Honesty in Artifice: The Medieval Text in Eric Rohmer's 'Perceval'

With its metal trees, painted backdrops and self-narrated actions, Éric Rohmer's adaptation of a medieval Arthurian tale manages to be both literal and idiosyncratic, modernist and deeply rooted in the world of its source text's twelfth-century author. As Jonathan Rosenbaum contends, it is the film's educational merits that have, in part, contributed to its obscurity.

Additional keywords:
Beyond the Multiplex, senior secondary, King Arthur, Knights of the Round Table, French New Wave, Chrétien de Troyes, The Marquise of O, André Bazin, musical