Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975 · Terry Jones · Monty Python and the Holy Grail on Sightlines
Arthur comes out of the fog at the top of the film and the soundtrack says horse. Hoofbeats on turf, an approach at a canter, a king arriving. Then the mist thins and there is no horse. There is a man skipping, holding reins that are not there, with a servant behind him clapping two halves of a coconut.
Everybody knows the joke. What repays attention is how it is built. The picture tells the truth: men on foot in Scotland, no budget for animals. The sound tells a lie, and tells it with total conviction. Neither channel corrects the other. They run side by side for the length of the film, and the gap between them is where the comedy lives.
Deleuze has a name for this arrangement, and he found it in films nobody would call funny. In Duras, in Straub and Huillet, a voice speaks over a landscape it cannot be located in; sound and image stop cooperating, each tells its own story, and nothing reconciles them. He calls it audiovisual disjunction. Its consequence is that the image loses its self-evidence. You cannot simply watch it any more. You have to read it, the way you read a caption that does not match its photograph. Terry Bedford shot the Scottish exteriors as gray, misted, genuinely handsome medieval epic, and that is the load-bearing half of the gag: the picture has to be believable for the sound to be able to lie over it. Python arrived at this to save money. They kept it because it was funnier than a horse.
Once you have watched the film split its channels, you start noticing it split everything else.
Take the Black Knight. To see what happens there you need the plainest idea in Deleuze's cinema books. Most films run on what he calls the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. See threat, draw sword, threat resolved. The chain is so natural we do not experience it as a convention. It is simply what a story is, and a Grail quest is that chain extended and ennobled.
Deleuze's argument is that the chain broke. After the war, characters appeared who could see perfectly well and could no longer do anything about what they saw. They stood in streets. They watched. He calls this the crisis of the action-image, and his examples are Italian and solemn. The Black Knight is the same crisis played as slapstick and taken literally. Arthur takes an arm and the knight calls it a scratch. Arthur takes the other arm, then both legs. The man has been relieved, one at a time, of the actual organs of action, and his conviction that he is in an action film survives every amputation intact. Arthur does not defeat him. There is nothing left to defeat. He crosses himself, walks off, and leaves a torso shouting after him. Reading the scene this way is worth the trouble because it explains why the film is not a series of unrelated jokes about knights. It is one joke, performed over and over on the machinery of narrative itself.
The quest obeys the same rule. Deleuze lists the symptoms of the broken chain: a dispersive situation, a group of characters only weakly attached to one another; slackened links, scenes that do not cause the next one; and the voyage or balade, the trip that transforms nobody. God appears in the sky and hands out an errand, the knights scatter, and each adventure leaves no residue in the one that follows. Gilliam's cutout animations do the joining, which is another way of saying nothing joins. The cutting severs a scene the instant its gag has landed. That is sketch rhythm, learned on television, and it happens to be the exact editorial grammar of a narrative that has given up on accumulation.
What replaces action is talk. Deleuze's reflection-image covers this: action that is not performed but transposed into figure, spectacle, or argument. Arthur announces himself as king and the peasants refuse the premise on procedural grounds, explaining that a woman in a pond handing out swords is no basis for a system of government. That is not a joke about peasants. It is the film declining to let a legitimating fiction pass as a fact, and doing it as a seminar instead of a duel. The Bridgekeeper is not fought, he is out-argued. Knights stand in a field debating the airspeed of swallows. Every obstacle becomes a problem posed and abandoned.
Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the room next door, from the absolute one, something outside the frame that cannot be placed anywhere in space. In Holy Grail the absolute outside is the production. A monster is defeated when the animator has a fatal heart attack. A historian addresses the camera and is cut down by a passing knight, and the film treats that as a homicide: a police investigation begins somewhere off screen, drifts through the picture, and finally reaches the climactic charge, breaks it up, and puts a hand over the lens. Deleuze notes that the crisis films keep discovering a diffuse plot behind the plot. Grail's plot behind the plot is a murder inquiry, and it wins. The Arthurian epic ends in an arrest.
One more channel-split, the funniest. Brave Sir Robin rides with a minstrel singing his heroism in real time while Robin, in the image, is failing. Deleuze calls this fabulation, a subject caught in the act of legending himself, and he means it seriously: people with no history invent one out loud. Python films the mechanism from the other end and shows the legend being manufactured live, a half-beat ahead of the body it describes, exactly like the hoofbeats a half-beat ahead of the coconuts.
None of the deflation was invented here, and the film is better for knowing it. Bresson's Lancelot du Lac had opened a year earlier with knights reduced to exhausted clanking armor and a quest that simply runs down. Bergman's Seventh Seal supplied the register being inverted, the armored man against a bleak horizon. Pasolini's Canterbury Tales gave the mud and the bad teeth. Welles's Chimes at Midnight showed how filthy real period staging could look while staying grand, which is precisely the credibility Bedford's camera lends Grail. Behind all of it sits Duck Soup: authority assaulted, plot dissolving, nobody in charge. The Pythons' own first feature had only restaged television sketches. What Jones and Gilliam invented together was keeping the sketch as the unit while building a world solid enough to be worth demolishing. Jones's insistence on genuine filth and real castles is what makes the anachronism land; Gilliam's cutouts are the visible seams.
Comedy normally announces itself. Lighting, scoring, and performance all signal permission to laugh. Grail withheld that signal from every channel except the writing. Chapman plays Arthur straight. Cleese plays a dismembered man as a man of honor. The music plays medieval solemnity so it can be violated. The film proved you can run a genre entirely straight while the content lies, and that an audience will hold both at once without help. It proved something about endings too: a film can admit it is a film and have the admission be the punchline rather than the critique. Godard had been breaking the frame for a decade as an argument. Python broke it for a laugh, and the laugh travelled further. An audience that accepts a police van arresting a movie will accept nearly any liberty a comedy takes with form afterward.
The joke the film never makes is the obvious one. Nobody in it ever says the Grail is not worth having. The quest is never debunked, only prevented, by procedure, pedantry, cowardice, and finally by the law. Watch it again listening for which channel is lying in each scene. Usually the score. Sometimes the minstrel. Occasionally the picture. Notice how seldom any two of them agree. The film is not making fun of Camelot. It is making fun of the machinery by which any story gets from a beginning to an arrival.
Concepts in play
- audiovisual-disjunction — The coconut hoofbeats: the soundtrack narrates a mounted procession while the image shows men on foot miming reins, and neither channel ever corrects the other (the castle guard's coconut interrogation makes the split explicit).
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Cleese's Black Knight, limbs removed one by one, insisting ''tis but a scratch' — the organs of action are gone while the conviction that action still resolves things remains; Arthur simply walks away rather than winning.
- voyage-balade-form — God commands the Grail quest, the knights scatter on individual trials, and no episode leaves a residue in the next; the film ends with no arrival, interrupted by police.
- dispersive-situation — Arthur's recruited knights — Bedevere, Lancelot, Robin, Galahad — are weakly linked figures who disperse, each Python also playing several roles across a chain of self-contained episodes.
- weak-links — Editing that jump-severs a scene the moment a gag completes, with Gilliam's animated interludes standing in for causal connection between episodes.
- discourse-image — The peasants lecturing Arthur on the illegitimacy of aquatic ceremonies as a basis for governance, and the Bridgekeeper defeated by trivia rather than combat — obstacles become problems posed and abandoned.
- out-of-field-absolute — The animated monster stops because the animator suffers a fatal heart attack; the film's outside is the unplaceable production apparatus, which finally reaches into the frame when police switch off the camera.
- condemnation-of-the-plot — The off-screen death of the historian mid-narration spawns a police investigation that runs beneath the quest and eventually arrives to break up the climactic charge — a plot behind the plot that ends the film in an arrest.
- fabulation — Neil Innes's 'Brave Sir Robin', in which the minstrel sings Robin into legend in real time while the image shows him failing.
- consciousness-of-cliches — The metafictional spine — the historian addressing the camera, the Trojan Rabbit, the Camelot musical number parodying epic pomp — characters and film alike moving knowingly among the conventions of the quest romance.