film, eyeballs, brain

Some random thoughts — actually, questions — which I wrote right after seeing Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac last week:

It was a choice between Mean Girls and Lancelot du Lac, and the latter won. (I was also trying to console myself for not seeing “Spamalot” last week with Bulletproof Vest.) I’m still trying to wrap my head around it (I don’t know anything about the film, and it’s my first Bresson, which is probably not the first Bresson to start with, and I just finished the DVD a few minutes ago) — in particular, the constant, abstracted waist-level camera shots of legs (and later, gloves and lances and swords) of both men and horses. As if they were interchangeable somehow.

Is Bresson trying to say that the results of those limbs’ actions are oddly separated from the characters? Or does violence — almost all of which happens offscreen — separate these tangible, physical extensions of humanity from the humanness of the people themselves? (At some point Guinevere offers her heart and soul to Lancelot, and he responds with “It’s your body I want.” There aren’t any heroes here except probably for the poor deluded Gawain.)

Indeed, close to the end, we only have those differently-colored tights to tell people apart, and in the last scene, Bresson chooses to remove that as well.

And what is up with the soundtrack? That same chirp, that same horn, that same whinny, the consistent sound of clinking armor that is finally silenced in the last shot… (In that almost interminable jousting scene, we see the same shot of the musician looped over and over.) That war and violence, like the sonic elements of the film, are condemned to repeat eternally? Or — as Brandon on the Pivotal Film mailing list put it — just bad sound design?

And the first minute of the film… which came first, this film or Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

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