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The Trial of Joan of Arc
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Prisoner
The Trial of Joan
of Arc is Robert Bresson’s severest film (even the French title, if rendered literally,
is severe: Trial of Joan of Arc). It is not about Joan (Florence Carrez) the warrior on the fields of battle, about her
family or childhood. It scarcely even seems to want to dramatise her anguish
and her ecstasy – at least not in the paroxysmic way that Carl Dreyer did in
the classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), with Maria Falconetti reeling histrionically
in stark-white frames and rolling her eyes to Heaven. There are no bursts of
sublime classical music here, as in some of Bresson’s previous films – only a
harsh drum beat to mark the beginning and ending.
Bresson
frustrated even his closest collaborators on this project. Once the perfect,
quite spacious location for the courtroom was found, dressed and lit, the
director insisted on filming only a tiny fraction of it. Cinematographer
Léonce-Henry Burel (who clashed acrimoniously with Bresson during the shooting)
described how the assembled judges, fixed on a dais against a flat backdrop,
were filmed from one principal angle – and then, on Bresson’s orders, “we
simply turned everything around, still with that wretched dais, and shot the
girl”.
And
that, essentially, is the form of the finished film: shots of the inquisitors
alternating with shots of Joan, interspersed with brief but poignant glimpses
of Joan in her cell. This Joan never looks up, causing Burel to despair over
the loss of light in her “most marvellous, beautiful eyes”. (1) So why this
severe form? Bresson was precise as ever: “Because it is a film made up
entirely of questions and answers”. (2)
Eschewing
every melodramatic possibility and keeping the action within a tightly confined
space, Bresson chooses a very particular focus: the words of Joan the Maiden as
they were transcribed in the trial records of 1431. He described the subject of
the film in a way that may seem peculiar but is, in fact, entirely
characteristic of his style of cinema: “Without ever touching a quill, Joan of
Arc wrote a book, and this book is a masterpiece of our literature”. (3)
Thus,
the film is devoted primarily to the twin actions of speech and writing – with
that hand we see constantly inscribing the text on paper both ominously sealing
Joan’s fate and preserving her glory for all time.
All
of Bresson’s films are about the internal metamorphosis of a character – toward
a spiritual state, or (in his later works) the negation of it. But in his works
that borrow (and completely transform) some of the devices of suspense or
thriller cinema – the captive chipping his way out of his cell in A Man Escaped (1956), the thief
mastering the techniques of criminality in Pickpocket (1959) – this inner journey occurs
via busy, intricate, intense action.
In The Trial of Joan of Arc, Bresson
deliberately turns his back on this more conventionally intriguing narrative
form. Bravely, even perversely, he picks up the story of Joan at exactly the
point where the action has stopped dead. No bodies are in motion here, except
in the passage to and from their circumscribed, ritual spots. The film shows us
nothing but the recounting of past deeds, the interrogation of motives, and finally
the passage to execution at the stake – a finale which is among the director’s
greatest achievements.
Part
of what makes this finale so paradoxically exhilarating is the fact that only
in these final moments does Bresson set his character, and we as viewers, free
into the open air and the light. “It’s important for me to establish the real
proportions of light between inside and outside”, said Bresson. “Outside is
very light. Inside more or less dark. The truth about the light takes its part
in the general truth of the film”. (4)
In
highly formal decisions like these – the decision to base the film around
written and spoken words, the decision to withhold full daylight and the open
air until the final scene – The Trial of
Joan of Arc anticipates, and prepares the way for, much innovative modern cinema
of a kind we today (sometimes unwisely) call minimalist: films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet like The Chronicle of Anna Magdelena Bach (1967), which is based entirely on real-time musical performances and diary
readings; or by Chantal Akerman, whose Golden Eighties (1986) keeps us inside an elaborate shopping-mall set until the final send-off
out in the street.
In
many such cases, the filmmakers seek to respect, and convey on screen, a certain text, usually a historical document of some sort. Bresson, for his part,
was adamant about the strict authenticity of this procedure: “I have shown
exactly what I found in the real account”. (5) Yet, at another moment, he
quietly betrayed how much intervention on his part was really involved: “There
were a great number of edits. I condensed things, in order to keep the
essential. Sometimes, I changed their order. I gave them a rhythm.” (6) This is
the hand of the artist at work; it is also a clue to the very particular
selection Bresson made from the transcripts, and an invitation to interpret his
very particular emphasis. Compared, for example, to the more conventional edit
offered by Willard Trask’s 1936 volume Joan
of Arc: Self-Portrait, (7) Bresson’s account of the trial stresses the
malignant perversity of Bishop Cauchon (surrealist
painter Jean-Claude Fourneau) as he insistently and
obsessively questions Joan as to the status of her virginity and her refusal to
wear women’s clothing.
By
the same token, Bresson is not interested in showing the historic past as
something fossilised, static, exotic or quaint, an object to be contemplated as
in so many costume pictures. He wanted “to make [Joan] real and immediate”. (8) As always in Bresson, the casting of a non-professional model (as he
named this precious type of performer) was crucial to the process. Florence Carrez (today Florence Delay, a novelist and member of the
Académie française) was, and remains, a controversial choice, even among devoted
Bressonians. Some see her more in the gauche tradition of Jean Seberg in Otto
Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957), Milla
Jovovich in Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc (1999) and Leelee Sobieski in the 1999
telemovie of the same title, rather than the voluptuously agonised Falconetti
in The Passion of Joan of Arc,
Sandrine Bonnaire in Jacques Rivette’s epic Jeanne
la Pucelle (1996), or even Ingrid Bergman in her twin incarnations of Joan,
first for Hollywood in 1948 and then for Roberto Rossellini in 1954. But this
naïve quality in Carrez, the lack of conventional dramatic weight, is surely
part of Bresson’s deepest intention.
This
Joan is a feisty thing, not easily bowed by the intimidation of authorities
from Church and State. Whenever she gets up from her interrogation post and
marches back to her cell, there is something in her gait that is irresistibly
evocative of an early ‘60s teenybopper. And this is a constant in Bresson’s
work, right to the end of his career: the freshness of youth in revolt – the
youth of the era in which the film is made, not the one in which it is set –
always erupts forcefully from the calm surfaces of the movies.
The
great Spanish director Víctor Erice put it well: Bresson’s films, whenever and
wherever they are encountered, are the “emblem of a new faith, against all the
odds of disenchanted youth. […] No one was able to speak to young filmmakers of
yesterday like Bresson, and in the same way, no one like him can speak to young
filmmakers of today”. (9)
If
there is any popular film genre which The
Trial of Joan of Arc evokes, it is the courtroom drama. All courtroom
movies, even the trashiest, come down to the sort of minimalism that Bresson
enhances: it is a matter of words, of speech, of text emanating from rigid
bodies in the dock – with the question suspended in the air of how much of any
of these spoken words match the real world outside the court.
In
the case of Joan of Arc, this question is both a historical watershed and an
endlessly topical, relevant issue. Can we believe that the voices Joan heard
were really from God or the saints – or were they merely her own mental
hallucinations? In the contemporary world, murder trials sometimes hinge on a
similar issue – and this is also the stuff of child-abuse horror movies like
Hideo Nakata’s The
Ring Two (2005).
Bresson’s
approach to it all is strictly both minimalist and materialist – we will never
hear those voices ourselves, as some Joan of Arc movies allow us to do – and,
at the same time, entirely religious. We can feel within the film itself (as
well as in Bresson’s comments about it) an extreme pledge of faith in this remarkable young woman.
And that faith is, in a sense, rewarded at the end of the film in its very
final shot: what Bresson referred to as “the miraculous disappearance of Joan”.
(10)
Although
it takes a little more work than usual to dig it out, The Trial of Joan of Arc is, like every Bresson work, a poetic
film. There is, from the start to the end, the superbly linked and flowing
procession of hands, feet, doors. There is the subtle parallel between Joan and
Christ – especially on the way to the Cross. There is the discreetly erotic
hint – opposed to the prurient voyeurism of the English captors, more in line
with Leonard Cohen’s poignant song “Joan of Arc” – of this girl as the Bride of
the Lord, going to the deliverance which is death in what can pass for a
wedding dress. There is that stray dog among the crowd as the flames grow high
and smoke fogs up the scene, and the birds that flutter around – for Bresson,
signs of the heightened, even supernatural sensitivity of the natural world,
and of a life-force that continues beyond the politics of men.
And
there is, finally, the dual-power metaphor that shapes the entire film. The
first part of this metaphor is theatre.
Jacques Lourcelles has commented: “While professing
to despise the theatre, Bresson in fact never left it. Step by step, he built
his very own theatre, without a doubt the most ‘artificial’ in all French cinema”.
(11)
The
world as conjured up by The Trial of Joan
of Arc is a theatre – but also, at the same time, a prison. When once asked, at the time of the release of this film,
why the theme of the prison is present in almost his works, Bresson modestly
but profoundly replied: “I have never noticed this. But perhaps it’s because we
are all prisoners”. (12)
MORE Bresson: L'Argent, Au hasard Balthazar
1. Rui Nogueira, “Burel & Bresson” in James Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson (Cinémathèque Ontario, 1st edition, 1999), p. 520. back
© Adrian Martin March 2005 / September 2006 |
