Eric Rohmer and the Holy Grail

Abstract

Eric Rohmer and the Holy Grail Compared to the younger, more prolific, and often more radical directors of the French New Wave-Godard, Rivette, Resnals, Varda, Truffaut, Marker-Eric Rohmer, the senior member of this illustrious group, has often seemed a throwback to many of the values the New Wave once opposed. A moralist in the heyday of leftist political cinema, a literary sensibility in an age when the French film was finally freeing itself from the literary standards of the "wellmade film," a Catholic in both his cinematic themes and his film criticism, Rohmer has always seemed an unmistakably original, but decidedly conservative, talent.1 His major work of the sixties and seventies, Six Contes Moraux, a loosely related cycle of six films dealing with the romantic and intellectual obsessions of mostly male, middle class heroes, is a visually static, television-style work in which characters endlessly debate the ethical and intellectual dimensions of erotic temptation: to spend a night at Maud's, to touch or not to touch Claire's knee. In these chaste, aggressively uncinematic films of temptation, James Monaco has gone so far as to observe the "faintly glowing embers" of the literary traditions of courtly love.2 Given these predilections, it was not surprising that Rohmer turned his attention to the filming of Chretien de Troves courtly medieval romance, Perceval le Gaulois. Here, finally, was a film in which Rohmer's Catholic and moral sensibilities, refined literary taste, even his interest in the archaic tradition of courtly love could happily converge. But what one was not prepared for in this adaptation was the uncommon beauty and originality of a film whose visual and narrative conception are like no other ever made. With Perceval, Eric Rohmer has outdone himself. The film's dazzlingly innovative narrative style and total re-thinking of filmic space are as radical for 1979 as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was in 1919. Yet these innovations derive from an adaptation of a twelfth-century literary source to which Rohmer, who himself wrote the modern French translation, is remarkably faithful. In the following analysis I hope to clarify the ways in which Rohmer's film adapts both the narrative form of Chretien's text and the spatial organization of medieval art to its own, peculiarly modernist, cinematic ends. Chretien's Text Modern readers of medieval literature encounter works of such profound religiosity as to seem almost inscrutable to our own more doubting sensibilities. Yet in these works we also encounter fragmented, digressive narratives, one dimensional characters and a total disregard of reality that seems very similar to the scrambled narratives and anti-realism of our own recent literature. Nowhere is this more true than in the Arthurian romances of the twelfth-century French poet Chretien de Troyes. In the gracefully rhymed, Old French couplets of Chretien's courtly romances, we encounter an emblematic world of obscure signs. In these secular texts, based on the orginally pagan legends of King Arthur, the earthly love of the knight-in-shining-armor for the fair maiden-in-distress frequently stands as an imperfect metaphor for the divine love of Christ. The reader is intended, as in all medieval art. both to enjoy the superficial charm and beauty of this world and to see through it to the spirit of the next. In Perceval, the last and most thematically religious of Chretien's romances, the movement from earthy to divine love seems to constitute the very meaning of the tale. From the very beginning, Chretien's text poses the problem of the reading/interpretation of obscure signs-a reading which is further complicated by the incompletion of the text itself. Perceval is an ignorant Welsh lad who, one day spying the shining armor of a knight, mistakes him first for a devil and then for an angel. Although the knight sets him straight as to the nature and function of this armor, the tale continues to revolve around Perceval's naive "understanding" of the true meaning of the knightly quest-his persistent inability to question and interpret its signs. …