Monty Python and the Holy Grail director's Influence

TERRY GILLIAM & TERRY JONES, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) 1HR 32 (LD/WS) THE DIRECTORS: TERRY GILLIAM (1940-) & TERRY JONES (1942-)

Set in 932 AD Britain. It is a series of sketches which deal with the legend of Arthur and the nature of medieval English society, the church, knighhood, chivalry, the peasanty, the burning of witches. The film should be seen as part of the tradition of satire about the chivalric ideal which goes back to Erasmus, Cervantes, and Chaucer (according to Jones's book). Its episodic nature needs to be understood (if not always enjoyed) as a result of its origins in the TV series. In his book Chaucer's Knight (1980) the director Jones notes that he had been concerned for some time about Chaucer's treatment of the Knight in The Canterbury Tales. Given the horrendous acts he was supposed to have participated in as a warrior and knight, Jones was troubled by the apparent dullness of his treatment of the character in the tale. Only when he was in Scotland filming The Holy Grail did Jones begin to reinterpret Chaucer's tale:

My problem was then to find out what Chaucer's contemporaries though about these mercenaries. In 1974 I was in Scotland filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when I picked up the guide-book for the castle in which we were filming, and there I found that not only was Doune Castle built at the very time that Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales but it was specially constructed so as to minimize the kind of treachery which had come to be expected from the new breed of globe-trotting mercenary. So there, expressed in the very fabric of the building we were using for our film, was the answer to my question about Chaucer's Knight - evidently the people of Chaucer's day were deeply suspicious of these mercenary knights. (p. x)

Jones also has some thoughts on the nature of the duel and one-on-one combat. The former is often fought for frivolous reasons by men overly concerned with their honour (see the scene with the Black Knight). The latter would be a good substitute for war if restricted to the leaders or their representatives. In his book Jones notes again that:

On that often quoted occasion in 1390, when the Saracens challenged the Christians to a tournament during the siege of Mahdia, there was, in fact, a considerable difference of opinion among the Christians as to whether or not they should accept it. The Lord of Coucy said that where the Christian faith was called into question, it was too serious a matter to be answered by one knight and that, 'such defyaunce in armes for suche a quarell ought nat to passe without great deliberation of good counsayle.'

In Monty Python's Flying Circus, the TV show in which I have been involved over the last ten years, we once did a sketch in which, instead of debating the existence or non-existence of God, a bishop and a humanist philosopher fought each other for it. It seems to me that Chaucer made this same joke almost six hundred years ago.

In his day, however, it had even more relevance, since he was in effect commenting on the Church's double-think on the subject of war. For the same Church that condemned tournaments, condoned and encouraged crusades in which, instead of two men, two nations fought each other to the death to prove the superiority of one religion over another. (pp. 81-2).

The process of filming The Holy Grail also showed the difficulties of moving about in heavy chain-mail, an experience which Jones uses to evaluate divergent academic critical opinion. In a footnote Jones comments:

Muriel Bowden thinks we are meant to visualize the Knight actually riding in his chain-mail on the pilgrimage... Skeat thinks not... For what it is worth, I agree with Skeat. It was a common cry that the armour of the day was too heavy (he then quotes Bonet). And although this must refer to the use of plate-armour in addition to chain mail, the chain-mail itself must have been very heavy. When we made the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, most of us wore imitation chain-mail made out of knitted wool, which was uncomfortable enough, but Graham Chapman, as King Arthur, wore a genuine metal chain-mail coif and found the weight of it unbearable for more than short periods. (pp. 273-4).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (New York: Methuen, 1980, 1985).

THINGS TO NOTE

• The contrast between the literary, romanticised world of Arthur and the Arthurian legend and the dirty, disease-ridden, impoverished reality of medieval England. Arthur's chivalric speech is not understood by the ordinary people. They recognise him as the king because of his attire - "He must be the King. He hasn't got shit all over him." The periodic reminders that ordinary people also lived and worked in Arthurian England: victims of the plague, villagers, serfs working in the fields.


• The nature of medieval kingshihp and the legitmacy of the king to rule. A peasant - "I didn't vote for you." The peasants' "anarcho-syndicalist collective" in which there is no need for a king. When Arthur becomes infuriated a peasant calls out - "Look at the violence inherent in the system".


• The satire on chivalry. Dueling and tournaments. The brutal one-on-one combat between the Green and the Black Knights. The fight between Arhtur and the Black Knight - satire on the nature of martial courage. A legless and armless Black Knight continues to challenge Arthur "to come back and fight like a man". The chastity of chivalrous knights - Sir Galahad and the castle of maidens. Sir Lancelot's rescue of the "damsel in distress".


• The suggestion that the "tales" sung about the exploits of the heroic knights were more fiction than fact, thus undermining the veracity of all epic poems. The gullibility of the Knights and ordinary people. The Tale of Sir Robin - "running away".


• The role of the Church in sanctifying violence - The Book of Armaments and the Holy Hand Granade.


• The references to other heroic legends - the Trojan Rabbit.


• The anachronistic self-reference to a modern "famous historian" - when pontificating about Arthur and Camelot (and thus perpetuating the legend) a knight strikes him down. The rest of the film is interrupted by the police investigating his "murder". The trademark use of animation - God and angles, monks, scribes, castle life, the Black Beast