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I should begin this piece with the honest admission that I�ve never been the biggest �Joan of Arc� fan, if a person can be described as such. I�ve frequently seen in her a piece of pious, national(istic) myth-making, of which I don�t approve. There is also the religious element to it, which would have one believe that the Maid of Orleans had been in contact with angels (and I really don�t understood why God would take sides in this particular stupid dynastic war). Finally, the basic story itself strikes me as being grotesque in an unpleasant way. (Things can be grotesque in a pleasant way: look at the films of Sion Sono, or the better films of Kim Ki-duk).
Now, when it came to making their respective Joan of Arc movies, neither Dreyer nor Bresson were all that interested in all the externals that attach to Joan: they don�t care about nationalism, they don�t care about who was �right� in the Hundred Years War (I�d say that nobody was right, that fighting and dying over the inheritance rights of some king and over whether or not to accept Salic law is profoundly absurd and barbaric). No, Dreyer and Bresson aren�t even particularly concerned with whether or not Joan is actually hearing the voices of angels or commands from God; they both leave this point ambiguous. They�re not interested in the objective truth about Joan of Arc, but rather in depicting her own subjective experience of her trial and execution. And certainly the last days of Joan�s life touch upon universal aspects of our humanity: the difficulty of maintaining one�s virtue when the establishment has assembled to tell you to abandon it, the horrors of persecution, the horrors of judicial abuse, the fear of death and pain.
So Dreyer and Bresson are both interested in the same portion of Joan�s story (the end of it) and they are both exploring similar themes. In fact, one can see Bresson�s film as a response to Dreyer�s. The question then arises, �What did Dreyer do, and what did Bresson decide he wanted to do differently?�
Dreyer�s 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, stars Ren�e Jeanne Falconetti in the title role in what some have called one of the greatest screen performances of all time (I hate that expression, �of all time,� but there it is). In Jean-Luc Godard�s Vivre sa Vie, Anna Karina�s character famously watches the Dreyer film and silently weeps, finding in the fate of Falconetti�s Joan an echo of her own.
Dreyer�s Joan also boasts a screen performance by Antonin Artaud, proponent of what he called the �Theater of Cruelty,� transgressive poet and essayist, consumer of mescaline, who in his later years invented a nonsense language to �confuse the demons who were stealing his thoughts.� So it�s pleasant to see Artaud on screen. I�m dithering here because I�m reluctant to come out with my true opinion of Dreyer�s Joan, because this opinion is heretical, because I can�t deny that I didn�t much like the movie.
The film is focalized very tightly around Falconetti, and her supposedly �brilliant� performance just doesn�t impress me. Throughout the whole movie she looks consistently dazed and even stoned. She doesn�t know what�s going on and she has no �presence.� She doesn�t look like Joan of Arc, but rather like someone suffering from some severe mental illness, perhaps someone who has become catatonic.
And this is where Bresson�s film of 1962 differs from Dreyer�s. Bresson�s Joan is alert, confident, and engaged. Although she�s certainly restrained (and given her bleak circumstances, that�s to be expected), she�s capable of being combative when necessary, and one never doubts that she�s a part of the action. Dreyer�s Joan appears to have withdrawn into her head, but Bresson�s Joan is firmly established in the courtroom and in her jail cell. One could argue that we�re witnessing a difference here between how one acts in a silent film and how one acts in a �talkie,� but I don�t buy that. I�ve seen plenty of silent films where the actors didn�t carry on with the weird facial expressions employed by Falconetti.
Well, at least I�m not the only one turned off by Dreyer�s film; so was Bresson. According to Wikipedia (which in turn is quoting from Paul Schrader�s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer), Bresson was repulsed by the �grotesque buffooneries� of the actors in Dreyer�s film. I think that�s a good way to put it. While Falconetti is acting all over the place, Bresson�s Joan�played by Florence Delay, who only has a few film roles to her credit but later became a distinguished writer and also provides the voice-over in the French-language version of Chris Marker�s Sans Soleil�gives the kind of calm, non-histrionic performance that I praised in my last post.
