The world of Lancelot du Lac is a world whose form is that of a mirror. It reflects not the face of its subjects, but their inevitable dissolution. What Bresson presents is not merely the collapse of Camelot, nor the disillusionment of a knightly order long passed, but the fragile structure of myth itself. In a decaying age, the film reveals the linguistic deconstruction of the very ideals it portrays; those that once stood as symbols of a coherent and ordered world. To watch this film is to stand before the ruins of an ideal, not a particular ideal, but the ideal itself or the irretrievable image of the perfect knight, the perfect kingdom, the perfect quest. However, in this decline, Bresson, like a master alchemist, transforms the preciousness of the legendary into something less sacred, something more exasperatingly human. The signifiers themselves collapse under the weight of their own meaninglessness. The very nature of language is exposed, as is its endless oscillation between signifier and signified, between form and void. In the knights’ silence, there is an absence of speech and a resonance of an older silence. Perhaps it is the quietude of the world before it was named and before it got divided into concepts and distinctions. This stillness is not merely due to a lack of utterance but is also the result of a deeper semiotic void. In the absence of speech, there is an unspoken commentary on the very nature of language, which suggests that language, far from being a neutral mirror of reality, is a construct that imposes its own order on the chaotic world. It is this very order that collapses in the film, as the knights are trapped within a symbolic system that no longer corresponds to the world they inhabit. The name 'Lancelot', once associated with chivalric virtues, has become an empty signifier, its meaning fractured beyond recognition. In this loss of meaning, Bresson's film speaks to the vulnerability of symbols, illustrating how they can be inflated with significance and yet, in time, lose all reference to the world they once described. According to Bresson, Lancelot is both the knight and the remnant of that knight: a signifier whose meaning has evaporated. He is caught between two solitudes: the myth that created him and a world that no longer believes in his greatness. Lancelot himself has become an anagram of the past. The myth that once bestowed power upon his name now serves only to remind us of the inevitable erosion of all meaning.

The knights, moving through this world as if in a trance, are characters from a forgotten epic or, one might say, figures who have outlived their own fate. They are neither trapped in time, nor are they victims of it. Rather, they inhabit time, rendering it irrelevant. In the classical myth, the passage of time would guide the hero through trials, giving weight to his suffering and merit to his victory. In Lancelot du Lac, however, time is indifferent. It is a static condition, a vast, unbroken present in which the knight is suspended, always repeating the same actions without the possibility of catharsis or meaning. In this world, there is neither beginning nor end, only a labyrinth of endless recursion of gestures, each one devoid of the redemptive power it once held. Like language, time has lost its function as a conduit for change. The knights do not fight because they must, nor because they are bound by honour, but because the act itself has become a question whose answer is always deferred. One might say that Bresson has drained the knights of their legend, leaving them with nothing but the bitter residue of repetition. In this world, the knights perform gestures as one might perform a ritual with no belief in its virtue. The armour that encases them is not a symbol of power, but a futile and almost comical gesture — an empty signifier. Their actions, like their armor, have become mere symbols without substance. They are trapped in a semiotic cycle, where meaning continually escapes them, leaving only the form without its original content. This collapse of meaning echoes the linguistic phenomenon by which a word, through constant use, may lose its original meaning and become a mere empty shell of sound, a fragment of a once-robust system of communication. They are but ghosts, and it is their ghostliness that gives them their tragic dignity. But it is a dignity suspended in the abyss. It is not of a knight who has triumphed, but of a figure who in his pursuit of an unattainable ideal is doomed to be caught forever in the moment of his striving. This is not the dignity of a hero; it is that of a cipher who cannot escape the confines of his own story. In a sense, the knights themselves are a linguistic anomaly trapped in a sentence that cannot find its conclusion, forever repeating and incomplete. Their narrative, once a tale of triumph, has now become an eternal fragment or a suspended clause that can never resolve itself. Their actions, like their words, are signs that no longer point to anything beyond themselves.