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The Art of Arthurian Cinema
Perceptio and inventio, “seeing” and “discovering”
In the Middle Ages, inventio was the process whereby a narrative was recreated by the author of a text (visual or literary) for transmission to an audience. The author discovered the meanings inherent in his material – story, narrative, rhetorical techniques – and then re-presented it according to his own vision and the requirements of his audience. When a director and his team recreate a text, they have to attempt an understanding of how the original source text was created, and why. In the process of this recreation, therefore, some of the qualities of the original will remain present in the cinematic text. The director, like the medieval author, “discovers” (in the senses of “finding” and of “uncovering”) the text. Three films in which this is the case are Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, 1974), Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, 1978), and Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981).
Lancelot du Lac
Mirrors were potent symbols in medieval culture. The view in the mirror represented truth, but was also associated with death. Death itself was a mirror, in which the sinner sees his/her true self before the Judgment. In Lancelot du Lac, Queen Guenièvre holds up a mirror, the symbol of a truth and an impending tragedy that only she can see.
Perception, seeing, and not seeing are centrally important to the understanding of Bresson’s Lancelot. The film itself is full of eyes – not human eyes, but the eyes of horses. In a film about knighthood and chivalry, horses are key characters; after all, it is they who put the cheval in chevalier. Bresson’s horses appear throughout the film, and their sounds – hooves, breath, neighing, and whinnying – punctuate the soundtrack. The horses watch the human characters knowingly, and in the end they suffer the same fate: Lancelot’s horse falls with its master, an arrow in its head. Their eyes, unlike those of the human characters, stare straight out of the frame, directly at the viewer. They challenge us to look harder, not only to see but to perceive. They encourage not only observation, but a moral response. The audience are encouraged to relate to the characters in the filmic text (as in La Mort le Roi Artu, Bresson’s thirteenth-century source text), and to realize that their own perception, like their view, is equally partial and sometimes obscured.
This effect is reinforced by Bresson’s use of camera angles and the composition of his shots. The camera angles, especially in action and transitional scenes, are frequently unusual, with shots from below and above, at different angles from their subjects, edited together in discordant ways. Many shots feature the body in part only, usually the legs and lower body, of humans or of horses. The effect of this is to dissolve the individuals into a single jellied mass, a corporate body of “knighthood,” implying a common code, a common ethos, a common purpose – although this also reinforces the irony that these knights are not united, have abandoned or betrayed their common code, and have no purpose left after the failure of the Grail quest. Their corporate anonymity is further reinforced by the effects of the full plate armor which they wear; their individual identity is lost when their visors are lowered, an action which Bresson stresses by continual close-ups of visor raising and lowering, accompanied by the sound of the hinges and the clash of metal on metal.
Guenièvre is one of the most far-sighted characters in Lancelot du Lac. The age of prophecy is dead, a fact to which she draws attention by her reference to Merlin’s prophecy of doom. Bresson represents the prophetic presence from his source text in terms of a souciant nature. He uses horses and other animals, especially birds, in this way (for example, the jackdaw which caws with ill omen when Mordred approaches the outbuilding where Lancelot and Guenièvre are having an illicit tryst). Gauvain watches the clouds for omens, such as the cataclysmic storm that accompanies the tournament, instilling an uncontrollable fear in Guenièvre, portending Lancelot’s wounding, Mordred’s treason, and the deaths of them all. Bresson emphasizes this with a shot of Lancelot’s pennant, the means of his identification, ripped from the apex of his tent by the storm, lying unnoticed in a puddle.
Gauvain achieves prophetic vision at the point of death. Christ-like, wrapped in his bloodstained bandages after being accidentally dealt a mortal wound by Lancelot, Gauvain warns Artus of the fatal consequences of attacking his killer. Bresson has changed the character of Gauvain from the source text, where he is much older and very prone to human weaknesses, to make him a naïf young man for whom Lancelot is an example and a hero. Gauvain’s youth adds pathos to Lancelot’s betrayal of his chivalric reputation.
Bresson makes Guenièvre a girl-queen, trapped in her marriage to an older man who appears to treat her with cool harshness. She is the archetypal “damsel,” imprisoned in a tower (a common medieval trope), rescued by Lancelot, then forced by circumstances to return to her husband. Guenièvre is better able than her lover to see and to understand her predicament, but she is powerless to prevent the outcome; it is men (on horses) who make history. Guenièvre points out the tension at the heart of the chivalric code, in which she and Lancelot, indeed the whole of Camelot’s society, are trapped, the tension between the “masculine” qualities of loyalty, strength, courage, and hardihood, based on knightly violence, and the more “feminine” qualities of courtly love, based on relationships with women. This tension is central to medieval Arthurian narrative.
Bresson sets up this conflict at the film’s violent opening, with heads being lopped off, decomposing corpses hanging in the trees, and armor being pierced, blood flowing. This is the first of three episodes of violence that make a framework for the narrative. Alongside these, there are three instances of the taking (or not) of hands in gestures of amicitia, which in medieval terms can mean either warm friendship or erotic love. This follows Bresson’s source: medieval writers and theologians loved to arrange their work in “threes.” On his return to the Round Table, Lancelot goes to a room over a barn (an ironic “upper room” in biblical terms) to meet his lover. After “worshipping” her by kissing the hem of her skirt (the courtly lover as Virgin Mary), Guenièvre expects Lancelot to take her hand and to make his aveu (avowal) of love for her, as courtly love requires. Instead, he tells her that their affair must end. Guenièvre is so desperate that she goes as far as to ask, or demand, what should be hers by right. She rejects his moral argument, and the moral/religious basis of the Grail quest, in defense of the supremacy of love over violence.
The tournament scene at the center of the film corresponds with another failed taking of hands. Lancelot goes to Mordred’s tent, offering his hand in a gesture of reconciliation. He believes at this point that Mordred can only guess about his adultery with the queen, which Mordred has been plotting to expose, and couches his gesture in the political discourse of public concern. Again, Lancelot’s perception is faulty; he does not see the woman’s scarf that Mordred is hiding in a dark corner, away from the lantern’s light. Mordred stands imperiously in the harsh golden light, refusing to respond. When Lancelot sees the scarf, he realizes that it is Guenièvre’s, and that their adultery has been exposed. Lancelot is subsequently reunited with Guenièvre, but he is still torn between the two extremes of the chivalric code. He puts off sexual activity until after he has won honor by fighting in the tournament at Escalot. Instead of being impressed, Guenièvre realizes that “honor” is directed toward men rather than toward her.
Bresson’s tournament sequence is the film’s tour de force, a brilliantly realized filmic example of amplificatio, or the exploration of a single trope from as many viewpoints as possible. The camera looks from different angles at the same subjects, from a variety of focal lengths – a knight’s knees, a flagpole with small pennants being raised, each one slightly different in color, if not in shape. As this happens, similar (traditional Breton) music is played. This is edited together with shots of the legs and feet of knights, with the legs and bellies of their horses, mounting and running against one another. There is the “ooh” of the crowd, the crash of bodies falling. There are shots of the sandy earth of the tournament field, onto which broken lances are tossed. Each time, we see similar (but never the same) shots of Artus and Gauvain in the stands, their heads moving from side to side as the knights charge. A gradual realization dawns that the anonymous knight with the plain shield is Lancelot. On the way to the tournament, Artus has already refused to surrender his willful blindness to Lancelot’s adultery with his wife. The honor and the thrill of partaking in Lancelot’s tournament victories is his vindication.
The final battle is the working out of the violence and betrayal that was implicit in the Grail quest with which the narrative began. It is preceded by another gesture of hands, as Lancelot returns Guenièvre to Artus, at her own insistence, in order to heal the rift between them. As Lancelot leads her to the meeting with Artus, Guenièvre holds onto Lancelot’s arm just above the wrist. As she leaves him, her hand passes over his very closely, but they do not touch. Guenièvre’s mirror is revealed to be a portent; love must wait for death. The promised night of passion never happened. As she tells Lancelot, it is the promise, the potential of their love which will survive, a hope seemingly fulfilled in the bird that flies away from the heap of dead bodies (a familiar ending to medieval battles).
Frequently what we see in the film is empty spaces. “My hands are empty,” says Lancelot to Artus on his return from the Grail quest, and so they prove to be, both physically and morally. He has nothing to offer Guenièvre but excuses based on false religiosity, only false hope for Artus, an example based on a lie for Gauvain, and a reconciliation based on guilt and fear for Mordred. Lancelot cannot even save himself. The empty spaces convey a sense of failure, wasted potential, and lack. This is evident at the beginning, when Artus shows Lancelot the room containing the now empty Round Table. Artus begins by indicating the seats of individual knights, giving the dead occupant’s name, but he moves from “here sat [name]” to simply “there … and there … ”; the memory, and the sense of loss, are too painful to articulate. Like Guenièvre’s bed without Lancelot, almost everything in the film is empty: chivalry without honor, knighthood without brotherhood or purpose, the Round Table without its occupants, a society without hope and without a future.
In this Bresson is echoing his source, although his simplified narrative, selection of material, and stripped-down style enable him to emphasize this more strongly. The temporal limitations of the film impose their own imperatives; the film demands singularity of vision in a way that the “epic” written narrative does not. Within this story of failure, Bresson’s Artus is a failed king. He is unable to tell his knights what to do or to provide comfort and purpose for them, unable to provide the impetus for reconciliation and communal healing, which they need after the Grail quest, unable to gain the love or respect of his young wife, unable to make up his own mind. When Gauvain challenges him to give advice on what the knights can do to help themselves, Artus responds, “pray, perfect yourselves,” an answer for which Gauvain has obvious contempt. Guenièvre reveals that she hates and despises Artus. Artus, like Lancelot, cannot “see.”
Again, Bresson is following his source. The medieval Artu of La Mort is a pathetic figure, reactive rather than proactive. He does not want to know the truth about Guenièvre and Lancelot, although “everyone” knows and talks about it behind his back, and the only time in which he acts positively is in vindictive anger after he learns of the adulterous affair. Artu (not Mordred) arranges Agravain’s attempt to catch the lovers together, then picks a quarrel with Lancelot, and arranges for the queen to be burned.
Bresson’s Lancelot, like his Camelot, has been symbolically dead since the Grail quest. When symbolic death has occurred, actual physical death is secondary. Both are gradually drained of meaning through the film. However, it is the promise, the potential of both Lancelot and Guenièvre’s love and of the Arthurian legend, which will survive. It is this, not their initial failure, which really matters.
Perceval le Gallois
The original source text for Perceval le Gallois is the unfinished romance of Perceval, or Le Conte du Graal, composed in the 1180s and left unfinished by Chrétien de Troyes (see chapter 14). The story was resumed after Chrétien’s death by at least four different continuators, but Eric Rohmer, who had taught Old French, used only Chrétien’s text, rather than using the continuations to provide an “ending.” Rohmer knew and followed Chrétien’s narrative closely, using his own modern French translation as the film script. He took Chrétien’s text, “dis-covered” its contents, then added his own vision and cinematic rhetoric, re-presenting it as a film. This is his, very medieval, claim to moral and intellectual auctoritas. Rohmer has been criticized for adding his own ending to Chrétien’s narrative, but in the light of this claim, he becomes simply Chrétien’s latest continuator.
Rohmer follows Chrétien’s text closely. He has extracted what he considers to be the most critical parts of each section, in order to preserve the essence of Chrétien’s style and narrative, while excising enough to allow, as Bresson does, the visual images to “speak” for themselves. Instead of a closely woven tripartite structure such as that of Bresson or Boorman, Rohmer adopts the episodic structure of his source text, retaining almost all of Chrétien’s episodes in their original order. Each episode is bridged by a “journey” scene or sequence, in which a character, usually Perceval, moves from one side of the (semicircular) set to the other, following a twisting course through the same arrangement of painted metal trees. This movement is usually accompanied by spoken or sung narrative. In this way Rohmer creates an impression of movement through the narrative, which parallels Perceval’s physical and psychological journey and yet manages at the same time, by the use of the same visual clues, to unify his episodic narrative. The camera sometimes moves, and sometimes pans, around the space. In the context of the film as a whole, panning (the camera follows the action while fixed to a single spot) is used in order to surprise. At the film’s opening, the camera pans away from the singing chorus to reveal “birdsong” being created artificially by other chorus members. Later, Perceval’s surprise at the appearance of a rider is conveyed by a swish (fast) pan. Special effects are reserved for supranatural events, such as the appearance of the Fisher King’s castle, the arrival of the mysterious girl, and the (cartoon) goose. The cut is used to convey synchronicity. When Perceval sends his vanquished opponents to the court of King Arthur, their appearance before the king is revealed by editing, while Perceval’s narrative continues in another location.
In his presentation of Perceval, Rohmer has achieved a fusion of romance epic narrative, medieval mystery play, and, most interestingly, the medieval practice of performing Old French lyric poetry. The chorus is presented as a group of traveling minstrels (trouvères) who present the narrative, sometimes spoken but mostly sung. In the medieval tradition, they frequently perform as a soloist and complementary voices, accompanying themselves on reconstructed medieval instruments. The pitch, tone, and tempo of voices and instruments work together to produce the soundtrack. An important, and widespread, practice across Europe in the Middle Ages was the “dance-play,” in which actor/dancers would perform all or part of a sung narrative, miming the actions while speaking or singing part of the musical accompaniment. In this type of performance, the actors would be joined by members of the chorus, who were also the singers and players of musical instruments. Rohmer has reproduced this on film, with the singers of the chorus joining the actors to perform the story – for example, when chorus members become the laughing girl and the fool, or when they become courtiers and serving men and women, while still singing the narrative, and commenting upon it. The characters, especially Perceval and Blanchefleur, frequently pick up the narrative from the chorus in the third person (“the knight said … ”), blurring the lines between narration and performed narrative. The whole weaves together into an inextricable, unified, multidisciplinary, very medieval, work of art in a twentieth-century medium.
Rohmer said that he wished to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of the medieval world to a modern audience. He achieves this not only by his method of performance, but by his sets, costumes, and manner of performance. The sets are based upon medieval manuscript illuminations, although Rohmer himself made the point that, due to an absence of contemporary manuscript illustrations, these are not so much representative of twelfth-century art romain as of later, thirteenth-century, images. In accord with the medieval images, Rohmer has not attempted to make the relationship between his sets and his human characters in any way proportional; as he himself commented, the idea of perspective did not exist in the Middle Ages. He also follows medieval manuscript images in the architectural framing of many of his sets. Marty (1985) has noted his use of the Romanesque arch as a unifying factor, comparing this to the use of similar arches in twelfth-century architecture, while Williams (1983) has compared Rohmer’s use of these settings within a semicircular set as similar to the curve of medieval illustrations, in which a circular course is used to draw the eye around a series of images, indicating the passing of time.
Gesture was part of rhetoric in the Middle Ages, and Rohmer’s characters frequently imitate the exaggerated gestures of characters in medieval art. These are stylized, and are indicative of either emotion (as when Perceval’s mother literally throws up her arms and falls in an exaggerated swoon), or of ritualized situations such as greeting, eating, courting, taking leave, and even fighting. The images in medieval art are representational, reflections of the “real.” What matters is not the naturalism of the image, but what is signified. The stylized gesture reminds the viewer of the signified emotion in the natural, the “real,” world, and this is what the viewer “reads.” In a similar way, the modern viewer interprets the non-natural images of comic books, cartoons, and video games.
Rohmer does seem to realize that, while this certainly adds to the strangeness of his film, he needs to make the whole accessible and understandable to his modern audience. Unlike Bresson’s untrained modèles, he utilizes trained actors, who inject “naturalistic” meaning and emotion into their characters’ performances. It is possible to be attracted to the naïf and well-intentioned Perceval, or to feel the tiredness of Arthur, or the desperation of the beautiful but abused Blanchefleur, while still being disconcerted at the stylized and “strange” nature of their gestures and settings. The sets and costumes also include authentic-looking medieval armor and dress, and authentic reproductions of medieval realia such as tableware, furnishings, chessboards, lamps, and the extravagantly pleated white tablecloths that were symbolic of wealth in the Middle Ages. The metal trees and metallic-looking castles add a more modern, surrealist tone.
At the beginning of the film, Perceval is living at his mother’s home in Wales, regarded as the margin of the civilized world. His understanding of the world has been engineered by his mother, after the deaths of his father and brothers in battle, in order to keep him from leaving home to become a knight. He is associated with women and peasants, and other marginalized people (he kisses serving girls). Perceval’s first appearance reveals his marginalized position: he takes up his own narrative, describing in the third person how he throws his javelins, at the same time miming the actions, by himself. His aloneness is emphasized as he fails to interact with the knight to whom he speaks. He responds to the knight’s question by asking questions of his own which have no relation to the knight’s attempts at dialogue. Following his meeting with the five knights, whom he mistakes at first for devils, then for angels, then God, Perceval, like the author/director, undertakes a journey of inventio, both discovering and dis-covering the values of the social world, as he is gradually integrated into chivalric, aristocratic society.
Perceval’s journey is closely related to the emergence of the code of chivalry at the end of the eleventh century. His development as a man has been arrested by the failure of his mother to release her control over him, although the knightly qualities that he has inherited from his father are visible to others with the aristocratic sensibility to be able to see them, such as King Arthur, Gorneman de Gorhaut, and Gauvain. Perceval demonstrates inherent strength, hardihood, and generosity, but he learns about courtly manners, skill, loyalty, courtly love, the care of the helpless, and the spiritual love of Christ. He, and his audience, must learn the difference between seeming and being, between appearance and substance.
Gorneman de Gorhaut, King Arthur, and Blanchefleur are what they seem to be, as is Sir Gauvain, but others are not, and as such their function is to draw attention to what they should be. The Knight of the Heath appears to be a courtly lover, but mistrusts and maltreats his lady; the Red Knight appears to be a powerful knight, but he is disloyal and abusive to his lord, King Arthur, and is easily overcome by the country boy’s skill in throwing a javelin into his eye. The Older Sister appears to be a courtly lady, but she mistreats her knightly lover by making unreasonable demands of him – but Sir Gauvain, while deliberately appearing to be a coward, is in reality a true knight.
Perceval’s inability to see the difference between appearance and reality leads him into comic irony (he thinks a pavilion is a church, then steals kisses and a ring from the lady inside, ignoring her obvious distress while thanking her for her hospitality and “gifts”). It also prevents him from asking questions about the Grail and the Bleeding Lance, which would have enabled the healing of the Fisher King. As he learns to be a knight, Perceval also learns to know himself, and to relate to others within society. He reaches a turning point in his personal development after his visit to the Fisher King. Up to this point it is Perceval who has been asking all the questions, but the mysterious girl begins to ask questions of him. He has been referred to constantly and impersonally as le valet (“the servant”), but now she asks his name. Chrétien says that he has to guess, but he guesses correctly, “Perceval.” Later, when asked by the hermit, he announces boldly that he is “Perceval le Gallois.”
Perceval leaves the female world to enter the world of the male. It is only when he has rejected the female by no longer submitting to his mother’s tutelage that he is able to enter into a heterosexual love relationship with Blanchefleur. His love for her reminds him of the love of his mother – in medieval understanding, a reflection of the love of the Virgin Mary for Christ and for all sinners – and causes him to set off in search of his mother. In medieval romance, secular love both mirrors and leads to spiritual love; this is implicit in the image of the three drops of blood left in the snow by the bleeding goose. As Perceval contemplates the drops of blood, a symbol of Christ’s passion, he thinks he sees the face of his beloved Blanchefleur. This leads him, after five years in which he has forgotten God, to the hermit (who is his uncle), who will lead him to a full realization not only of human love as sacrifice, but also of the sacrificial love of Christ.
This is played out in the final scene, a version of the Passion narrative enacted in the form of a medieval mystery play. The chorus sings the Passion narrative (secular and spiritual singing were very closely related in medieval art and performance), while actors from the film take on the roles of characters from the Passion. Fabrice Lucini, who plays Perceval, is now also Christ. At the climax of the play, he is wounded by the Bleeding Lance, recalling its appearance in the Fisher King’s hall. It is Good Friday, and Perceval has achieved an emotional and spiritual understanding of who he is within society, and of who he is in relation to God. The film ends with the young knight continuing on his quest. Everything appears the same, but all has changed. Perceval now has the physical, personal, and spiritual attributes that will enable him, outside the time frame of both Chrétien and the film, to successfully complete his Grail quest.
Excalibur
John Boorman’s ultimate source is Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, although it has been very strongly suggested, and with reason, that this is filtered through the views of modern commentators, in particular the “Celtic” interpretations of Jessie Weston. Malory’s text is an epic production – a reworking and translation of the whole of the Old French Vulgate cycle – as is the film, which follows Arthur’s story, albeit selectively, from beginning to end. The power of Boorman’s work lies in his visual artistry. Whereas Bresson uses minimalist settings and costumes, which have both “authentic” medievalist and modern elements, and Rohmer bases his sets and costumes on medieval manuscript illustrations, Boorman’s settings and costumes relate to the works of nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite painters, which are better suited to his “romantic” treatment of the legend. The whole is strongly interwoven with a strand of New Age Celticism. In Excalibur, the supernatural, the magic, and the prophetic overwhelm the chivalric element of Malory’s text.
In Malory’s text the supernatural is accessed by prophecy, which punctuates the narrative throughout. It is the duty, sometimes the misfortune, of human agents to make possible prophecy’s fulfillment, for good or evil. In text and film Arthur marries Guinevere despite Merlin’s warnings, while the film ends as the barge with the three noblewomen bears the dying Arthur away to Avalon, having relocated Lancelot’s career as a hermit before the final battle and having him die, as in Bresson, with the rest of the remaining Round Table knights. As a prophecy well known in Malory’s England put it, “his end will be mysterious.”
In Excalibur, nature dominates and envelops the human beings who populate it, indicative of powerful forces of supernature by which their affairs are shaped. The sword is lifted from the lake in the mists of morning, and descends back into it after Arthur’s death, in the interval between twilight and darkness, symbolizing the birth and death of the Arthurian dream. Excalibur has a tripartite structure similar to that of Lancelot du Lac, in that it begins and ends with the violence of internecine battles and the bloody deaths of knights, with a joust at its center. Bresson’s violence, however, signifies violent death, the loss of life, and the corruption of knightly ideals. The violence at the beginning and end of Excalibur is eroticized and charged with spiritual significance. In the beginning, Merlin hands Uther the (phallic) sword of power, after which Uther rapes Cornwall’s wife Ygraine, a violent sexual act which resembles combat. Uther ejaculates in time to Cornwall’s death gasps, emphasized by a thumping musical score. In Malory, these events cannot be synchronous, as Merlin uses the two-hour gap between Cornwall’s death and Arthur’s conception to “prove” that Arthur must be Uther’s son. At the film’s end, Mordred deals Arthur a mortal blow with his (phallic) spear while Arthur drives Excalibur into his son’s neck, and Mordred says, “Let us embrace.”
The joust at the film’s center is not, as in Bresson, “play,” but a trial by battle to establish the innocence or guilt of Guinevere, condemned to burn for adultery and treason. The accuser is Gawain, here taking up the role allotted in Malory to Sir Mador, who accuses Guinevere of killing Sir Patrice with a poisoned apple. Lancelot and Gawain do take part in single combat in the Morte Darthur, but this is later in the narrative, resulting from Lancelot’s killing of Gawain’s brothers. Boorman’s aim is to show the negative forces of rumor and jealousy which have entered the society of the Round Table, not through defeat, losses, and the failure of the Grail quest, as in Lancelot, but through luxury and indolence brought on by success.
Boorman reproduces Malory’s method of paralleling themes and events with examples later in the narrative. As Uther rapes Ygraine in disguise, so Morgana seduces Arthur, leading to the birth of a child. Mordred is thus, in the context of the film, the mirror of his father, the son who displays his father’s negative qualities. Arthur, on the other hand, displays Uther’s positive qualities. As Uther drives Excalibur into the rock to prevent anyone else from exercising his power, so Arthur repeats the action in his hurt and anger at Guinevere’s adultery and Lancelot’s betrayal. While Uther receives the sword and has to be told to “give,” Arthur hands Excalibur, of his own volition, to his worst enemy to be made a knight and therefore a king. Igrayne’s dance is paralleled by Guinevere’s. Arthur’s discovery of his real “self” in the first part of the film is paralleled by his rediscovery of this after the administration of the Grail by Perceval, while Morgana is a perverted image of her own mother, Igrayne.
Women are a largely negative presence in Excalibur. The theme of the Fall is woven intimately into the narrative. Uther is morally unhinged by watching Igrayne dance, and Guinevere is seen as enchanting Arthur by giving him a strange cake. Guinevere goes to her meeting with Lancelot on a horse, emphasizing her control of masculinity. Lancelot, surrounded by the wild nature associated with the female, attempts to back away from her, positioning Guinevere as the sexual aggressor. They are viewed from Merlin’s cave in juxtaposition with an iconographic image of Adam and Eve. Guinevere’s becoming a nun is brought forward, so it becomes a result of post-lapsarian guilt, rather than atonement for the collapse of Camelot and the death of its knights, as in Malory. Before his death, Lancelot admits to Arthur that his love for Guinevere, “the old wound,” will never heal, linking the woman to the ultimate debacle and the fall of civilization. This failure is ultimately Eve’s fault.
In the film, as in the Morte Darthur, there are good and bad practitioners of magic. By eliding three of Malory’s female characters (Morgan, Morgause, and Nineve) to make Morgana, Boorman is able to create a character who is driven by the desire for revenge on the son for Uther’s rape of her mother. Nothing in Excalibur “just happens,” as it does frequently in medieval Arthurian romance. This gives the film a very modern aspect. Boorman’s twentieth-century audience requires villains to have credible motivation. Morgana’s shape-shifting powers, by which she seduces her brother and bears his child, Mordred, are derived from her Celtic past as a fay, or fairy, not from Malory or his French originals, in which Morgan simply sleeps with Arthur by mutual consent when she visits his court without her husband. Morgana’s resourcefulness and sheer ability to gain and use power are undermined by her use of it to keep herself beautiful, implying that she is, as Woman, weak and vain after all. The ultimate destruction of Morgana is thus the triumph of the masculine, although it is something of a Pyrrhic victory, in which almost all die. The dying king is entrusted to the ministry of women. The idea of Woman as nature/nurture and the earth as Mother, and yet the agent of temptation and destruction, is maintained throughout and is a strong theme of the film.
The power of pagan Celtic spirituality is contained in Boorman’s conception of “the dragon,” connecting as it does to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Prophecy of Merlin,” in which the British and the invading Saxons are represented by a red and a white dragon. The dragon as a prophetic symbol is relatively common in medieval English (and Welsh) “Arthurian” prophecies. The film is dominated by lush, green landscapes, offering a loose connection with the Celtic association of supernatural, divine powers with natural phenomena such as rocks, streams, and lakes. Merlin is associated with the elements, with plants and animals, with “wild” nature, and with the female. His position in relation to Arthur’s court, and to the world of humans in general, is liminal. Although his presence at Camelot is not secret, he moves in the shadows, he converses with Morgana at the back of the room, and does not seem to move as freely as she does within the company of knights. Merlin’s wild, ragged, and hermit-like clothing emphasizes his liminality, while his “hard edge” is denoted by his metal skullcap. He serves his own prophetic agenda, with little sympathy for mortals; he ignores Igrayne’s anguished cries as he takes away her baby. In character and performance, Nicol Williamson’s Merlin in the film has many echoes of Malory’s.
Whereas the Grail is a very “present” absence in Bresson, and a luminous physical presence in Rohmer, the Grail episode in Excalibur seems incongruous and clumsily handled. If the film is based on Malory, why should the Grail knight be Perceval, rather than Galahad? One of the reasons for this may be the pre-existence of Rohmer’s film. Boorman’s Perceval is pieced together from the adventures of other characters in Malory. He is Malory’s Gareth, put to work in the kitchens by Sir Kay because his noble origins are unknown. He is Sir Bors, offering to fight for Guinevere in case Sir Lancelot does not appear in the lists. He is the Perceval of Chrétien’s continuators. Finally he is Sir Bedevere, unwillingly throwing Arthur’s sword back in to the lake as his lord lies dying. Instead of being used to heal the Fisher King, the Grail is administered to Arthur himself, as Boorman has elided Arthur with the Fisher King. Like the Fisher King, Arthur and his kingdom revive, offering Boorman the chance for a moment of creative, medievalist bravado. Arthur and his knights ride to defend the land against Mordred and his mother, as the earth springs into life in a flourish of buds, green leaves, and falling blossoms, as in the “spring” sequences of medieval lyrics, to the accompaniment of Carl Orff’s (modern treatment of the medieval) Carmina Burana – an echo of Malory’s “May” passage.
Another reason for the absence of Lancelot’s son Galahad may be the director’s desire to keep Arthur at the foreground of the film. For this reason, Lancelot’s adventures are mentioned but not shown. Arthur is ever-present, even in his physical absence from the screen. He is the chief object of desire, even for Guinevere, who, it is implied, only turns to Lancelot because she cannot fully possess Arthur. As he says to her, he must live for his legend, and cannot be a mere “man.” In the context of his Grail story, Boorman makes a very important point about the medieval perception of kingship, “the king is the land, and the land is the king.” This echoes medieval political theology, in which the king is christus, God’s anointed representative on earth. Boorman’s use of cinematic technology presents this in vivid form, with the visual elision of Arthur and Christ in Perceval’s Grail vision. The idea that a weak or depraved king would affect the physical well-being of his country was common in medieval England. Arthur is the guarantee of peace, safety for the weak (women and naked young children play outside the castle), promoter of arts and sciences (inside the castle, all manner of learning, entertainment and scientific development is under way), of plenty (the Round Table is awash with food and drink), and of justice (Arthur places this before his love for his wife). For Merlin, as for many medieval English people, Arthur is “the One”; he embodies the Celtic and the Christian, the old and the new, chivalry and kingship. He is the inspirational force behind the Round Table (which he, with the blessing of Merlin, founds, rather than it being Guinevere’s dowry as in the source texts) and Camelot. His kingship is received from God by the pulling of the sword from the stone, although his personal qualities must maintain it. His development in wisdom and maturity is made visible by Boorman in his physical development and costume, from the beardless page to the bearded man in armor, to the graying patriarch giving his life for his realm. As the king and the land are one, so are Arthur and Excalibur. He is the ultimate priest and king, wielder of both the spiritual and secular swords.
Literature and Culture
There is no such thing as “historical accuracy” in legend, which can only be true to itself. A filmed text can only be true (or not) to its written source. Each of these films seeks to discover, in the medieval sense, its source. The difference between them is contextual. Lancelot du Lac and Perceval were made in a cinematic context that stresses the legend as literature, but in Excalibur’s Anglo-American (Hollywood) context – on which Boorman relied for funding – Arthur has become part of popular culture. Boorman’s audience expects to see certain aspects of the legend in any film about Arthur (sword, Grail, joust, battle, adultery, wizards), and this is what he selects. Although he is less “accurate” than Bresson or Rohmer, he has less freedom to be so. In the light of this, Boorman’s achievement of medievalist inventio is considerable, and his film deserves, alongside Lancelot du Lac and Perceval, to be considered “art.”
References and Further Reading
Baby, Y. (1985). Metal makes sounds: An interview with Robert Bresson (trans. N. Jacobson). Field of Vision, 13, 4–5.
Bartone, R. (1992). Variations on Arthurian legend in Lancelot du Lac and Excalibur. In S. Slocum (ed.), Popular Arthurian traditions. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pp. 144–55.
Beatie, B. A. (1988). Arthurian films and Arthurian texts: Problems of reception and comprehension. Arthurian Interpretations, 2(2), 65–78.
Callaghan, L. (1999). Perceval le Gallois: Eric Rohmer’s vision of the Middle Ages. Film and History, 29, 46–53.
Codell, J. (1992). Decapitation and deconstruction: The body of the hero in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. In D. Mancoff (ed.), The Arthurian revival: Essays on form, tradition and transformation. New York: Garland, pp. 266–82.
Coote, L. A. & Levy, B. J. (2006). The subversion of medievalism in Lancelot du Lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Studies in Medievalism, 13, 99–126.
Denery, D. G. (2005). Seeing and being seen in the later medieval world: Optics, theology and the religious life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dronke, P. (1996). The medieval lyric. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
Fieschi, J. (1979). Une innocence mortelle. L’Avant-Scène du Cinéma, 221, 4–6.
Foury, M.-H. (2001). Excalibur de J. Boorman: quête originelle d’un imaginaire contemporain. Cahiers de Conques, 3, 239–60.
Frappier, J. (2000). Perceval or Le conte du graal (trans. R. Cormier). In D. Mahoney (ed.), The Grail: A casebook. New York: Garland, pp. 175–200.
Goetinck, G. W. (2000). The quest for origins. In D. Mahoney (ed.), The Grail: A casebook. New York: Garland, pp. 117–48.
Harty, K. J. (2002). Parsifal and Perceval on film: The reel life of a Grail knight. In A. Groos & N. Lacy (eds), Perceval/Parzival: A casebook. New York: Routledge, pp. 301–12.
Hindman, S. (1994). Sealed in parchment: Rereadings of knighthood in the illuminated manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Hoffman, D. L. & Sklar, E. S. (eds) (2002). King Arthur in popular culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Lacy, N. J. (2002). Mythopoeia in Excalibur. In K. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty essays, rev. edn. London: McFarland, pp. 121–34.
Marty, J. (1985). Perceval le Gallois d’Eric Rohmer: un intinéraire Roman. Cahiers de la Cinematheque, 43, 125–32.
Nickel, H. (2002). Arms and armor in Arthurian films. In K. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty essays, rev. edn. London: McFarland, pp. 235–4.
Paquette, J.-M. (1985). La dernière métamorphose de Lancelot: Robert Bresson. In D. Buschinger (ed.), Lancelot. Göppingen: Kümmerle, pp. 139–48.
Pruitt, J. (1985). Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. Field of Vision, 13, 5–9.
Quandt, J. (ed.) (1998). Robert Bresson. Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group.
Reader, K. (2000). Robert Bresson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rider, J., Hull, R., Smith, C., with Carnes, M., Foppiano, S., & Hesslein, A. (2002). The Arthurian legend in French cinema: Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois. In K. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty essays, rev. edn. London: McFarland, pp. 149–62.
Rohmer, E. (1979). Note sur la traduction et sur la mise en scène de Perceval. L’Avant-Scène du Cinéma, 221, 6–7.
Rosenbaum, J. (1997). The rattle of armour, the softness of flesh: Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. In Movies as Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 201–9.
Teisch-Savage, N. (1978). Rehearsing the Middle Ages. Film Comment, 14, 50–56.
Thompson, K. (1998). The sheen of armour, the whinnies of horses: Sparse parametric style in Lancelot du Lac. In J. Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson. Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, pp. 338–71.
Whitaker, M. (2002). Fire, water, rock: Elements of setting in John Boorman’s Excalibur and Steve Barron’s Merlin. In K. Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty essays, rev. edn. London: McFarland, pp. 44–53.
Williams, L. (1983). Eric Rohmer and the Holy Grail. Literature Film Quarterly, 11, 71–82.
Filmography
Excalibur (1981) Dir. John Boorman. Orion Pictures.
Lancelot du Lac (1974). Dir. Robert Bresson. Compagnie Française de Distribution Cinématographique.
Perceval le Gallois (1979). Dir. Eric Rohmer. Les Films du Losange.