Signifying nothing : Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and the Arthurian paradoxism of Tennyson’s 𝘐𝘥𝘺𝘭𝘭𝘴

Abstract

It is almost an axiom of Arthurian film criticism that the uncredited source of Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac is the anonymous La Mort Le Roi Artu, the final secion of the thirteenth-century French prose Vulgate Cycle. Hence Kevin J. Harty ‘s comment about Jane Sloan having “wrongly identifie[d] the film's source as Le Chevalier de la Charette by Chrétien de Troyes” (25, n. 22). Indeed, Harty’s claim that “[f]or the general outlines of its plot , Bresson's films owe much to the Mort Artu” (16) can hardly be denied. Thematically, however, Lancelot transcends any exclusive Mort Artu interpretation of its origin, thereby supporting Richard C. Bartone’s belief that it “arose from an assimilation and synthesis of primary literary documents” (145). As Bartone suggests, Lancelot du Lac is what Gerard Genette would label a 'metatextual' film narrative haunted by “silently evoke[d]” literary sources (4). What Lancelot’s metatextuality recalls in fact is Harold Bloom’s uncanny theory of apophrades, wherein living poets aesthetically wrestle with illustrious dead precursors (141),