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Murphy discusses the film "Lancelot du Lac" by Robert Bresson. When the film was shown at the 12th New York Film Festival in 1974, Vincent Canby complained that it "came close to being a parody of Bresson."

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In 1974, when Lancelot du Lac was shown at the 12th New York Film Festival, Vincent Canby complained that it "came close to being a parody of Bresson. Here is a film by a director, known for the impassive acting style he imposes on his performers, in which a great deal of the 'acting' is done inside suits of armor with faces hidden." Even in his displeasure, Canby caught something of what Bresson is up to in this intensely uneventful, oddly mesmerizing reading of the final act in the Arthurian cycle. The tone is set in Lancelot's opening frames: Huge swords cross, wielded heavily by metal-clad arms. Occasional sighs punctuate the dull clanking of articulated armor. A blade, triumphant, momentarily sways over the earth, then strikes. Decapitated, his head sent flying across a forest glade, a knight falls to his knees, blood flowing freely. The sound is like water running rapidly out of a spigot. Because Bresson has rigorously framed out any sign of human life in these shots, we are introduced to one of our most potent myths through a battle between medieval 'droids, tin cans that contain enough "juice" to keep the old story going.

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The Arthurian tales represent a wonderful nexus of pagan and Christian iconography, a mythic hotspot where human dreams of perfection in heaven and/or on earth - overlap, clash, and sink into symbolism. In older versions, the union of Guinevere and Arthur was meant as a concentration and conduit of the generative force that greens the earth; later, Christ's perfect love moved through the marriage to all of Camelot. In Excalibur, John Boorman mined voluptuous poetry from the creation and fall of Arthur's attempt at a second Eden. And there's still a role for the devil in Boorman's world: Merlin's magic drives the fiction, though it ultimately finds its own legs and leaves its maker behind. So how is this story, with its volatile mix of aspiring souls, fertile nature, utopian vision, and sorcery, reimagined by Bresson?

Lancelot du Lac begins with the return of the Knights of the Round Table from the fruitless Grail quest, at the moment the myth is winding down into despair and death. Arthur's enclave sits somewhere in a dark, mostly uninhabited forest, a collection of white tents and a stone building full of white, empty rooms. The place has no roots in the earth and no vital connection with anything or anyone outside itself (The armored knights from Escalot who challenge Camelot to a tourney can be distinguished from Arthur's men only by their diamond-patterned flag.) The silence in this airless place is punctuated by the continual clangor of armor, the whinny of a horse, a bagpipe's drone, a bird's shrill, bells. These sounds seem "canned" - as though they were timed to play at intervals. This might be ritual, noise that marks "stations" in the course of spiritually significant experience. If so, Bresson suggests ritual that has lost any direction or meaning except that of repetition.

Bresson repeats sequentially shots of certain actions: throwing a saddle blanket over a horse, hefting a tin-man onto his steed, a mounted knight galloping through the forest. During the tourney, every jouster's participation is comprised of a succession of the same images and sounds; each of the disguised Lancelot's triumphant forays is put period to by Gawain's uninflected intoning of the champion's name, to which Arthur nods nearly imperceptible agreement. No excitement or rise in narrative temperature is generated by this progressive cutting. Rather, it's bloodless, wearying, leeched of power to advance the story into epiphany.

In everyday medieval life, a person might cut his lunchtime apple into three parts to celebrate symbolically the nourishing power of the Trinity - inextricable from the apple's tastiness. In Lancelot du Lac, certain objects - a lance driving, as though self-propelled, through a Bressonian frame; armor, flags, Guinevere's scarf - seem to aspire visually to the numinous qualities of, say, sacramental wine and bread. But ultimately they fall short of mystery, that potent marriage of the mundane with the magical. They focus our vision and that of our "priestly" surrogates only in unregenerate, unresonant "thingness." Communion is blocked; neither we nor the Round Table are enlarged.

"I've lost my way," says one disoriented Grail quester. In the living myth, that general ill afflicts all who live in Arthur's derailed Camelot. But Bresson's version of this fundamental fiction has become a closed system, a kind of Dantean circle in which the players walk through the drama as they have so many times before, almost as automatons, assigned to act for us in an eternal ceremony but amnesiac and passionless. The primary "action" in Lancelot du Lac consists of Arthur and his men - never unarmored - trooping noisily into and out of tents and castle rooms, stopping momentarily to speak in monotone of their angst and Mordred's plots, moving on to ... what? Where? What life do they have outside their various containers? The rite is utterly abstracted from the mundane, the myth cut off from the ground that gave it life and, in turn, drew sustenance from its perpetuation.

Again and again, Bresson focuses on the endlessly perambulating feet of his protagonists, that place where flesh rests on ground, the anchoring source of human strength, as it was for mythic Antaeus. ("I am your strength," Guinevere tries to convince celibate Lancelot. "God is no trophy to bring home....") If this is our animal plane, then for Bresson's knights, two slim windows at the top of a high, featureless stone wall represent a dream of angels. "Our one woman, our one sun," Guinevere is presumably empedestaled behind those windows, yet only some vast sky - or darkening void - backs the openings. It's not just that the queen's adultery has blasted their hope of heaven; her knights, staring upward at the moon, their armor glowing in its light, seem lunatic, mesmerized by nothing. ("I have chosen nothing," claims Guinevere ambiguously at the denouement of her story, the divine author of which, she continues, also "demands nothing.") When Mordred and his men clank through the green forest to stand under the window of the loft where Lancelot drops his armor to (almost) succumb to fleshly appetite, they recall the shambling fascination of George Romero's living dead.

Traditionally, the wind- and thunderstorm ("the devil in the forest") that drives through Camelot would signal sin's fatal blow to the soul, individual and collective. (Lancelot has suffered a dolorous wound, though he has sinned only in his mind, not the flesh.) Such weather might be welcome in Arthur's bell-jar encampment, but the storm is more mechanical artifice than a sign of the natural world's convulsive reaction to spiritual agon.

Bresson frames the great moist eye of a horse seve Lancelot: in its fathomless dark lies true living mystery. Does the beast witness the hieratic behavior of these abstracted human figures with compassion? Indifference? Patience? Or is his consciousness reserved for the mundane, circumscribed realities of horse-ness? Its belly prodded by steel spurs, careening riderless through the forest, dying from an arrow just missing its limpid eye - is the life of this creature to be cherished less than those condemned to act forever in Camelot's reruns? Tdfhe same questions are prompted by the noisy little bird outside the window of the loft where Lancelot and Guinevere embrace, and the hawk that sails the sky during the final, inhuman battle in the forest. While the spiritual life in Lancelot seems drained of substance, the shape of nature fails to swell with mystical possession.

The end of Arthur's world comes not with a bang or a whimper, but with the steady thunk! of arrows being fired into the hearts of trees. A dying knight clanks his faltering way to a heap of jumbled suits of armor. Collapsing, the tin man is instantly transformed into junk, cruelly indistinguishable from the other empty receptacles in this salvage dump. In Lancelot du Lac, the forms expressing the aspirations of Arthur's knights have contracted into prisons; the dreams and the dreamers seem barely animate. Bresson's Camelot is like a base camp set up by affectless, Kubrickian space travelers who've landed on a vital planet, but are so preoccupied with performing their technical rounds that they never think to explore the alien woodland, the brave new world at their very feet. This new Eden has nothing to fear from a Calibanruled forest. In Camelot according to Robert Bresson, the mythic Round Table has come to be ringed by melancholiac robots, condemned to repeat the stations of the cross over and over - lacking even living wood to sustain ceremony.