Last Tango in Belle Isle: Walker Percy, Cinéma Vérité , and New Language

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article recovers the lost dialogue between Walker Percy's controversial novel, Lancelot (1977), and Bernardo Bertolucci's infamous erotic film, Last Tango in Paris (1972). Employing a method called cinéma vérité , which relies on improvisation to simulate a reality effect, Last Tango in Paris claimed to recover a reality antecedent to language, one defined by bodies touching bodies. This cinematic project paralleled a movement within religious studies toward examinations of body practice and away from what Percy himself called "worn" theological lexicons. Percy engaged these mutual turns to the body by deconstructing and remaking them in Lancelot , a novel structured around a series of failed film projects, each of which draws on the methods of cinéma vérité . By studying the protagonist Lancelot's failure to access reality by documenting it in film, the novel insists that experiences of the real, against the claims of Bertolucci and anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, are inextricable from our ways of speaking about it. Through its invocation of Last Tango in Paris, Lancelot examines the risks of the immanent turn in postwar religious studies and calls for a new normative language to frame religious experience.