The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) – R. Bresson

I take it that this is no one’s favourite Bresson film.  However, I found this return to his stylized world refreshing – there is no one quite like Bresson.  Perhaps the choice of film content was so obvious that some reviewers felt he was going through the motions? Bresson has always focused on issues of faith and how challenges that a person faces might lead them to question their faith.  So, Joan of Arc represents a person in such a challenging position – although perchance it is we the audience or Joan’s interrogators from the Church who are really being challenged, given that Joan’s faith nary wavers a bit.  Bresson is also acknowledging Dreyer as one of his forebears, given the earlier director’s transcendent version of this story, also based on the available transcripts from the trial.  However, Bresson’s version is far different from Dreyer’s ecstatic take and instead almost mechanical in its stoic and restrained approach.  But the inhibited nature of the film (and those typical shots of Joan’s hands and feet, often in shackles) somehow elicits a heightened reaction from the viewer, as if the viewer must contribute him or herself the emotion and spiritual force that have been omitted on screen.  Of course, modern viewers might be led to wonder whether Joan of Arc might have been experiencing schizophrenia, but the final shot of the stake after Joan has been burned suggests that Bresson did not share similar doubts.