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"Dans ce palais archiepiscopal
le mardi 29 Mai 1431 a été tenue
la séance du procès Jeanne d'Arc
où elle fut citée à comparaître
le lendemain au vieux Marché"
Commemorative plaque for Joan of Arc
in Rouen Cathedral, in Normandy
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Robert Bresson found his perfect film in The Trial of Joan of Arc.
His cinematography was mesmerizing in the sparse, austere style he has perfected with his black-and-white films. His "choreography" of hands and feet is more restrained here than in Pickpocket, and there is no musical score to accompany even what there is. But, he occasionally uses his realistic, magnified sounds when he focuses on the scratching of a feather pen, or the marching boots of soldiers (anachronistically transplanted from WWI, the only flaw in the film.) He places a soft light on Joan, drawing out a gentleness out of her otherwise stern face.
But, more than his style, it is the story that redeems him.
Joan, like many of his characters, considers herself a special, entitled being. But, her entitlement is enveloped in her humility. She owes it all to the greater will of God, saying all her actions are based on personally revealed messages from God to her.
Mouchette, Jacques from Pickpocket and even the perennially romantic (other) Jacques from the aptly titled Four Nights of a Dreamer have decided on their own that their value in society is very high. Joan, on the other hand, attributes her's to the Grace of God.
Bresson's films always convey this sense of the transcendent. His characters do seem endowed with some kind of grace, but in his secular films, their arrogance and self-centeredness always get the better of them. But, Bresson never fully accepts that, and subtly tries to coerce us into seeing the specialness that he sees in them.
In The Trial of Joan of Arc, we need no coercion. It is in the genius of his method that he decided to use the real trial proceedings to write the script for this unusually short, but dramatic film. The story is enough to tell us that Joan is the real element, and his film makes her especially so.
On a more skeptical note, one of the reasons that I think Bresson was attracted to this subject (besides the usual attraction of French directors to a part of their French history) is that Joan was on trial before the Catholic establishment, and stood fast against all their condemnations.
Bresson is more of a spiritualist than a Catholic Christian. In this particular story, he found the perfect confrontation between a truly pious woman and a (momentarily) corrupt Catholic body. The battle between the Spirit of God and the House of God. The incorruptible and the corruptible. But Joan never condemned her church, and fully realized that her presence there, as throughout her life, was a miraculous event, difficult for even some priests to grasp.
Bresson's other spiritual (quite possibly non-Christian) beings, Jacques, Mouchette and even the young priest in Diary of a Country Priest, would have benefited by interacting more humbly with the establishment to which Bresson appears to show such aversion, and to which Joan despite her trials, was certainly attached.