El proceso de Juana de Arco

To appreciate this film you have to be a supporter of the 'less is more' school of thought. Bresson presents the viewer with a stark, simple story, employing virtually no cinema devices at all - whilst 'Trial of Joan of Arc' isn't one of his best known efforts, it bears all the hallmarks of his genius.

With a running time of just over an hour, the film covers the trial of the famous French heroine, the script solely based on the historical notes from the trial itself. As usual with Bresson, the cast is made up of non-actors who prove that simple delivery of potent narrative, can still be convincing.

The actress who plays Joan, Florence Delay, is superb and stunningly attractive - I assumed she was a major star of 1960's French cinema, rather than an unknown in her first ( and last?? ) role. The film concentrates so much on her character that she has to be convincing - every word she delivers has an edge to it and you can truly believe that here was a teenage girl who had an inner strength which entire armies would follow.

Everything which is good in foreign films is encapsulated here - the simple approach, the dialogue, the static camera and the realism. Bresson's next film was the highly praised 'Au Hasard Balthazar'(1966), which continued some of the themes, but overall I think this is the better film.

A superb demonstration of Bresson's talent as one of the last century's greatest film-makers. It is a short film, set minimally in a courtroom, then Joan's cell and finally, with immense power, at the stake. The actors are amateurs, as usual with Bresson, but the message they convey is universal - and as relevant to the 21st century as to the 15th century, when the events, realistically described in the film from court texts, took place.

Was Joan really a freedom-fighter and a saint, receiving messages from God through her saintly visions? Or was she a 15th century terrorist, opposing both the power of the English occupying army and the tenets of the Catholic Church and its bishops? As the trial is enacted, there are no obvious villains - not even the English officer representing the occupying secular power. And Joan needs to be discreetly prompted by a white-clad priest, whose motives are obscure, casting some doubts on the certainties of her visions. The triumph of the director and the actors is that you feel that the viewer is totally involved in the interactions - and I had to rush to the history books to learn more about the main characters as soon as the film finished.

I saw this film along with numerous other Bresson films being shown at the National Gallery of Art in DC. In this film the English characters speak English and the French characters speak French. I knew little about Joan of Arc and was expecting it not to be one of my favorites. I was blown away by the way it brought Joan and her tragic experiences to life. It and Diary of a Country Priest were my favorites. I had the advantage to talk to a gentleman who teaches a course on Great Trials of the World who gave me background including how well this uneducated girl was able to handle the questions at the trial, how Bresson was faithful to George Bernard Shaw's play based on transcripts from the trial, etc. The emotional power of Joan of Arc's trial in this film is truly amazing. It should be available on Netflix for all to see.

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.

Bresson's film is quite extraordinary. An entirely static camera, a repertoire of what seems like only a handful of angles, and no music save the unnerving thumping of medieval drums at the beginning and end, all add up to a form restrained to the point of stasis. The movement of the film comes entirely from the words and from the faces. And from the rigorous choice of those few camera angles. It is a moot point as to whether or not it is relevant that the script is composed almost entirely of transcripts from the actual trial. However, the viewer armed with this knowledge must surely be privy to an extraordinary sense of time-travel - a restrained, respectful and highly spiritual journey back into the "dark ages". There is necessarily an inescapable sense of people hundreds of years dead speaking through the mouths of the (non-professional) actors, whose limited but affecting range fits perfectly with the curious juxtaposition of past and present, of cinema and grace.

As has been pointed out many times before, one of the primary differences between Bresson's film and Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is in their formal delineation between good and evil; where Dreyer uses light and shadow to point up the difference, in the Bresson film the contrast is more subtle, resting, it would seem, mainly on the fact that the Bishop Cauchon is shut exclusively head on, whilst Jeanne commands a variety of oblique camera angles. But the subtlety of the camera also brings out a fantastic sense of time, space, and place. The numerous close-ups of period shoes are all we need to have the era set firmly in our minds; the medium-shots - and complete absence of anything like a long shot - simultaneously reinforce the claustrophobia of Jeanne's predicament, and focus our attention on her, and that which falls under her gaze. The one notable exception to this is the short series of shots while she burns on the pyre, of the white doves fluttering above the canvas awning, suitable parallels with the absent characters of the Saints Catharine and Margaret, whose presence is felt and whose names recur throughout the trial. A simple film, formally, perhaps, but only in the sense that everything is pared down to a minimum, and the choices are only made with the greatest of care and most rigorous of logic. The words and the faces do not need embellishment. They need attention and simplicity, in the same way that the words uttered by the real Joan of Arc are simple and unadorned. A masterful marriage of form and content.