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The human visage, Hegel's "soulful and spiritual center," analyzed six ways from Sunday in a magnificently sustained frenzy. Jeanne (Renée Falconetti) "simple et humaine" out of her armor, the siege is fought in a blanched court. (A lateral pan provides a view of the interrogation chamber before the utter obliteration of screen space.) Cloaked judges, warty, blubbery, hawk-faced, lunging at the exhausted maiden oozing tears—the charged close-up is la spécialité de la maison. Her gaze is often heavenwards, in a moment of panic she's pacified by the shadowy cross cast on the floor of her cell. "France has never seen such a monster!" A fake letter from King Charles, communion rites offered and denied, the spiked wheel spinning in the torture room. A whole world against her, more than a thousand assaultive fragments comprise the ordeal's discordant flow. Medievalism fused with modernity for Carl Theodor Dreyer, not the protagonist's sainthood but her monumental emotional essence captured by exalting-draining lenses. (Titian's Mary Magdalene is a key model, so is Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross.) An overwhelming physicality, spittle and blood and patches of skin like road maps, integral part of the état de grâce. The sublime portrait is carved with extreme angles, scurrying soldiers are seen in swinging overhead shots or from the ground with a half-buried camera, forehead and eyes enter the bottom of a frame dominated by an iron arch. "Une bonne chrétienne," Falconetti's glow reflected in the tender gauntness of the monk played by the founder of Théâtre de la Cruauté himself, Antonin Artaud. Exhumed skull and exposed breast, a brief intermezzo with contorted jesters (The Seventh Seal). Cinema's great organ fugue, pure visual Bach. For the stake Dreyer has a Millet silhouette amidst flames and Battleship Potemkin for the ensuing riot, "do not let me suffer long." The professed rebuke of Bresson's version is really a dialogue between resolute artists. Cinematography by Rudolph Maté. With Eugene Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, and Michel Simon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |