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Mystery and Mechanism in Dreyer and Bresson
The purest, most distilled film in the fifty-year career of Robert Bresson, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) remains his most under-seen and under-recognized achievement. Remarkably faithful to the transcription of Joan’s trial, Bresson’s film was an attempt, “without creating ‘theater’ or ‘masquerade,’ to discover a non-historical truth by means of historical words.”
In this respect, the film inevitably evokes comparison with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s similarly radical attempt to accurately represent the final months of Joan’s life while also exploring much deeper questions. For all their considerable differences, the films are linked through their bracing formal rigor as well as their idiosyncratic treatment of a perpetually beguiling figure that has intrigued filmmakers of all kinds for more than a century.
Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc
Like the other silent-era directors making Joan of Arc films following her canonization in 1920, Dreyer employed a historical advisor, but the finished film challenges the aesthetic conventions of the period and frustrates the expectations generated by its subject. Although an expensive castle set was constructed, there is a complete absence of the establishing shots that would allow the viewer to ground the action in a particular space. By using camera movements without any clear reference point, and framing figures from below against blank backgrounds that break down linear perspective and traditional depth cues, Dreyer instead presents the screen as a graphic surface and the face as an emotional landscape. Visual motifs become patterns that play out in a number of subtly reinforcing permutations, and the highly elliptical editing is used to bridge discontinuous spaces in continually surprising ways.
Totally eschewing conventional forms of cutting, Dreyer creates his own internal system of communication, held together by glances. Broad pans across the judges are intercut with close-ups of Joan (Renée Jeanne Falconetti) and the gazes are linked through editing so as to create the impression that she is the unmoved center of a circle, the sacred axis around which her inquisitors orbit (left). Off-center framings, rapid camera movements, and shifts in the scale of the judges reinforce the isolation and centrality of Joan, who is frequently shown in extreme close-up.
For a substantial portion of the film the viewer is staring Joan in the face from a high-angle position, and in one highly revealing moment Dreyer visually aligns the camera itself with Joan’s torturers, drawing attention to the element of sadism inherent in the film’s representation of her persecution and implicating the viewer in the process (below).
With Joan’s death, the carefully constructed network built up around her breaks down, the camera appears to become unmoored, and the montage becomes turbulent, held together by the repeated appearance of a flock of doves that attests to her spiritual release (below).
Whatever catharsis or reassurance this may provide is tempered by the questions it leaves lingering for viewers put in the position of the inquisitors for the first three-quarters of the film—does Joan possess genuine spiritual authority? Is she a sacred martyr or a persecuted fool? Like Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955), The Passion of Joan of Arc possesses an audaciously architectonic structure that ultimately forces the viewer to confront the most fundamental questions of belief.
Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc
Bresson’s film - a spare and concentrated sixty-five-minute chamber drama made in an era dominated by full-color, panoramic epics - is equally uncompromising. After a long drought in the early sound period, there were a considerable number of Joan of Arc films released shortly after World War II, including two vehicles designed for Ingrid Bergman at the height of her celebrity, both based on plays she had performed in on stage: Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948) and Roberto Rossellini’s Giovanna d’Arco al Rogo (1954). No actress in the immediate postwar period was more closely identified with the figure of Joan than Bergman, who attached herself to a role that provided ample scope for her gestural virtuosity and range, precisely the “theatrical” values Bresson struggled most ardently to exclude from his films.
The contrast between the intense, physically expressive performance of Bergman in the Rossellini and Fleming films and the pared-down style of the totally deglamorized Joan (Florence Delay) in The Trial of Joan of Arc could not be more stark. In this respect, Bresson’s unusually specific comments about the lead performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc are very revealing: “For want of truth, the public gets hooked on the false. Falconetti’s way of casting her eyes to heaven, in Dreyer’s film, used to draw tears.””
Bresson tried to downplay the influence of Dreyer’s film in several interviews, but it appears to be one of the few films that gave him genuine artistic anxiety, the possibility of comparisons haunting him so much that he instructed his cinematographer never to show “Joan’s eyes looking up, because Dreyer had done that.” Dreyer’s example may also have influenced Bresson’s decision to avoid close-ups wherever possible. Presented almost entirely in neutral, uninflected medium shots, Bresson’s Joan speaks with a controlled, almost totally unemotive precision that makes her seem both internalized and inscrutable.
Where Dreyer openly acknowledged the religious dimension of his film by calling it a Passion and compressing the narrative so that a period of several months appears to pass by in a single day, Bresson keeps the focus on the mechanics of the trial, basing all dialogue in the film on the transcripts of Joan’s Trial of Condemnation (1431) and posthumous Trial of Rehabilitation (1455–56), and structuring everything around a series of highly formalized dialogues. Like Dreyer, Bresson refuses to provide any establishing shots of the space the characters inhabit, but he goes even further in his systematic reconfiguration of the basic shot/countershot structure of filmmaking, repeating static camera setups with only minimal variation for large portions of the film.
By placing the camera at a sharp forty-five-degree angle and shooting with a 50mm lens, Bresson locates each character near the center of an attenuated perspective tunnel that roughly corresponds to a shallower version of the human eye’s ordinary field of vision. Triangulating between three different camera positions, Bresson is able to orient the speaking figures within a precisely rendered courtroom that nevertheless cannot easily be mentally visualized or mapped out. Half-visible figures are stacked around Joan, spilling outside the frame to make it clear that we are only seeing slices of a much larger environment, but there is never a cut to a shot depicting Joan and her adversaries in the same contiguous space during any of the courtroom scenes, making her literal and metaphoric isolation palpable.
Also noticeably absent, for those familiar with the director’s previous films, are the point-of-view shots and first-person voice-over that figured so prominently in Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), and Pickpocket (1959). Aligned with neither Joan nor her interrogators, the viewer in The Trial of Joan of Arc remains an outsider, even a voyeur.
Bresson drives this point home with unusual directness in a series of shots of Joan viewed through a small hole in the wall (below). The quality of forbidden eroticism in these shots, reminiscent of similar keyhole views in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960, below), is extremely surprising given the austerity of everything that precedes and follows. At these moments the soundtrack is dominated by the conspiratorial whispers of the English guards, and the incongruity of their salacious observations introduces an element of worldly skepticism that is surely shared by many viewers.
Sound and Image
The Trial of Joan of Arc is the first film in which Bresson completely followed the precepts outlined in his Notes on the Cinematographer (1975), and the total elimination of extra-diegetic music strengthens the impact of the sonic motifs – creaking doors, echoing footsteps, etc. – making the film spatially immersive. [1] Yet the fact that the objects given life by these sounds remain largely offscreen further emphasizes Joan’s decentered position within her environment, highlighting the contradiction between the physical existence of this unremarkable-looking shepherdess and the intense drama of her inner life.
Herein lies the central paradox of Bresson’s cinema: the body is made acutely present through its connection to a world of objects given weight and dimension through the mental synchronization of image and sound, but it is also a shell, a container for an underlying essence that, like the sacred, can be hinted at but never represented directly. This tension between body and spirit courses through all Bresson’s films to varying degrees, but there is a perfect harmonization of form and theme in the final section of The Trial of Joan of Arc (left).
Bresson focuses on Joan’s feet as she is taken to the stake, and her movements make it clear that she is almost running, eager to move to the next world (as Bresson put it, “Joan sacrificed her life to the meaning of her life”). Everything is prepared and, at the final moment, Bresson cuts away from Joan to a pair of birds on a roof. The religious symbolism is clear enough, but by holding on these birds for several beats longer than necessary, first showing them land atop the tent roof and then letting their sound continue after they fly away, Bresson allows the shots to develop according to their own immanent rhythms and keeps them from being iconographically overburdened.
Like the dog that runs up to greet Joan before she is tied to the stake, these are autonomous living creatures caught before the camera as well as key links in a carefully modulated chain, and in filming them this way, Bresson offers the ideal alternative to Dreyer’s abstracted flock of doves. By insisting on the real existence of these birds and shooting them from beneath the screen-like surface of the tent, Bresson amplifies their potential resonance, encapsulating his own aesthetic system in a brief series of shots that can neither be divorced from what surrounds them nor reduced to a simple metaphor (below).
It is in their endings that the differences between the Bresson and Dreyer films emerge most vividly. The Passion of Joan of Arc follows a long tradition of Christian imagery in linking physical suffering with spiritual strength, but by structuring his film so rigorously, Dreyer turns Joan’s triumph over the flesh into a challenge of belief. In The Trial of Joan of Arc, by contrast, the suffering body of Joan simply vanishes. Joan recites her final lines with quiet resignation but otherwise gives no sign of pain, and Bresson keeps her physical torment entirely offscreen by discreetly cutting away first to a cross being raised before her and then to the enigmatic birds.
Briefly accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings, the film’s final shot begins enveloped in smoke, which slowly dissipates to reveal an empty, blackened stake. As in Diary of a Country Priest, iconography is explicitly visualized in a way that brings the film to a formally perfect close, pointing towards a world that is ordinarily hidden and providing an image for which there can be no meaningful countershot.
