ABSTRACT
Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac aroused violent critical and public reactions because of the startling ways the film rejected filmic conventions and frustrated its audience's expectations. Bresson used the tradition of the Arthurian legend as a vehicle to challenge fundamental precepts of Western humanism heroism, individuality, free will. In Bresson's economy of language and image signified shift for each signifier with every repetition, creating a slippage, a loss, a draining of meaning. Bresson's film begins forcefully with a decapitation, a knifing, and skeletons in armor hanging from trees in rapid succession. Bresson's representation of Guenevere's body reveals the relation between his radical revision of filmic convention and the deconstructive implications of that revision. The multivalent readings of the representation of Guenevere increase by an analogous scene. The knights gaze not only at Guenevere's empty window, but also at the moon behind clouds.
