Written for the Australian journal Screen Education 91 in 2018. — J.R.
What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either, with all due respect to the partisans of pure cinema, who would speak with images as a deaf-mute does with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature.
– Éric Rohmer
The least typical film by central French New Wave figure Éric Rohmer, Perceval (1978) offers a wonderfully strange and evocative version of Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century poem – set to music and translated into contemporary French by Rohmer himself – about the adventures of the title character (Fabrice Luchini), a callow and innocent youth who becomes the Red Knight. It captures the essence of its medieval trappings like no other film, yet it does so without ever presuming or pretending to re-create a historical period about which we know relatively little. Thus, it might be seen – and in fact was seen when it first appeared – as a bizarre exercise in literal literary adaptation, an odd experiment in representation itself.
At the beginning, we see four performing musicians in period dress with medieval instruments, two male and two female, constituting a sort of chorus, one of whom also sings the opening lines of the poem: ‘It was the season when trees break into leaf, when fields and woods turn green, and the birds, in their sweet idiom, sing softly in the morning—’ The camera pans right over the final phrase to three men in period dress performing bird calls as sound effects while another man in period dress looks on at their activity. Then the four men join the musicians on their left in singing, ‘—bringing joy to all alive. That’s when the son of the widow lady, who lived in a remote manor-house, arose and, without further ado, mounted his horse’, as we cut to Perceval on his steed riding out of the entrance of a small golden castle, ‘taking with him his three spears’ (as we see a man on foot handing over the spears to him). ‘So armed, he set out for the great forest.’ The camera pans left a few yards with him as he rides past ‘trees’ that resemble contemporary abstract sculptures made out of sheet metal painted green. Then we cut back to the original musicians performing and singing, before a closer shot of the youth riding through the sheet metal is accompanied by Perceval himself reciting, ‘Into the forest he rode. He rejoiced at the fine weather, and the merrymaking of the birds.’ (In subsequent scenes, narration of this kind gets distributed democratically and equally, in a kind of relay, among the various characters, regardless of whose actions are being recounted; sometimes it’s delivered by Perceval, sometimes by others.) Then we cut back to the men again performing their bird sound effects – as if to rub our noses in the artificiality – and then singing with the others (as the camera pans left to them): ‘The merrymaking of the birds: all these things pleased him well.’
The film winds up resembling both a stage musical and a studio-shot, minimal-budget western (complete with artificial sky) staged on a miniature golf course.
While the film’s style and setting alike are intentionally synthetic and mannered – its colours radiant, and its space as shallow as a medieval tapestry – the film is remarkably true to Chrétien’s text (taking into account the lack of information about the time in which it was written). Yet largely because of this radical and literal faithfulness – which confounds the expectations and habits of most viewers to the point where the film winds up resembling both a stage musical and a studio-shot, minimal-budget western (complete with artificial sky) staged on a miniature golf course – Perceval also turned out to be the most spectacular critical and commercial flop of Rohmer’s career, attracting only about 145,000 spectators during its initial run, or less than half as many as Rohmer’s previous feature, the Heinrich von Kleist adaptation The Marquise of O (1976), did.
The literalist approach of Rohmer as a literary adapter to these quite dissimilar features is worth considering in its own right. Ever fascinated with ‘ambiguity’ in both his written and cinematic work – a preoccupation he shared with his mentor, André Bazin – Rohmer brought his Catholic existentialist dedication to naturalism to The Marquise of O, an approach that at once led to a faithful representation of plot and characterisation and to an undermining of the fiery spirit of Kleist’s novella. The results in that instance proved to be compatible with the Masterpiece Theatre notion of literary adaptation while also adhering to a domesticated, ‘good taste’ notion of continental art cinema.
I’m far less familiar with Chrétien’s Perceval, or the Tale of the Holy Grail than I am with Kleist’s novella, so I can’t comment on Rohmer’s faithfulness in this case. But based on my looser impressions, his comparable literalism in adapting a medieval poem paradoxically seems to convert the relative sanity of the unfinished epic poem into something fairly demented. Indeed, Luchini has referred to Perceval as ‘a scholarly project, touched by insanity’. Herein lies both its appeal and its profound eccentricity, compounded by its outlier position within Rohmer’s (otherwise determinedly realist) oeuvre. Even without factoring in the artificial sets with their painted backdrops, the film’s aforementioned method of distributing its narration to various characters or chorus members already gives its narrative a kind of deconstructive, self-conscious address – what the Russian formalists referred to as ‘baring the device’ – that is far from the transparency of the storytelling found in Rohmer’s other films, including The Marquise of O. Arguably, this can be read as an attempt to view storytelling itself in a state of relative innocence, before it has learned how to cover its methodological tracks.
Paraphrasing Rohmer, Australian critic CG Crisp has described this realism: ‘The cinema is a privileged art form because it faithfully transcribes the beauty of the real world […] Any distortion of this, any attempt by man to improve on [God’s handiwork], is indicative of arrogance and verges on the sacrilegious.’ If this seems like a rebuke to Rohmer’s own approach in Perceval, the film nevertheless serves as a demonstration of his belief that a type of modernity emerges from a carefully preserved past. Indeed, any sense that the film might be anachronistic is undermined by its blunt depiction of violence and matter-of-fact portrayal of its consequences.
When I asked Rohmer after a New York Film Festival screening of the film how he could have managed to reconcile his dedication to realism with the artifice of Perceval, he recounted a remark that Bazin had once made about the ‘realism’ of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928): that, if nothing else, at least the dirt was real. While there is no dirt to be seen in Perceval, what comes through as real here is the medieval world itself – real not in the sense of some fictional ‘re-creation’ or as a pretended embodiment of the period, but rather in Rohmer’s brutally honest account of the material from the twelfth century that he is working with. By committing to this realism, Rohmer breathes life into something otherwise lost to time – a laudable approach that emerges less from the power of the director’s imagination than from his inability to divert from the source text, even if this approach risks provoking incredulous laughter from viewers. Sticking stubbornly to his methodology therefore might be appreciated as an ethical decision, with certain unexpected yet unmistakable parallels to the materialist methods used by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in utilising other literary texts of the past as texts, not as imaginary landscapes derived from them.
One might infer from this that Chrétien’s text represented for him the childhood of narrative literature, or, stated differently, narrative in its purest and most innocent state.
In their biography of Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe begin their chapter on Perceval with a paragraph that helps us to pinpoint how and why such an undertaking was no mere academic exercise for the director, but a personal fulfilment:
[Rohmer]’s vocation as a metteur en scene originated in the house in Tulle where he was born. With old wallpaper on the stairway walls that represented medieval damsels wearing hose. One day his father found the little boy collecting tree branches – with the intention of ‘burning [them], like Jeanne d’Arc!’ An early combination of the taste for spectacle and for the Middle Ages that he was never really to abandon: as a professor of French, he took great pleasure in having his students act out passages in Perceval, ou le Conte de Graal (Perceval, or the tale of the Holy Grail), a fundamental work in the French tradition of the novel, a repertory of figures and situations that were not yet complicated by metaphor. ‘What interests me in this text,’ Rohmer was to explain, ‘is its concrete side: there are no rhetorical figures, and this story cannot be summed up. […] This simplicity keeps it understandable, more understandable to children than [Jean] Racine or even, sometimes, Molière.’
Reading between the lines, and bearing in mind the importance of childhood, innocence and purity in Rohmer’s cinematic universe, one might infer from this that Chrétien’s text represented for him the childhood of narrative literature, or, stated differently, narrative in its purest and most innocent state. We should also recall that Rohmer was a novelist before he embarked on either film criticism or filmmaking, having published the novel Elisabeth (under the pseudonym of Gilbert Cordier) in 1946, when he was twenty-six, two years before he published his first film reviews and four years before he wrote and directed his first film. And his background as a teacher, which dates back still further, is clearly even more relevant; Perceval should be regarded as an educational project first of all. The story itself can readily be seen as the education of its title character – a student of life who proceeds by error, as students commonly do.
Moreover, this is not an education in which innocence is invariably viewed in a positive light. The innocence about the world observed and sometimes (at least implicitly) celebrated or critiqued in the narrative most often belongs to Perceval, but sometimes it belongs to others as well, such as the ‘Lord of the Heath’ (Jacques Le Carpentier), the guardian of the maiden (Clémentine Amouroux) whom Perceval forcibly kisses and whose ring he steals (early in his adventures, when he stupidly and brutally misunderstands his mother’s instructions): refusing to believe the maiden’s account of the incident, her protector chooses instead to punish her for her imagined infidelity. Thus, stupidity and brutality, like innocence, are viewed as potentially universal human attributes.
From another standpoint, it could be argued that Rohmer’s idiosyncratic handling of narration by assigning it to multiple characters and diverse on-screen participants (so that many of them even refer to their own stories in third person, as if they were happening to other people) is above all a pedagogical method for showing that the story of Perceval is actually a story that belongs to everyone and therefore should be recounted by everyone – a claim for universality that unfortunately and ironically wound up helping to limit the film’s reception. By the same token, the deliberate confusion created with personal pronouns (when some characters are made to recount their own stories in third person) is matched by an occasional confusion of verb tenses, such as when Perceval belatedly orders the maiden’s knight and protector to confess his misdeeds to King Arthur (Marc Eyraud) and his court, and his command overlaps with the actual fulfilment of this order as it becomes a voiceover.
Indeed, the film’s commercial failure can be attributed to both the uncompromising rigour and peculiarity of its style and its running time of 140 minutes. Even though Perceval does include such familiar commercial stand-bys as sex and violence, it can’t be said to articulate these elements in a manner that always conforms to generic conventions and one’s expectations about them. Significantly, in the collection of his film-criticism work The Taste for Beauty, Rohmer called the American musical ‘the world’s worst genre’ (in his guarded, ambivalent and only partial defence of Joshua Logan’s 1958 film South Pacific), and also admitted that he wasn’t ‘crazy about westerns’ in his celebration of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sky (1952). So it should be stressed that my earlier allusions to both genres in relation to Perceval might well be more pertinent to my own appreciation of the film than it was to his conception of it as a film. In fact, its status as an educational project ultimately interferes with its being easily read as either a ‘movie’ in the popular sense or as an arthouse film (which might have allowed for some useful comparison of its neoprimitive visual style with that of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), for example).
In effect, one feels that Rohmer wound up having to reinvent the cinema in order to articulate his own particular aims and concerns.
Neither fish nor fowl, Perceval possesses a singularity that prevents it from being assimilated in relation to more familiar film genres. In effect, one feels that Rohmer wound up having to reinvent the cinema in order to articulate his own particular aims and concerns – even including a brief and awkward stretch of animation to convey the flight of geese and the bleeding of a fallen bird on a snowbank, before proceeding to a match cut to the rosy cheeks of Blanchefleur (Arielle Dombasle).
All the usual coordinates of (fictional) time and space are affected by this reinvention – including the usual distinctions made between interiors and exteriors, and even those between past and present. But, in keeping with the statement of Rohmer quoted at the head of this essay, these coordinates are shown, not stated or argued in either the words or the images. And they become the heart of Rohmer’s lesson.
Jonathan Rosenbaum was film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, and he maintains a website at <http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net>.
Endnotes
1 Éric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne, 1989, p. 80.
2 Antoine de Baecque & Noël Herpe, Éric Rohmer: A Biography, trans. Steven Rendall & Lisa Neal, Columbia University Press, New York & Chichester, 2016, pp. 284, 319.
3 See Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Europe: New Waves’, in Geoff Andrew (ed), Film: The Critics’ Choice, Aurum Press, London, 2001, p. 210.
4 CG Crisp, Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1988, p. 3.
5 De Baecque & Herpe, op. cit., p. 307.
6 Rohmer, op. cit., p. 111.
7 ibid., p. 128. ■