Day 51/53 - The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)

Directed by French director Robert Bresson, The Trial of Joan of Arc is a straightforward presentation based on the real documents from Joan’s trial in 1431 and the Rehabilitation trialin 1455-6. As a simple story, the power of the script grows like in a real trial where we see a corrupt church trial, manipulated by the English, grinding toward its foregone conclusion that Joan must burn.

The director plays visually with the black and whites of the churchmen’s habits. As might be expected in a film created from a trial manuscript, we see a lot of straight-on faces. We also see a lot of feet and shoes as the camera follows people into Joan’s prison cell and back out. These contrast strikingly with Joan’s bare feet walking to her stake and pyre.

Florence Delay makes a pretty Joan (although some scholars have suggested she probably had a less feminine appearance. Delay underplays much of part with simplicity and sincerity. Is she the child of faith she purports to be? The film suggests so by so clearly casting Bishop Cauchon (Jean-Claude Fourneau) as the English sympathizer and manipulator of the trial. Cauchon’s own words often condemn him during the trial. Here Joan speaks with simple ideas. While we fail to get the drama of a George Bernard Shaw or Jean Anouilh, Joan passionately arguing for her life, we do get a sense of the nobility of spirit in her character. Her death becomes a stark almost undramatic event which makes it perhaps more powerful than some of the other film versions. [I find her underplayed version more powerful  than  Jean Seberg’s Joan in Otto Preminger’s 1957 St. Joan based on Shaw’s play or Ingrid Bergman’s 1948 Joan of Arc, based on Maxwell Anderson.]

While I am put off a little by the classical style of the film, I am glad I saw it.

The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) ***