Robert Bresson's movies are often described in ways that make them sound like liturgy: austere, somber, religious. There's some truth in that, at least in certain films, but none of those adjectives truly captures the sinewy strangeness of Lancelot du Lac, his 1974 take on the Arthurian legend. It seems at once post-apocalyptic and pre-Enlightenment: with the veil of courtly love removed, and Camelot literally godforsaken, the knights of the Round Table are reduced to clanking metal humanoids hammering each other with swords, their brain-jarring collisions so ritualized that Bresson shoots their jousting matches from the legs down.
With the director's preferred non-professional actors giving the stoic, uninflected performances he wanted, each gesture assumes the heaviness of movement in armor. At times it's as if Bresson had made a medieval robot movie, with only jets of blood to prove that tin can rolling on the ground ever encased a head. It's a fearsome and visionary movie, concrete in every evocative detail and sound, and not even Monty Python's spot-on burlesque of it (especially in their Black Knight sequence) lessens its power.
Part of The Belcourt's ongoing Bresson retrospective, it screens one time only tomorrow, Tuesday, March 20, at 7 p.m. Lynn Ramey, Vanderbilt associate professor of French and chair of the department of French and Italian, gives a talk on the film beforehand at 5:45 p.m. at Belmont United Methodist Church. It's the second talk in the symposium accompanying the retro. We asked Ramey a few questions about the movie in advance of her talk tomorrow afternoon, and as with Jennifer Fay's answers last week before A Man Escaped, her responses have us excited about both the talk and the film.
