This is the one Bresson allegedly made in response to Dreyer, though not sure if that was the real impetus or something said along the way to mark intentions. I can see how the project would appeal greatly to him; like his three previous ones, it's about an idealistic youth faced with a world that stifles the spirit. He must have felt it so apt that he could use actual transcripts of the trial kept by the notaries at Rouen.
He films the trial as a process of facts, no flourish allowed anywhere, sparse and all the other things you'll read in comments, and all this as asceticism that purifies the eye, or so it goes. Dreyer's Joan was assailed by passions so overwhelming they escaped the body to rend the cinematic air. Huge contrast with Bresson's who is stoic and dispassionate, the air is static, everything is kept in body.
One specific impetus behind the project I believe may hav been how to have the portrait of this woman, induce as much deliberate poverty of expression, and still give us a soul? He does it I think. He gives us a Joan who is indomitable, but also afraid, proud without losing her sweetness, glimmers of unsure innocence through the armor of god. He's gifted with a woman as marvelous as Dreyer had.
It was an ongoing project for Bresson that stretched back several films, he surpasses them here in complete austerity. He was probably a happy camper looking back.
But more than any individual film, it's his philosophy of purity that I feel is worth examining, and I'm in the middle of a few posts where I grapple with it. He was writing along the way a book that delineates this philosophy. It was seeing quotes from this book for years that prompted me to follow up on the films, it was something I've always had in the back of my mind tied to personal observations about emptiness and purity.
I won't have conclusions before Balthazar, which is next in line, and probably the one after, but there is something to say here.
We say that Bresson is pure, but if you look up close, there's a method. It's one of timing and blocking exact pieces, this extends from the camera to the actors, who become pieces to be moved. What he's doing is that he's taking the language of film and breaking it down to the most basic grammar. I see this as both an intellectually barren project to pick, why all your work will just be simplifying, and it sets you down a slippery slope where the only thing purer is is simple.
Bresson makes a lot out of the importance of stillness, but at the center I perceive another notion; he writes that he wants nothing false, nothing that the eye doesn't see. It's a grammarian's insistence on what is true, or seems so at this point, a dogmatist's claim on reality. How about all that we don't see but can feel move through us? He deliberately mutes this in the actors.
And in the film we have what? A young girl who is full of inner things she feels, god or madness it's the same courage for her, faced with a cadre of clerics who set out to disprove it all as impure, the devil's work. What's happening during the trial is that these dogmatists are trying to corner Joan into saying that she saw what the eye doesn't see, the abstract in the world of senses, which is what Bresson is working against.
(From a Christian view, it would be heretic to say that the divine was bound thus and so, and you were privy of that form)
Were the saints clothed? Did St. Catherine have her hair down?
Grammarians of spirituality.
Now the task is open. More interesting than the actual films for me is this battle in Bresson, between the grammarian of spirituality with his fixed notions on the divine and Joan who wants to preserve the truth of what she felt. Is the world full of presence? Balthazar is up next.
