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.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
Pellinore at the well, and then begged that he should be buried, and that one of Arthur's
• 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...
Malory, Thomas. King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver (London: Oxford UP, 1975) 124-25.
The Green Knight comes into the hall where King Arthur and his knights feast on a horse, and does not greet anyone. He carries a huge axe with "The Spike of green steel" (Norton 207) and with green engravings. He carries no armor and no other weapons. When he enters, not only he does not greet the people present, but he looks down rudely at them and asks: "Where is the captain of this crowd? Keenly I wish to see that sire with sight, and to himself say my say."
“Little Caesar.” Magill’s Survey of Cinema (June 1995): n. pag. eLibrary Curriculum Edition. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.
Sir Gawain is the nephew of the most famous King Arthur. Gawain being in line of the throne knew he must show his bravery and man up in front of his fellow knights. The Green Knight stormed into the king’s courts riding on a mystical horse. He taunted the men asking for the bravest knight in the kingdom to stand up and take his outrageous challenge. As the men sat quietly not knowing what to do, Sir Gawain decides t...
The second stanza describes how many warriors and "bold boys" were bred in Britain. The text continues and describes that many exceptional things are happening in this land than in any other for a long time. Most importantly, the text proceeds to offer a description that sets up the visualization and stature of the setting and characters included in the poem. Of all of the British kings, "King Arthur was counted most courteous of all" (Norton p. 203). He was the most respected, and therefore was the most powerful and most successful. There are many stories about the Arthurian Legend, but the author denotes that the story that he is about to retell, is one that is incomparable to any other. "Wherefore an adventure I aim to unfold, that a marvel of might some men think it, and one unmatched among Arthur's wonders. If you will listen to my lay but a little while, as I heard it in hall, I shall hasten to tell anew." (Norton p. 203) The author is saying that he heard it in passing and doesn't want to offend anyone by what he is saying.
Arnheim’s body of theory suggests that the necessity of human intervention to implement plot, tropes, and culturally legible symbols raises a film to a higher level than a mere copy of reality, and that this interpretation and expression of meaning is “a question of feeling” or intuition on the part of the filmmaker. (“Film Theory and Criticism” 283) One consequence of effective directorial intervention is that differences in speed, stops and starts, and what would otherwise be jarring gaps in continuity can be accepted by viewers, because if the essentials of reality are present, th...
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...
Paul Morrissey has created an atypical piece of cinema in which we view a character’s banal existence through the focal point of a choppy and broken editing style. This clip takes the viewer by surprise as it does not follow the conventional norms that we as an audience are familiar with, such as smooth transitions, clean editing, and sound dubbing.
Rascaroli, Laura. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24-47. JSTOR. Web. 08 May 2014.
Two of the best things in the world, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Harry Potter,” have a good deal in common. Other than the vast amount of space reserved in my brain for storing quotes and random facts from these two stories, both tales share many similar objects, plot devices, character attributes, and themes. Even though Python's “Holy Grail” is an exact historical representation of the Arthurian Grail legend, some might argue that the “Harry Potter” story is more reflective of the actual ancient texts than the 1974 film.
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.