as Parsifal’s dead, or soon-to-be dead, mother who has lost her son to the chivalric order represented by the Round Table pictured in the manuscript illumination on her lap. Here, the marginalized other, the woman through whose abject difference the Grail community constructs its chivalric identity, seems in the final moments of her life to cast an omniscient glance at the medium through which that chivalry is transmitted – the book – just as, at the film’s end, Clever, as Kundry, the exotic Semitic outsider, will cast an omniscient glance over the entirety of the Wagnerian opus, when she is pictured staring down on a snow globe that contains a model of Wagner’s Bayreuth opera house.
As the camera zooms in to focus on the manuscript page with its picture of the Round Table, Syberberg leaves his viewer perplexed and, perhaps, perturbed with this self-conscious remediation of the written word (figure 32.3). We stare over the director’s shoulder as he stares over the shoulder of his actress/character(s) reading, or perhaps just holding, a book that is barely identifiable; is it a manuscript, some remnant of the “real” Middle Ages? The shot calls attention to the medium of cinema as it embraces all of these possibilities, reimagines, and supersedes both the medieval text and Wagner’s musical reimagining of it. But even more striking is the probability that Syberberg believes that once his film has been viewed through the many intermediary spaces he has created, all imaginings of both the Middle Ages and Wagner will be shifted, the past will be transcended. Arriving last in a long line of remediations, he seems to argue that his film will stand, at least for a while, as the apotheosis of Wagnerian drama, appropriating all previous media forms to itself and initiating a reassessment of everything that has preceded it.
Figure 32.3 Parsifal (1982), detail.
Image not available in this digital edition
But even as it argues for cinema’s primacy among all other media, Syberberg’s film reaches something of a dead end, a suffocating space of incessant self-referentiality. If Logan’s shot of the Round Table strives for immediacy and Syberberg’s for hypermediacy, we must remember that remediation works through a logic that involves both. To illustrate this, we must turn our attention to newer forms of “hypermedia,” recent applications “that present multiple media (text, graphics, animation, video) using a hypertextual organization” (Bolter & Grusin 1999: 272). DVDs are a good example of this newer digital hypermedia. As larger television screens and high-definition formatting make watching a DVD feel increasingly like a movie theatre experience, cineastes, once disdainful of any form of home viewing, have been drawn to this technology. But DVDs offer more than just an opportunity to watch a film in the comfort of one’s home. They remediate the process of film viewing, providing viewers with “extras” that frequently vie with the main feature for our attention: trailers, missing scenes, alternative endings, documentaries, video games, cast biographies, historical “footnotes,” and audio commentary.
While Camelot and Parsifal are both available on DVD, neither of these films takes full advantage of the technology’s promise. The audio commentary that accompanies John Boorman’s (1981) film Excalibur, however, offers a starting point for an analysis of the medium’s potential for remediating Arthurian narrative. Elvis Mitchell (2003) considers how the process of adding commentary to DVDs “was perfected by Criterion, a company that took as its mission eliciting lengthy interviews with directors and boiling them down into thoughtful, and often staggeringly intense, conversations about filmmaking.” Mitchell suggests that DVD audio commentary tantalizes with the potentiality of access to origin. It offers the prospect that analysis by screenwriters, directors, and actors could render all further interpretation superfluous, granting viewers immediacy through access to the film-makers themselves, who seem to be sitting with us in our living rooms discussing their work. “For a time,” he argues, “it seemed that Criterion’s output might eliminate the need for film schools altogether, since their essential components, access to films and information about them, were packaged in two-disc sets … The Criterion Collection’s laser disc presentations were so deluxe that the filmmakers themselves literally signed off on them: the cases included a somber black label with the director’s signature and the legend Director Approved Special Edition.”
Robert Hanning, in his analysis of medieval textual glossing, suggests that “[a]s an explanatory technique, glossing belonged primarily to the schools and the pulpit, but as a concept it achieved a much broader cultural currency, functioning as a metaphor for all kinds of textual manipulation, even what might be called textual harassment, that is, the forcible imposition of special meanings on single words or entire verbal structures” (Hanning 1987: 27). In so many ways, DVD audio commentary functions as a high-tech textual gloss. Like the medieval textual gloss, the audio commentary stands simultaneously both in counterpoint to the text it analyses and as its supplement. Proximity endows the gloss with an authority that overshadows all other possible commentaries, so much so that the gloss even threatens to overwhelm the text it analyses. But ultimately the bonds that tie text and gloss together slip, as do the connections between a film and its DVD audio commentary. They become destabilized, susceptible to interpretations that require reassessments of their relationships.
For the DVD of Excalibur, John Boorman’s audio overlay hints, at times, at a thoughtful, careful reappraisal of his film. But with one striking sequence, culminating in the rape of Igrayne, Boorman’s commentary devolves into an uncomfortable – though fascinating – discussion about reimagining sexual violence in Arthurian romance. Boorman’s stuttering, stammering narrative of why he chose his daughter to play Igrayne calls into question the immediacy of audio commentary. It holds out the hope of immediate access to authorial interpretation while simultaneously withholding that meaning, calling attention to the process of mediation itself. Although Excalibur offers moments of gratuitous nudity, arguably for the sake of authenticity, Boorman seems somewhat reluctant to talk about how, in his film, bodies – primarily female bodies – are constructed as objects of desire, sites for a multiplicity of gazes, each with its own set of social, political, and sexual agendas. In his DVD audio commentary, Boorman steps back and looks admiringly, for the most part, on his cinematic creation. But he only hesitatingly reflects on his rendering of gendered identity in the homosocial world of the Arthurian legend. Even as he fills the screen with sexually charged images, Boorman seems intent on discussing nearly anything else.
In Malory’s Morte Darthur, Uther Pendragon’s desire for Igrayne coalesces with his determination to take all that belongs to Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall, including his wife. Igrayne, however, rebuffs the king’s advances: she was a passing good woman and wold not assente unto the kynge (Vinaver 1990: I.7). Boorman’s remediation of this scene complicates the sexual politics of the situation. Having made claim to Excalibur, “the sword of power,” Uther celebrates with those who have sworn fealty to him. At a dinner celebration, Uther and Gorlois bind themselves to one another, cutting their arms and intermixing their blood. Gorlois then taunts his newly made blood brother: “My wife will dance for us. Igrayne, dance! You may be king, Uther, but no queen of yours will ever match her.” Igrayne’s body becomes a site both of bonding – she is after all displaying herself for Uther and his men – and contestation. Boorman’s Uther might have been satisfied simply to possess property – hence the refrain, “one land, one king.” But Gorlois cannot leave well enough alone, and Igrayne’s dance prompts a hypermasculine response from Uther, as sexual desire becomes entangled with homosocial one-upmanship.
While this sequence plays itself out, John Boorman’s commentary is heading in an altogether different direction. He addresses why he chose actor Gabriel Byrne to play Uther, lingering on Byrne’s heavy Dublin accent and the various problems it caused. When Gorlois introduces Igrayne, Boorman discloses, almost as an aside: “That’s my daughter, Katrine, playing the unfortunate creature [long pause] Igrayne, who gives birth to Arthur.” Boorman then shifts topics again, apparently unable to address effectively his casting choice, unable to watch and comment on his daughter’s sexualized exhibition, even as his cinematic knights are banging their flagons on the table to cheer on Igrayne’s ecstatic dance. The juxtaposition of the onscreen action with the director’s audio commentary is astonishing. Katrine Boorman/Igrayne is dancing her way to orgasm as John Boorman nervously – his discourse filled with long pauses and stumblings – turns his attention to the significance of the matter of Britain: “The legend, you know, it’s always, the Grail legend, the Arthurian legend, it has always obsessed me. It seems to be central to the English-speaking nations. The power of it is that it’s really in three parts: there is the early part which is the birth of Arthur, or Uther, his father Uther, this kind of brutal period where man seems to be emerging from the swamp … then there is Camelot, which is the rise of Arthur and civilization. Then there is the collapse of civilization and the waste land, which is to represent the past, the present, and the future of humanity.” Boorman’s commentary is interesting for its inarticulate evasions, for what it cannot say. Having turned his daughter into an object of the male gaze, he averts his eyes; he cannot bring himself to look. The obsession that is playing itself out on the screen is one he cannot bear to discuss. The obsession that he does discuss is academic. The commentary, far from rendering the scene transparent, hypermediates it, filling Boorman’s silence before his daughter’s sexuality with distracting noise.
Malory spends little time detailing Uther’s rape of Igrayne. Malory’s squeamishness about sexual detail is more than made up for in Boorman’s film, which gives Uther’s rape of Igrayne a sadomasochistic edginess, complete with paraphernalia of bondage and domination. Uther, in the guise of Gorlois, walks into Igrayne’s bedchamber, roughly kisses her, rips off her nightdress, and proceeds, while still fully armored, to rape her. The scene is disturbing, even more so because of the varied witnesses to the sexual violence, including Gorlois’ daughter, the child Morgana, and, it is hinted, perhaps Gorlois himself, since Borman intercuts Gorlois’ dying moments with Uther and Igrayne’s sexual climax, suggesting that Gorlois must witnesses the submission of his wife as he breathes his last breath. The problematic role of the film’s director in vividly expanding what Malory only hints at is not entirely lost on Boorman, but he is uncomfortable talking about it. Can Boorman possibly have avoided, for more than twenty years, inquiries about casting his own daughter as the victim of a graphically depicted sexual violation? Still, his discussion of the scene is halting and troubled. He says: “In this scene we see the death of Cornwall, with Uther, as it were, raping his wife, but, of course, it is in the guise of Cornwall, because Merlin has transposed him. That’s the young Morgana, of course. And, uh, so people, a lot of people ask me, well, what, how do you feel about directing your daughter being raped. Well, she wasn’t being raped, of course, it was, uh, it was just a scene. She didn’t mind, nor did I.”
Boorman protests not nearly enough. His film offers rape as performance, and its multiple levels of voyeuristic opportunity serve, in part, to eroticize what would otherwise be little more than an act of brute aggression. Morgana, the film-makers, and the cinematic audience all know that a rape is occurring. Igrayne, on the other hand, does not, and the line between rape and rough sex is blurred by the movie. Igrayne believes that it is her husband, returned from battle, who takes her forcibly in front of their child. She is surprised by the violence of the sexuality, but also responsive, her participation signaled by her placing her left leg over her lover – actually over his armor – as he pounds away at her. Boorman’s camera collaborates in confusing violence with sex, in shielding the offender – keeping him armored, protected in his impermeable masculinity – while opening the victim to any number of desiring gazes. The camera and Uther become one, violating Igrayne/Katrine.
Again, Boorman tries to discuss the scene in question, but allows himself to become distracted, this time with technical issues. He begins not by talking about the action on the screen but rather about the set: “This is a marvelous set done by Tony Pratt, who has done a lot of my pictures, uh, and, in fact, in this heavy monumental kind of gothic, not gothic exactly, but, uh, Germanic kind of style, was very successful, perhaps more successful than the later Camelot, which was a kind of goldy, gold and silver, which I was, um, was my fault really, because I wanted it, Tony did it, but it wasn’t as effective as this. I think the most difficult thing for Katrine in this scene was the proximity of the fire. We wanted to get the flames rising around them, so when we intercut with her husband dying, you had, uh, also the flames.” Although Boorman insists that his daughter was only playing a role – “She didn’t mind, nor did I” – he confuses the actress with her character throughout his audio commentary. His focus on the technical obscures, but not much, his own conflicted position concerning what he has produced. John Boorman’s DVD audio commentary veers away from a discussion of his film just when discussion of the project becomes too personal and too disturbing. In every sense we learn more from what Boorman doesn’t tell us, what he can’t bring himself to tell us, than from the superficial overview he tries to provide. Even as the authoritativeness of the DVD audio commentary proves insufficient, opening spaces for interpretation rather than closing them, the DVD’s special features – including the audio commentary – remediate not only Boorman’s film, but the Arthurian legend itself.
DVD extras, like commentary, only begin to uncover the impact of new media on Arthurian narrative. We would like to close by returning to the Black Knight sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with which we began, this time as it is remediated on the internet at YouTube (2006), the popular web site where users can upload, view, and share video clips, both homemade and commercial, a site that is currently being hailed as “the future of media” (Garfield 2006: 3). The site, which has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right, boasts more than 65,000 new video uploads every day. On YouTube homemade videos of piano-playing cats jostle with classic TV commercials, popular music videos, and even professional entertainment “stolen from or surrendered by Hollywood” (Garfield 2006: 3). All of our previous discussion has assumed a situation in which video entertainment is produced and distributed by Hollywood or other national film industries that more or less limit the ways in which viewers interact with the content. YouTube changes that situation, creating a new locus whose very emptiness (the site designers provide only a template into which users dump whatever content they choose) allows for an almost infinite variety of uses and remediations (that much of this content – both video and verbal – is inane may even be beside the point). On YouTube, the Black Knight sequence is detached from its place in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and uploaded in much the same way that the designers of medieval books broke apart works like, say, The Canterbury Tales, circulating the stories independently in new contexts, paired with new content. The clip circulates independently of the film, creating new meanings as it is juxtaposed with other media. Like most websites, YouTube is hypermedia; it is a chaotic mélange of different media – graphics, multiple videos, text, sound, photographs, and animation in multiple panes and windows – all jumbled together, all simultaneously competing for our attention (see figure 32.4). Everywhere is the ubiquitous link that allows users to jump willy-nilly from one window to another, from one bit of information to whatever proximate bit catches their attention. YouTube simply cannot be passively viewed, like a film. It requires active manipulation on the part of the viewer, who must constantly choose – what links to click, what videos to watch, what responses to make.
Figure 32.4 YouTube Black Knight sequence.
Image not available in this digital edition
The clip from Monty Python is displayed in a small window roughly 3 × 4 inches (which can be expanded to a full-screen view). To the right is a box with information about the poster, in this instance BassmanFOO. Also to the right are thumbnail pictures of other clips from the film that have been uploaded to the site, as well as a series of unrelated “Promoted Videos,” including a film on “How to Balance Two Forks on a Toothpick.” Below the clip are a seemingly endless stream of “Comments and Responses” from users who have viewed the clip. These consist almost exclusively of quotations from this and other scenes in the film (“what are you going to do, bleed on me?”), followed by the enigmatic “initialese” favored by inveterate “texters” – lol (laugh out loud), rofl (rolling on the floor laughing). Taken as a whole (an almost impossible task), the experience of viewing the Black Knight skit on YouTube seems to imitate (or remediate) what it would be like for a group of friends to sit around a room, perhaps sharing a few beers or getting stoned, and watch the movie, yelling out the lines in unison. The recitation becomes less commentary than a form of social bonding. In other words, uploads to the site do not convey content so much as they become a mechanism for forging new kinds of imagined friendship networks that extend far beyond the confines of any party space (in this they are like social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, internet phenomena that developed at almost exactly the same moment as YouTube). Our Monty Python clip links some 2,184 individuals (as of March 2, 2008) who have responded to it, frequently with little more than an assertion that they like it as much as the next guy. In 1967, the same year Joshua Logan released his film version of Camelot, the French situationist Guy Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle, that “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 1992). YouTube seems perfectly to realize that vision, though whether as nightmare or utopia is still an open question.
As our analysis above suggests, the Arthurian legend cannot be understood without also thinking about the various media that have served as its hosts. We have tried to suggest that those media must be explored simultaneously as objects, as social relationships, and as formal structures. They reconfigure the way we conceive of reception and how we locate ourselves in interpretive communities. The story of Arthur has really changed little since the Middle Ages. However, the technologies that have reproduced it during the twentieth century – in theatres, at home on DVD, or online at a computer – have fundamentally altered our relationship with it.
Primary Sources
Vinaver, E. (ed.) (1990). Malory. Works, 3 vols, 3rd rev. edn (ed. P. J. C. Field). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
White, T. H. (1987). The once and future king. New York: Ace Books.
References And Further Reading
Barber, R. (ed.) (2002). King Arthur in music. Woodbridge: Brewer.
Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Debord, G. (1992) The society of the spectacle (trans. K. Knabb). London: Rebel Press. (Originally published as La société du spectacle, Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1967.)
Garfield, R. (2006). YouTube vs. boob tube. Wired, 14. At www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html. Accessed March 2, 2008.
Hanning, R. (1987). “I shal finde it in a maner glose”: Versions of textual harassment in medieval literature. In L. A. Finke & M. B. Shichtman (eds), Medieval texts and contemporary readers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 27–50.
Gunning, T. (1990). The cinema of attractions: Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde. In T. Elsaesser & A. Barker (eds), Early film: Space, frame, narrative. London: British Film Institute, pp. 95–103.
Mitchell, E. (2003). Everyone’s a film geek now. New York Times, August 7, 2003.
Sklar, E. S. & Hoffman, D. L. (eds) (2002). King Arthur in popular culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
YouTube (2006). Monty Python and the Holy Grail – The Black Knight. At www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno&feature=PlayList&p=83C4001CC5B518F4&index=3, accessed March 2, 2008.
Filmography
Camelot (1967). Dir. Joshua Logan. DVD Special Edition Warner Home Video, 1998.
Excalibur (1981). Dir. John Boorman. DVD Warner Home Video, 1999.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones. DVD Special Edition Sony Pictures, 2001.
Parsifal (1982). Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Film Munchen. DVD Imagine Entertainment, 1999.