ABSTRACT
A JL Anyone who sees the film Perceval le Gallois, completed in 1978 by the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, knows that it is “based upon" the medieval romance Li Contes del Graal by Chretien de Troyes: the credits tell us that. Much less obvious is the fact that nearly all of its shooting script consists of Rohmer s own abridged translation of Chretien’s text. The film is a remarkable vehicle for raising questions about the transformation of Arthurian materials for a modern audience. Not only is Rohmer, through his trans lation, a “reader” of Chretien’s text in the same way that Hartmann von Aue and the anonymous author of the Percevalssaga were, but he has reinterpreted Chretien’s narrative through a medium that is unique to the twentieth century.
