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Now You Don't See It, Now You Do: Recognizing the Grail as the Grail

from II - Interpretations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Roberta Davidson
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Summary

Every director who makes a film depicting the Holy Grail faces the same challenge: the audience assumes it knows what the Grail looks like. Contemporary representations of the Grail have uniformly shown a glowing chalice, and for audiences this chalice is immediately recognizable as the Grail. Accordingly, every director who makes a film depicting the Grail has the same problem: how to avoid cliché and anticlimax when an object the audience has already recognized before it appears on screen is finally seen.

To put the problem in its most basic terms – film is a visual medium. When we see an object in a film we recognize it, or we are told what it is, or we are conscious of not knowing what that thing on the screen is supposed to be. If, in order for the Grail to be visually accepted as the Grail it must conform to the popular expectation of a glowing chalice, it also, presumably, cannot be other than that when revealed. The audience must not need to ask the question, “what is it?” Therefore, the director and the screenwriter must address a crucial creative question: how a film, in which the familiarity of the object is a prerequisite of the narrative, can nonetheless surprise the audience when the already recognized object is found?

Traditionally, the history of both the representation and identification of the Grail was far less iconic than our contemporary perception of it. Its association with a holy cup does not occur until the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, in Robert de Boron’s verse romance, Joseph d’Arimathie, or Le Roman de l’Estoire du Graal. Previous versions of the Grail or Grail-like objects included a serving platter (Perceval), a cauldron that brought the dead back to life (Branwen, Daughter of Llyr), and one that would only cook food for the brave (Spoils of Annwn). However, the chalice and its identification as the cup from which Jesus drank at The Last Supper has dominated modern popular culture. In that sense, then, the actual history of multiple Grail representations does not provide the filmmaker with any viable alternative image.

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Studies in Medievalism XVIII
Defining Medievalism(s) II
, pp. 188 - 202
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2009

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