Monty Python’s King Arthur skit is full of structuralism dogma breaking moments. This analysis focuses on the first scene of the movie. The scene utilizes pre-conceived notions of movie structure, the publics’ awareness about leaders and prominent figures and the acknowledgement of the existence of life among cast extras to create a satirical adaptation of King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail.
As the scene begins we hear the hooves of a horse coming from beyond the mist around the castle. The viewer, exposed to several scenes that reflect this setting in previous movies, expects to see someone riding a horse about to emerge, instead it is King Arthur and his servant that appear; both lacking horses. “Out of the mist walks King Arthur followed by a servant who is banging two coconuts together” (499). King Arthur makes a stop sign and the servant is seen halting as if he were a horse. The viewer realizes that the servant holding the coconut halves was pretending to be an actual horse. “Servant makes noises of horse halting with a flourish” (499). This obvious break from traditional script writing and prop use highlights the general expectation for viewers to assume what is about to occur and in which manner. In this excerpt the viewer expects to be shown a horse because he is fooled into thinking there would be one present. In reality it was just a man clapping two coconut halves to imitate the sound of hooves.
Right after this scene, a soldier guarding a castle’s battlements comes into view. Here the soldier and King Arthur have a conversation where King Arthur introduces himself to a non-believing soldier:
SOLDIER: Halt! Who goes there?
ARTHUR: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot.
King of al...
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...he discussion by providing his own two cents and setting the first soldier off into a rant about termites. “What do you mean ‘generically’? There’s the ‘plodding termite,’ the ‘yellow Angolan termite,’ I mean you just can’t say...” (501).
In hindsight we observed how the first scene of Monty Python’s King Arthur skit lends itself to postmodern criticism. The script shows ways in which people build up events based on pre-conceived notions such as hoof sounds mimicked by coconut halves. The script highlights the awareness of the ordinary people in Arthurian times; the soldier’s disbelief at the revelation of Arthur’s identity. The script also reminds the viewers that the extras seen in movies represent actual people in that era. Monty Python and the Holy Grail present a movie filled with realistic albeit radical view of life as it probably was in the time of Camelot.
Malory, Thomas. King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 124-25.
The film immediately sets the tone from the very beginning by presenting various interdisciplinary ‘experts’ who equally have part in narrating the film throughout. As the argument develops, however, the narrators seem to hav...
The Green Knight notes that he has heard many things about the knights of Arthur’s court and the bulk of it being ab...
white and has no real idea about the music he alleges he is an expert
There are many common themes mocked in the movie “Monty Python the Quest for the Holy Grail”. Religion, Knightly Behavior, Noble Quests etc. I believe the movie showed how the old stories and plays kind of exaggerated these themes, and they aren’t as mighty as they are made out to be. I think Knights and Kings weren’t really as bold and courageous as stories told and this movie kind of showed it. There are exceptions though, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he took the challenge and stuck his neck out so no one else would have too and he did it bravely (he had a little bit of a scared moment) but he also admitted he was wrong for messing with the Green Knight’s wife. But in Monty Python, it showed how Knights also did things cowardly, as when Lancelot went to save the “damsel” in distress and killed almost everyone in the castle.
Pellinore at the well, and then begged that he should be buried, and that one of Arthur's
For this assignment I have chosen to analyze a scene from the 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, directed by West Anderson, where Richie Tenembaum, portrayed by Luke Wilson, attempts to commit suicide. This scene provides a shift from the previously established editing style of the film, its mood, pace, and camera movement as the filmmaker presents the climax in this one character’s story. This is done through the use of a specific mise en scène and an editing style which conveys the emotion behind the character’s actions.
In the words of Michael O’Shaughnessy, ‘narratives, or stories, are a basic way of making sense of our experience’ (1999: 266). As a society and a culture, we use stories to comprehend and share our experiences, typically by constructing them with a beginning, middle and an end. In fact, the order that a narrative is structured will directly impact the way it is understood, particularly across cultures. This idea originated through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structuralism in anthropology which ‘is concerned with uncovering the common structural principles underlying specific and historically variable cultures and myth’ in pre-industrial societies (Strinati 2003: 85). In terms of media studies, structuralism’s inherent objective is to dig beneath the surface of a media text to identify how the structure of a narrative contributes to it’s meaning. Structuralism encompasses a large range of analytical tools, however, this essay will examine Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary oppositions. Through analysis of Victor Fleming’s film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), it will be shown that although the monomyth and binary oppositions are useful tools with which to unveil how meaning is generated in this text, structuralism can undermine the audience’s ability to engage with their own interpretations of the film.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Despite this occasional negative reception, nothing signifies the influence of a film on screen culture more than when dialogue enters the vernacular of a nation. The iconic line “You’re terrible, Muriel” highlights “an intangible outcome beyond anything money can buy, striking
• In the beginning of the movie, you hear the sound of music and horses. However, it turns out that it was not horses at all; it was the sound of King Arthur’s squire pounding two coconut halves together to make the sound of horses galloping. They then go on to confront two soldiers at the castle gates o invite their lord to be apart of the round table .they approach a castle and are quickly confronted by soldiers on top of the castle walls. The soldiers go on to question about their mode of transportation. King Arthu...
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
While Shakespeare doesn’t have the cinematic luxuries of lighting and shadow at his disposal, he proves that Mulvey’s argument that desire is expressed in voyeuristic and scopophiliac fashion, but also that these innate desires of an audience transcend mediums and can in fact be fulfilled and appreciated in written form as much as within the intricacies of modern film.
legendary Arthur and the real Arthur have been presented, and the two have been compared for the purpose of drawing conclusions as to why, perhaps, this mortal man was personified as a legendary warrior and king of his people. Now, with both the legendary Arthur and the "real" Arthur discussed, perhaps a new outlook on the Arthurian legends can be taken when a person hears about Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.
The legend of King Arthur has intrigued generations for over a thousand years. Over these years, this tapestry has been handed down through the hands of many gifted storytellers. Bits and pieces were taken out and replaced by new strands woven in to fabricate a slight variation of the original that’s suitable for the audience or perhaps the storyteller himself. These modifications are evident in the 1981 film of Excalibur and Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” published in 1485. The film incorporates magical acts while religious allusions are portrayed in the text. There are several characters that appeared in one but not the other. The two versions have the same essential elements, but with some alterations. The main changes in the story plot are the events leading to the battle and the battle itself. The two versions have the same essential elements, but with some alterations.