Robert Bresson

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Bresson's 'Lancelot du lac

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[Lancelot du Lac stuns and overwhelms one because of the film's] clarity and simplicity, a precise and irreducible arrangement of sounds and images that is so wholly functional that nothing is permitted to detract from the overall narrative complex, and everything present is used. It is a film where the rattle of armour and the neighing of horses are as essential as the faces and bodies of the characters, where indeed each of these elements serves to isolate and define the importance and impact of the others.

The sheer rawness of what is there disconcerts, but it shouldn't lead one to focus unduly on what isn't there, or track down some elusive clue to the Bressonian mystery. To a certain extent, Bresson's films are about mystery, but their manner of arriving there is always quite concrete…. [It] seems useful to speak here of Bresson's art as one of immanence, not one of transcendence, and one where the inside is always revealed by remaining on the outside….

This is a distinctly modern Lancelot, in striking contrast to the relatively 'medieval' atmosphere of Bresson's last two films, both set in contemporary Paris, where the gentle creature often suggested a lonely maiden in a tower waiting to be rescued, and the dreamer resembled a wandering knight in search of a pure love that was equally hopeless. The sense of elongated durations and passing seasons that we associate with the romances of Chrétien de Troyes is more evident in Balthazar, or even in John Ford's The Searchers, than in the tightly compressed episodes of Lancelot, where action and event is all.

The comparison with Ford is hardly gratuitous: Lancelot is surely the closest thing we can ever hope to get to a Bressonian Western or adventure film, although it also achieves a tapestry-like stillness in certain scenes that plays against the livelier movements. (p. 129)

Most modern of all, perhaps, are the characters of Guenièvre and Lancelot, although the specific signs of their modernity are not at all easy to pinpoint. The scenes between them seem to adhere rather closely to the courtly tradition, and the spiritual malaise affecting Lancelot—torn between his love for Guenièvre, his vow to God to end their adultery, and his loyalty to Artus—contains no discernible elements that are added to the legend. And yet the absence of any psychology, the elliptical exposition of their feelings, and the degree to which Bresson isolates them from their environments and defines them in relation to each other, all serve to give them unmistakable contemporary reverberations. (pp. 129-30)

[And] of course, there are the voices—neutral and uniform in their apparent lack of expressiveness, but presences charged with meaning and effect in relation to the overall complex of sound and silence, where the lack of overt emotion becomes a sounding brass against which the words themselves are able to resound. (p. 130)

Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Bresson's 'Lancelot du lac'," in Sight and Sound (copyright © 1974 by The British Film Institute), Vol. 43, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 129-30.

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