HONESTY IN ARTIFICE The Medieval Text in Éric Rohmer’s Perceval
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 thedress 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.’
