Lancelot, Knight of the Queen

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Movie
German title Lancelot, Knight of the Queen
Original title Lancelot du Lac
Country of production France , Italy
original language French
Publishing year 1974
length 83 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Robert Bresson
script Robert Bresson
production Jean Yanne
Jean-Pierre Rassam
François Rochas
Alfredo Bini
music Philippe Sarde
camera Pasqualino de Santis
cut Germaine Lamy
occupation

Lancelot, Knight of the Queen (original title Lancelot du Lac ) is a French knight and historical film . The medieval film was shot in 1973 and is the second (and last) costume film by director Robert Bresson after The Trial of Joan of Arc from 1961. It counts alongside The Nibelungs , La Passion de Joan of Arc , Rashomon , Det sjunde inseglet and Andrej Rublev as a masterpiece of auteur film with a plot set in the Middle Ages .

action

Almost 30 knights of the Round Table return unsuccessfully from the search for the Holy Grail . More than two thirds of those who had once set out died in numerous fights. Slaughter and looting show that the desperate survivors are no longer following the knightly virtues of "êre, triuwe, milte, staete, mâze, zuht and minne" ("respect, loyalty, generosity, constancy, symmetry and equilibrium, inner and outer well-behavedness, service of love." ") Life. King Arthur calls on his knights ( intriguing against each other ) to contemplation, meditation , penance and inactivity - against the advice of his nephew Gawein. He sees salvation in daring, in struggle.

However, Arthur sticks to his decision, closes the hall of the round table and hopes that God will give him and his knights a sign. "This sign remains, and the rituals of the Knights, the religious and court ceremonies [...] always appear empty and grotesque ." After all, "[a] n view of the daily presence of death is an alienation occurred, which for centuries valid tradition of disavowed the legends , myths and fairy tales of the ancients sung about at festivities and victory celebrations . "

Two camps have formed. Those gathered around Mordred want to overthrow the weak king, the others trust in the "shining" Lancelot, including Gawein.

But Lancelot inwardly suffers from a loyalty conflict , because on the one hand he and Queen Ginover love each other - far beyond what is permitted in the ministry - and on the other hand he wants to serve the king loyally. He is determined to end the "adulterous [] relationship [...] which he blames for the knights' failure and the godlessness", but she does not release him. Mordred witnesses one of the " shy tête-à-tête [s]" with the queen. When the knights leave for a tournament and Lancelot refuses to ride, Mordred uses his knowledge to spread the rumor that Lancelot is staying in Camelot to meet the Queen.

Incognito , Lancelot takes part in the tournament. Gawein is the only one who recognizes him by his fighting style. Lancelot wins, but is wounded by Gawein and spends the time of recovery with an old peasant woman.

During his absence, Mordred reveals the forbidden love and Ginover is put into a kind of respectful captivity. Lancelot returns, kills the guards, kidnaps Ginover and retreats to a castle with a dozen of his friends. In the event of a night out, he sheds the blood of his friend Gawein - without recognizing him. He was only on the side of the besiegers out of solidarity with his uncle; but even in death his heart beats for Lancelot.

Lancelot and his followers are determined to go to extremes, but the Queen wants to avoid further bloodshed. So the lovers renounce each other and Lancelot brings Ginover to the king's tent and wants to leave the country .

Then the news comes that Mordred has risen against the king. Lancelot immediately takes the king's side to go into battle with his followers against Mordred and his mercenaries . But the " rank and file , which in the forest after guerrillas - and sniper tactics [...] almost act invisible mobile is the future": the knights who are "like imprisoned" in their heavy armor, the more modern military equipment subject of Mordred's mercenaries , " movable archers ”.

“One of the last shots of the film shows an apparently peaceful, deserted forest. Suddenly a riderless horse breaks out of the undergrowth and gallops past the camera. The viewer already suspects what is to come. As the riderless horses increase, the premonition becomes certainty. Everywhere in the forest the camera finds knights bleeding to death, the trees are occupied by snipers. Lancelot's horse is hit, he himself staggers towards a clearing; he dies with the name of his beloved on his lips. ”“ While [his] […] cawing ravens circling over the corpses ”, a“ heap of tin on the battlefield of history ”.

background

The director had been planning a film about the Knights of the Round Table for over 20 years. The work was an "affair of the heart" to him. At an early stage of the preparations he considered an English-language adaptation with actors such as Natalie Wood and Burt Lancaster , but when he was able to realize his "dream" during the almost four months of filming in the Vendée and on the Île de Noirmoutier in the summer and autumn of 1973, he worked he as in the previous films with amateur actors. They "[serve] the director who rejects the filmed theater as 'models', as timeless characters". There were probably only two intentions he could not achieve: At the request of the producers, the film was not given the title Le Graal , as intended in the script , and an English-language version could not be shot.

The film structures were designed by Bresson's permanent collaborator, Pierre Charbonnier , whose last film architecture would be this.

Performance history

When the film was supposed to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 , it caused a political issue: the selection committee found it not worthy of the competition. Only because the producers persevered and directed inquiries to the French Ministry of Culture, a special screening became possible. The film was never shown in the cinema in Germany; The ARD first broadcast the film on German television in 1975.

Film analysis

While other knight films of the 1970s such as The Knights of the Coconut demystify the genre by means of the absurd and parody , Lancelot, Knight of the Queen achieved this through reduction: Bresson's adaptation of the subject dispenses with all the fantastic elements of the Arthurian legend such as the magical sword ; Both the wise magician Merlin and the idealistic savior Parzival are only mentioned in the prologue, a long subtitle above a chalice.

The film language used is unusual because the “formalized image montage ” of “ close-up and detailed shots ” predominates . The long shot is only used in the final sequence . Sound and image are mostly used independently of one another: “[The film] is downright stingy with the linguistic signs that are available to it; the viewer seldom sees everything he hears and seldom hears everything he sees ”.

synchronization

The synchronization was created in 1975 for ARD .

role actor Voice actor
Lancelot du Lac Luc Simon Gerhard Lippert
Queen Ginevra Laura Duke Condominas Cordula Trantow
Mordred Patrick Bernard Volker Lechtenbrink

criticism

“The story of the failed knights of the Grail [...] takes place with an unprecedented compositional rigor. No picture, no sound is superfluous and, as always, Bresson often replaces pictures with sound. "

- Hans C. Blumenberg , 1975 for the German premiere of the film by ARD

“Bresson did not create a historical film, but a cinematic thought model or allegory that seizes the myths for the sake of its ciphers and thus paints the rigorously fatalistic mournful image of a human race determined by (self-) destruction, doom, death and the failure of any endeavor to achieve love is. "

- Lexicon of international film

“Bresson designed his film with a great deal of style. [...] This is how Bresson realizes his theory that image and sound should not cumulate but complement one another. A big tournament, for example, is mainly experienced acoustically, while the camera focuses almost exclusively on the horses' legs. (Bresson: 'They express the power and violence that determine this scene!') "

- Dieter Krusche and Jürgen Labenski , around 1975

“The brittle, visually powerful narrative [is] […] perhaps one of the most beautiful films that has ever been made […]. [...] A film that despite its recourse to the Lancelot material [...] from the 12th century always protrudes into the present. That makes it so exciting, explosive and modern and so infinitely sad. It is characteristic of these stories that they are timeless and universal , and it is characteristic of good storytellers that they can grasp and convey their essence . With his economical means, Robert Bresson is probably one of the best storytellers of our time. "

- Hans Messias, 1995

“ Lancelot, Knight of the Queen holds the breath of the inevitability of fate, a superhuman tragedy . Is a new spirituality making its way in space and history? Does the deconstruction of the old, guilty world enable a new independence? Does purification offer a saving way out? A world without God inevitably leads to ruin, is Bresson's creed . […] Seismographic snapshots tell of the longing for the absolute , of the temptation of the gods and pagan rituals . Bresson presents interior views of marionettes , externally determined representatives of a declining class . Your demise on the battlefield seems like the awakening from a deceptive dream. "

- Josef Nagel, 2003

“[The] encounters [of Ginover and Lancelot] (like those of the other characters) are shown on film with extreme restraint - no emotional cinema à la Hollywood, in which big stars are moved by music and in captivating close-ups the audience is drawn into the Draw affect, instead of an art cinema in which unknown actors perform sentences of tremendous force and philosophical content laconic , toneless and unmoved and precisely because of this create an intensity of a different kind. "

- Christian Kiening , 2006

"[Bresson uses] artistic alienation effects [...]: He lets the Grail Knights speak the old French text of Chrétien de Troyes and thereby achieves two things: First, through the difficult to understand original language, he shows the temporal and mental distance between the audience and the actor 20th century and medieval events; Second, it makes it clear to the viewer that the medieval epic was a stylized art world in which everyday language was not used. Admittedly, such experiments place high demands on the recipients, above all in terms of their patience and their willingness to get involved in the unfamiliar. "

- Hedwig Röckelein , 2007

"Bresson's minimalism reduces situations that are staged with sweeping gestures in other film adaptations of the material to simple signs with an almost abstract quality."

- Andreas Rauscher , 2013

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Christian Kiening: Middle Ages in Film . In: Christian Kiening, Heinrich Adolf (Hrsg.): Mittelalter im Film (=  Trends in Medieval Philology. Vol. 6). De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-11-018315-3 , pp. 3–101, here 5. - The term 'masterpiece' is also used: Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337-342, here 341.
  2. ↑ Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337-342, here 337.
  3. ^ A b c Georg Seeßlen: Film Knowledge: Adventure. Popular movie basics. Schüren, Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-89472-704-8 , p. 48.
  4. ↑ Josef Nagel: Lancelot, Knight of the Queen. In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 88-91, here 89 f.
  5. ↑ a b Dieter Krusche with the assistance of Jürgen Labenski: Reclams Film Guide. 5th, revised and expanded edition, Reclam, Stuttgart 1982 [1. Edition 1973], ISBN 3-15-010205-7 , p. 299 f., Here 300.
  6. ↑ a b c Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337-342, here 338.
  7. ↑ a b c Josef Nagel: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 88–91, here 90.
  8. ↑ a b c Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337–342, here 340.
  9. ↑ Josef Nagel: Lancelot, Knight of the Queen. In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 88–91, here 89.
  10. ↑ Christian Kiening also uses the term 'pile of tin' in his introduction to the Middle Ages in the film : Christian Kiening, Heinrich Adolf (ed.): Middle Ages in Film (= Trends in Medieval Philology. Vol. 6). De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-11-018315-3 , pp. 3–101, here 64, and in his filmography on medieval film (in the same volume, pp. 372–445, here 411). There is talk of a “rubbish heap of history” in: Dieter Krusche with the assistance of Jürgen Labenski: Reclams Film Guide. 5th, revised and expanded edition, Reclam, Stuttgart 1982 [1. Edition 1973], ISBN 3-15-010205-7 , p. 299 f., Here 300.
  11. ↑ See Georg Seeßlen: Film Knowledge: Adventure. Popular movie basics. Schüren, Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-89472-704-8 , p. 47.
  12. ↑ See Christian Kiening: Middle Ages in Film . In: Christian Kiening, Heinrich Adolf (Hrsg.): Mittelalter im Film (= Trends in Medieval Philology. Vol. 6). De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-11-018315-3 , pp. 3–101, here 62.
  13. ↑ a b c Jonathan Rosenbaum . In: Sight & Sound , Summer 1974. Quoted after the translation of a section in: Georg Seeßlen: Filmwissen: Abenteuer. Popular movie basics. Schüren, Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-89472-704-8 , p. 47.
  14. ↑ See Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337-342, here 339.
  15. ↑ Josef Nagel: Lancelot, Knight of the Queen. In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 88–91, here 91.
  16. ↑ a b cf. Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337-342, here 341.
  17. ↑ a b cf. Andreas Rauscher: Ivanhoe . In: Fabienne Liptay , Matthias Bauer : (Ed.): Filmgenres. History and costume film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-019064-7 , pp. 112–122, here 118.
  18. ↑ Peter W. Jansen , quoted from: Dieter Krusche with the assistance of Jürgen Labenski: Reclams Film Guide. 5th, revised and expanded edition, Reclam, Stuttgart 1982 [1. Edition 1973], ISBN 3-15-010205-7 , p. 299 f., Here 300.
  19. ↑ The information is based on: Lancelot, Ritter der Königin (1974) . In: Deutsche Synchronkartei , accessed on January 7, 2017, and: Lancelot, Ritter der Koenigin (1973) . In: Synchronous database , accessed on January 7, 2017.
  20. ↑ Hans C. Blumenberg : FilmtipPrograms. In: Die Zeit , No. 19/1975.
  21. ↑ Lancelot, Knight of the Queen . In: Lexicon of International Films. Completely revised and expanded new edition. Edited by the Catholic Institute for Media Information (KIM) and the Catholic Film Commission for Germany. 10 volumes. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-499-16357-8 , Volume 5, p. 3241 ( online edition . Zweiausendeins , accessed on January 7, 2017).
  22. ↑ Ha. M. [Hans Messias]: Lancelot, knight of the queen. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments. Volume 3: 1965-1981. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009418-6 , pp. 337–342, here 340–342.
  23. ↑ Josef Nagel: Lancelot, Knight of the Queen. In: Andreas Friedrich (Ed.): Film genres. Fantasy and fairy tale film. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-018403-7 , pp. 88-91, here 90 f.
  24. ^ Christian Kiening: Middle Ages in Film . In: Christian Kiening, Heinrich Adolf (Hrsg.): Mittelalter im Film (= Trends in Medieval Philology. Vol. 6). De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-11-018315-3 , pp. 3–101, here 65.
  25. ↑ Hedwig Röckelein: Medieval projections . In: Mischa Meier, Simona Slanička (ed.): Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Film. Construction - documentation - projection (= contributions to the culture of history . Vol. 29). Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-24405-7 , pp. 41–62, here 62.