The following notes on Lancelot du Lac were written by Pate Duncan, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A recently restored 4K DCP of Lancelot will screen at the Cinematheque on Friday, October 18 at 7 p.m. Location is 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Pate Duncan

In 1974, after two decades of trying to get the film made, enigmatic auteur Robert Bresson released his ascetic Arthurian adaptation, Lancelot du Lac, to international acclaim. Bresson, known for adaptations and the brisk, minimal style he imposed upon the source material, based this film off the anonymous 13th century French text La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of Arthur). The film centers on the titular Lancelot (Luc Simon, one of Bresson’s many “models” or non-professional actors, though the role would’ve gone to Burt Lancaster if not for a scheduling issue) as he feuds with his fellow knight Mordred (Patrick Bernhard), serves his King Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek), and services Queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas) in an emotionally fraught and dangerous love affair. Beginning and ending with images of bloody spurts seeping into forest floors, Lancelot is a violent entry in Bresson’s oeuvre that develops his sparse form, typifies the cruel stories of his color period, and presages the final violence that ends his final film, L’Argent (1983). Lancelot is Bresson’s eighth adaptation, his third color film, but only his second period piece.

Though known for his nigh-monastic auteur persona, Robert Bresson’s filmmaking career points back to bohemian days with 1930s French Surrealists, rubbing elbows with Jean Cocteau and Jean Aurenche before finding his way into fashion photography for French couturier Cartier., according to scholar Colin Burnett. Bresson’s experience creating refined, elegant promotional material had a greater influence on his style than his avant-garde affinities. Bresson then founded an independent production company in the decentralized film economy of 1930s France, beginning his career with the comedy Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs, 1934). Later, his engagement in the French ciné-club ecosystem gave him another cinephilic scene, even as he experimented with a style of radical minimalism that set him apart from both his older contemporaries Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati as well as up-and-coming filmmakers of the French New Wave.

Contemporary audiences will likely be more familiar with Bresson’s earlier features from around the same period as the French New Wave, give or take a few years on either side. A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) remain among Bresson’s most popular films with audiences today, and all are significant examples of Bresson’s stringent style and solemn tone. Paul Schrader, one of Bresson’s most devout acolytes, explains the master’s style succinctly: “Bresson’s everyday stylization consists in elimination rather than addition or assimilation. Bresson ruthlessly strips action of its significance: he regards a scene in terms of its fewest possibilities.” It is with this ruthlessness in mind that Bresson is frequently invoked as a paradigm case of a challenging filmmaker, one whose films—in spite of their fairly speedy average runtimes—demand that we adopt viewing skills germane to their subtly modulated intrinsic norms. This is to say nothing of their enigmatic thematic concerns which, as Burnett notes, have been read for, paradoxically, both their opaque metaphysical preoccupations and their sensuous—even erotic—materiality. All of this is to say that Bresson remains puzzling even for us eggheads in the room.

Kristin Thompson helps us understand the appeal of such challenging material as a fundamentally playful aesthetic exercise with Lancelot as a prime example of sparse parametric form. Thompson notes that the film features a kind of modular, bilaterally symmetrical plot of variant and variable scenes that rhyme in their use of various devices and plot actions. The film’s structure is something like that of a horseshoe, bringing to mind the scene, late in the film, in which a young peasant child bows her head against the hoofprint of Lancelot’s steed and prays for his safety. This symmetrical organization turns on the fulcrum of the film’s dazzling tournament scene, a baring of such pared down parameters that its play of repetition and variation evokes music more than film, repeating only the word “Lancelot” for the entire sequence. Even Bresson himself remarked that the scene “is edited almost entirely for the ear.”

Playful editing is one of Bresson’s most renowned formal flourishes. Throughout the film, graphic matches and ambiguous spatial relations (owing to Bresson’s trademark lack of establishing shots in his films) complicate narrative comprehension in what would be in the hands of another director a fairly straightforward and classical knight’s tale. Bresson plays with the ambiguity of tent backdrops, colorful but ultimately meaningless flags, and screen direction and eyelines to deform this centuries-old fable into a modernist exercise in the cineaste’s sui generis style. Thompson elsewhere suggests a purely graphic quality in the film’s mise-en-scène, where Mondrian-like fields of color and reflective armor clash like the knights themselves. Thompson notes that the armor is “a costuming substance that makes the figures like chameleons, changing their fit to their environment—yet in no case do the suits of armor add strong color to the scene.”

The armor’s presence also allows Bresson to further develop his minimally expressive figure behavior, as his models’ faces and bodies are often obscured and only differentiated by distinct tights and helms. Such restraint counterintuitively heightens the importance of even the smallest of movements and makes the film’s inclusion of faces stand out in stark relief against Bresson’s impenetrable armored heads, dorsal framing of human figures, and framing of horses at the same scale and angle as their human riders. Bresson’s eye for composition and subtle reframing is striking, as charged with self-consciousness as the just-so iconography of an ominous Tarot draw, with Schrader calling this style “a frozen form which expresses the Transcendent—a movie hierophany.” Keep an eye out for these surprising pops of color in this otherwise quite dark film, as well as pinprick glints shining off reflective armor and figures moving rhythmically in the backgrounds of shots. These elements add a graphic complexity and aesthetic texture whose regularity and materiality temper Bresson’s somber thematic material and heady philosophical concerns.

Of course, it can be taxing on a viewer to play along with all of Bresson’s parametric peacocking, especially on a first watch. It’s for that reason that his films have rewarded careful study and inspired impassioned criticism. Few filmmakers can boast inspiring such critical enantiodromia, working as a case study for both Schrader’s transcendental formalism and the more materialist example of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s elaboration of sparse parametric narration. Bresson resolves the antinomies of seemingly incompatible opposites, uniting spirit and flesh, heaven and earth, eternity and present. His work continues to fascinate viewers and scholars even as we move further into his dense, cultivated mystique.