Hollywood Avalon, Episode 39 – The Once and Future King: Paganism and Arthurian Cinema (full episode)

Mary, a white woman in a black t-shirt, holding her hands up and mouth open to speak, standing in front of a screen. She is in what looks like an open structure in the woods. Dennis is in the front of the audience with a laptop open. The screen has the same image as what's behind Mary, so I guess he clicked on the slides for her.

We’re doing something a little different this month; instead of covering a film or tv show, we’re releasing a lecture given earlier this month. Also, we’re releasing this episode widely, including on the main feed.

We were recently invited by Rev. Michael Dangler–a member of the Patreon here–to give a talk at the Summerlands Festival about Arthurian cinema. And so I wrote a short essay, titled “The Once and Future King: Paganism and Arthurian Cinema”, which discusses the origins of seeking Pagan themes in Arthurian legend, followed by a discussion of several films, all of which have been covered on the podcast: Apocalypse NowExcalibur, and the Mists of Avalon among other films are brought up.

Apologies for the sound quality; we had an equipment failure, and so we only had one recording make it through the presentation, so there’s some ambient noise, and audience interaction is hard to hear clearly.

Once again, we’d like to thank Rev. Dangler for inviting us to speak, we had a wonderful time, and it was great to get our thoughts down on the subject. This is the second time I’ve been able to give a short talk on film (see our bonus episode on Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy for the other); hopefully it won’t be the last.

For anyone interested, Rev. Dangler has his own Patreon as well: https://www.patreon.com/cw/chronarchy

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