Europa '51

EUROPA ‘51              B+                  

aka:  The Greatest Love

Italy  (113 mi)  1952  d:  Roberto Rossellini

In each of us there's the jester side and its opposite; there is the tendency towards concreteness and the tendency towards fantasy. Today there is a tendency to suppress the second quite brutally. The world is more and more divided in two, between those who want to kill fantasy and those who want to save it, those who want to die and those who want to live. This is the problem I confront in Europa '51. There is a danger of forgetting the second tendency, the tendency towards fantasy, and killing every feeling of humanity left in us, creating robot man, who must think in only one way, the concrete way. In Europa '51 this inhuman threat is openly and violently denounced. I wanted to state my own opinion quite frankly, in my own interest and in my children's. That was the aim of this latest film.

—Roberto Rossellini

Remember when you first arrived here in Italy, in ’47 wasn’t it?  The things that have changed, and the things that have happened since then.  In those days you were rather selfish and frivolous, now you’re full of enthusiasm and concern for the class struggle.

—Andréa Casatti (Ettore Giannini)

It was like being condemned. Those workers seemed like the slaves of some evil God.  

—Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman)

Ingrid joins the working class, before

The working class goes to Heaven

This film is a perfect example of contrasting styles that don’t necessarily work well together, where Rossellini works largely without a script, using non-professional actors to authenticate realism onscreen, while Ingrid Bergman relies upon a script and works in the grand Hollywood tradition, where this film is largely undone by her over-the-top, operatic acting performance in an otherwise small story that accentuates realism, where the melodramatic excess in many ways subverts the working class message of the film.  This is an odd film, where the dubbed voices make it even more peculiar, something of an offshoot of his earlier work, THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (1950), a Rossellini favorite on the life of St. Francis, making another film about a saint, this time using Bergman as a woman in contemporary society whose motives would likely be completely misunderstood.  While Rossellini was not a practicing Catholic, he had a strong interest in Christian values and the ethical teachings of the church in a materialistic world.  Bergman was pregnant with her twin daughters Isabella and Isotta at the time of the shoot, which took place during a sweltering heat wave, so much of the shooting took place at night.  The film is actually comprised of two different halves, before and after a transformation, where in the first Bergman and Alexander Knox play Irene and George Girard, a wealthy married couple living and raising a young son in post-war Rome, where their lives are more devoted to the party life of society socialites than raising their son, who is rightfully bored and upset after spending all day by himself and now he’s again shuffled out of sight and instructed to go to bed while the adults in the next room can thoroughly enjoy themselves.  A fall down the outside staircase causes a scene, later determined to be a suicide attempt, where after a brief improvement, the son dies tragically from a blood clot, reminiscent of an earlier child suicide in GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (1948).  Enormously upset, Irene falls into a fit of depression, blaming herself for what happened, where the absolute horror of the suicide provokes a traumatic moment where she’s literally unable to live with her former self anymore. 

But Irene takes interest when her communist cousin Andréa (Ettore Giannini) mentions the plight of some people worse off than she is, exposing her to a different world, identifying a particular woman whose child will likely die because she can’t afford the medicine he needs.  Irene immediately agrees to pay whatever sum is needed to save the life of a child, where she perks up a bit by visiting the family with Andréa, all of whom are overjoyed to express their gratitude.  The picture of life in the housing projects is noisy and overly grim, where everyone is stacked on top of one another, including large families stuffed into one-room apartments.  This has an effect on Irene, as these are people in genuine need just surviving day to day, as opposed to her wealthy husband who has all and more than he could ever need.  Rossellini does an excellent job contrasting the two worlds, drawing attention to the needs of the poor, where Irene discovers several young children at a drowning site, where she and the oldest of six children help return them safely home, where none other than Gulietta Masina, in a role (though unfortunately dubbed) reminiscent of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), plays the vibrantly alive and spirited mother who obviously has her hands full.  When Andréa finds the mother a job, the start date falls on the same day she has a date with her boyfriend, something she decides is more important, leaving Irene to fill in for her at work.  A day at the factory completely changes the texture of the film, returning to the neorealist visualization of the film, where the middle class whims have disappeared, replaced by a blowing factory whistle, where the entire city population seems to show up for work, with an industrial wasteland surrounding the factory.  In a powerful sequence, Irene is seen entering the factory in documentary style with real workers, where the overwhelming noise and massive machines dwarf the people inside, suggesting an immense industrial world, where one day on an assembly line job leaves Irene in a state of shock, as it’s beyond her comprehension what ordinary workers endure.  In a life-changing moment, clearly disappointed with an easily exploited worker state, Irene decides what’s needed is a spiritual transformation. 

One of the most interesting shots in the film is a view of Irene climbing the stairs to the entryway of the church, viewed as an actual ascension, but she remains something of an outsider, not a convert.  Nonetheless, when she finds a sick and ill-tempered prostitute on the street coughing uncontrollably, she helps her home and calls a doctor, discovering she has untreatable tuberculosis, where she’s placed in a position to watch over her death in a matter of days, leaving her anguished and utterly heartbroken afterwards.  When she breaks up an armed robbery in progress in the apartment next door, where a teenage child is scared half out of his wits, Irene urges the kid to flee to the police station and turn himself in.  The police, however, find that it was her actions that allowed the boy to escape, even though he later does turn himself in.  When her family is called to the station, her mother wearing pearls and a fur coat, they are completely baffled by her behavior, where the husband assumes she’s under the influence of Andréa and covering up an affair, all agreeing that she be sent to a sanitarium for psychiatric observation.  Depending on one’s faith, people may have different takes on her fragile mental state, as she continually suppresses any notion of her former self, claiming she loathes that person, and reaches out in benevolence and love to anyone in need, literally stepping into the shoes of St. Francis of Assisi.  However she’s evaluated by several layers of society, including her family, the court, a treating psychiatrist, the chief resident at the mental institution, a local priest, other patients, and several of the people in town whose lives she affected.  All weigh in on her sanity, as they can’t understand her behavior without being inspired by the blessings of the church or a political organization to motivate her actions.  Someone that freely expresses a spirit of love on their own to anyone they meet is more reminiscent of the supposed feeble-minded Johannes in Dreyer’s faith-based masterwork ORDET (1955), as Irene is seen as a perceived threat to the recovering post-war Italian society, where large portions of the population are left marginalized and dehumanized from the deteriorating economic conditions, circumstances that all but call out for grace and forgiveness.  Two other films that seem inspired by EUROPA ‘51, and in particular Bergman’s extraordinary characterization, include the family’s forced institutionalization of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974), and also Fassbinder’s MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975), a film shot with two separate endings, where radical political organizations cynically manipulate a tragic death for their own self-serving purposes, unconcerned with the effect this has on those most affected by the loss.  By the end, the film feels loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, an essay from The Brothers Karamazov that suggests if Christ returned today, the Church, protecting their own interests in their interpretation of the Biblical narration, would charge him with heresy and blasphemy, as they need him to stay in heaven where he supposedly ascended.  

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Gennady Soloviev











Michael Tarkovsky

HAPPY PEOPLE:  A YEAR IN THE TAIGA             B+  
Germany  (90 mi)  2010  d:  Werner Herzog        co-director:  Dmitry Vasyukov

You see that everything is going forward as it should. It gives you a sense of a job being done. And it is not you who are doing it, but you still feel a part of it.                   —Gennady Soloviev, Russian hunter and fur trapper

They live off the land and are self reliant, truly free. No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values and standard of conduct.                   —Werner Herzog, narrator

This is a contender for the greatest snow footage ever captured on celluloid, especially given the documentary style realism following a Russian (Gennady Soloviev) and his indigenous friend, a pair of hunters living in the remote wilderness of the Taiga forest in the heart of Siberia, a region so vast that it covers a territory larger than the entire United States  The nearest town is the indigenous village of Bakhtia on the Yenisei River, a community of 300 people, where there are no connecting roads, so the only way in or out is by helicopter or by boat in the few summer months where the waterways are not frozen. The footage was originally compiled by Dmitry Vasyukov from four hour-long documentaries shown on Russian television, focusing his cameras on the rugged individualism of Gennady Soloviev, a Russian fur trapper who has been hunting in this isolated wilderness for thirty years, as he was originally hired by the Soviet government to work as a hunter for the State.  After the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet empire, he simply continued his established lifestyle, “You can take everything from the man, everything, but you can't take his craft,” hunting about 1000 square miles of pristine wilderness in the Taiga forest, where it takes a day and a half riding on a snowmobile to get from one end to the other, so he constructs cabins stocked with provisions along the way.  The photography is as stunning as anything you’re ever likely to see, shot by a collective of Russian cinematographers, including aerial, underwater, and cinéma vérité techniques from Alexey Matveev, Gleb Stepanov, Arthur Sibirski and Michael Tarkovsky, a relative of the infamous Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, all of whom are wilderness experts themselves.  The film recalls Werzog’s own ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007) and is comparable to Dick Proenneke's ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS (2004), another made-for-TV documentary that shows how a man built his own log house in the Alaskan wilderness by himself and survived the first winter alone, where his exemplary survival skills allowed him to live for another thirty years or more in the remote wilds of Alaska. 

Herzog discovered the film at a friend’s house in Los Angeles, becoming obsessed with the intimate beauty and intense individualism of surviving in such harsh elements, where it routinely gets 50 below zero in the wintertime, much as he was once struck by Timothy Treadwell's uniquely personal footage of Alaskan grizzly bears, the subject of GRIZZLY MAN (2005), one of Herzog’s most compelling films.  In each film, Herzog works with footage he did not capture himself, as he never traveled to Siberia or interviewed any of the subjects, but he trimmed the film down to 90-minutes and added his own narration, where it’s impossible not to feel Herzog’s own adrenaline racing when he expresses how these men live outside the laws of man, “No rules, no taxes, no government, no laws, no bureaucracy, no phones, no radio, equipped only with their individual values.”  This is Herzog’s view of heaven on earth, where a man is truly free to live a life as he alone chooses, living completely off the land, unencumbered by national boundaries, petty bureaucracies or Party rules, currency and exchange rates, language deficiencies, or any other human limitations other than his own.  In fact, the biggest problem here is that Herzog has too much of a good thing, where the material is so in synch with his own thinking that he never develops a conversation with any of the characters or expounds on the material, as he does, for instance, with countering Treadwell’s views of humanizing wild animals, treating them like household pets instead of the dangerous creatures they are, becoming a film as much about Treadway as it is grizzly bears.  In contrast, Herzog never questions anything Gennady does, treating him like a saint in the wild, exactly the kind of person Treadway thought he was, where we hear how Gennady nearly lost his life to an attacking bear, losing two of his dogs in the process.  But to hear him describe it so matter of factly, where every facet of life is broken down to precisely recalled details, one wonders about the effects of remote emotional isolationism when one has no other human interaction for months on end, year after year, where in the enormity of solitude the rules of God and man stop applying to your existence.

Gennady admits the difficulty of getting through that first Siberian winter alone when he was literally dropped in the middle of nowhere with only what he could carry on his back.  Over time, he has been able to add a stove, a chainsaw, a snowmobile, and kegs of oil, not to mention time to train his own dogs, an essential component to any hunter’s survival.  He does elaborate on his personal ethics on killing animals, finding it more of a sporting chance with hunting than when he previously raised cattle for slaughter, where he prefers living by one’s wits.  “In the Taiga, the wild animal knows that no good can come from me, man. Here it’s about who outsmarts whom.”  Gennady acknowledges a special relationship with animals, claiming he despises those who beat their dogs when training them not to go after the food set in the traps, which goes against every hunter’s instincts, and instead he builds traps just for dogs, where the unpleasantness of the experience teaches them not to try that again.  This teaches a dog intelligence instead of fear of man.  Gennady comes across as deeply reflective and philosophical, where he does appear to be an example of some kind of idyllic utopian ideal, in balance with the natural world around him.  But then, every New Years, the hunters come in out of the cold and spend a few days with their families, including the Russian celebration of Christmas, which falls on January 7th.  As we see the children dressed up in colorful costumes for a town gathering, all behaving with the spontaneous unpredictability of children, you can just feel the awkward uncomfortableness these hunters must feel having to be social, making small talk with their neighbors, chatting about each other’s children and grandchildren, whose names they may not even recognize, as opposed to the name of every one of their dogs.  It’s a different setting, the land of human beings as opposed to the tall trees, and one where only a scant amount of time is spent before they race back out into the wild, where their dogs can once more run free, chasing whatever animals they please, including (unsuccessfully) a reindeer swimming in the river or (more successfully) a Russian sable hiding inside a hollowed out log, and hunters are equally in tune with the world around them, told using the cycle of seasons.  As they have been doing for centuries, the daily routines are unchanged, where Gennady can be seen making homemade ski’s from tree trunks using only a sharp hatchet and a wooden wedge, building canoes, constructing or repairing his wooden huts, designing infallible traps, making homemade mosquito repellant, spearing fish, or properly storing food.  The outdoor visual splendor is simply astonishing and dramatically overwhelms Herzog’s meager narrative input, where we never know what we’re missing in the 2 and ½ hours of cut footage, but who will ever get an opportunity to spend this kind of guided tour through the mystical landscapes of the Siberian forests?  

Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne)

DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (Journal d'un curé de campagne)        A
France  (110 mi)  1951  d:  Robert Bresson

Easily the most personal film in Bresson’s lifetime, a deeply Catholic experience that comes closest to defining his mortal soul.  This is the film that set the tone for Bresson films to follow, all dealing with grace and redemption, spare, minimalist, no excess emotion, without a single shot that is not needed, carefully creating a visual sphere of what it is to be human, recreating mechanical gestures, physical movements, parts of the body, like hands and feet, using a voiceover narration that reads what the audience sees written into a Priest’s diary (in Bresson’s own hand, by the way), adapting a novel written by Catholic author Georges Bernanos, who also wrote Mouchette (1967), perhaps approaching the concept of God’s grace from opposite directions.  Non-professional actor Claude Laydu, a devout Catholic who spent several months fasting and living among priests prior to the film, is excellent as the frail young country Priest who feels irrelevant to the surrounding rural community that all but ignores him.  Eating little more than stale bread mixed with wine due to a painful stomach condition, he struggles to fight against his own physical and human limitations throughout the entire film, where he approaches each person from the position of goodness, love, and God’s grace, person to person, soul to soul, never proselytizing or reading scripture, never defending his own actions, but taking the unpopular view that we can all grow closer to God in the way we lead our lives, something mocked and scoffed at as irrelevant and naïve by most, yet he persists, never gaining the upper hand, but matching the cynicism of the local community that feel church only exists for marriages, funerals and Sunday services.  The Priest, on the other hand, sees every living moment as a conversation between heaven and earth, where humans can only persevere to lead better lives and become more devout believers.  

Of interest, there is a musical score by Jean-Jacques Grunenwald that plays throughout, though never interfering or rising at climactic moments, also several of the central characters had professional film careers, including Nicole Maurey as Miss Louise, the only one to attend mass every day, but also the mistress of the richest and most influential man in town, the Count (Jean Riveyre) and his wife the Countess (Rachel Bérendt), whose spoiled and manipulative daughter Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral) generates much of the action by feigning thoughts of suicide (Ladmiral committed suicide in real life 7 years later) in order to prompt the young Priest’s urgent involvement in her unhappy family life, taking advantage of his inexperience and naïveté, but he soon finds himself wallowing in turbulent waters, especially facing the unruffled pillars of high society in the well educated and placidly confident Countess who has little use for the Priest’s ideas, finding him childish and out of place, but politely tolerates his presence in her home, all leading to one particular moment in the film, a transcendent moment that is excruciatingly intense, where the core of a man's beliefs are challenged, even shattered momentarily, but where the Priest exercises his free will as a man in the hands of God, acting on his own terms in accordance with spiritual values, not those of the local church and social hierarchy, but surprisingly persuasive nonetheless in order to ascend to a place reached by no one else in the film, and certainly no one else we know in our own lives. This character's struggle can’t help but guide our own actions, which is the effect of the film, turning this socially isolated and personally anguished individual into a modern day saint, where leading by example brings us closer to a state of grace.   

As it happens in small towns, the Priest’s presence becomes fodder for gossip and scandal, where the Count and his bratty daughter start vicious rumors about having him removed for needlessly interfering in his family affairs, whose own scandalous behavior, of course, is wiped under the rug in an attempt to divert attention away from his own public scrutiny.  An elderly Priest (Adrien Borel) is brought in to consult with the young priest, finding no fault in his scrupulous methods, understanding that Priests are not expected to be liked, but feared and respected through the implementation of rigid discipline and authority, reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov where the church would no longer recognize the humble origins of a human Christ even if He should return, having converted Him into eternal perfection incapable of human flaws.  But this young Priest has no use for implementing a fictitious or condescending order in the universe that he doesn’t believe in himself, instead finding each day such a painful struggle that he has his own personal difficulties praying, feeling himself unworthy.  This struggle takes an interesting turn by the end, where the Priest gets a taste of his own mortality, growing weak and delirious from his illness, having visions blend into real life that can only exist in a Bresson film, where he remains the picture of innocence throughout, guided perhaps by the purity of youth, the uncorrupted souls, where he continually walks among them to become an illuminating light.  There’s a wonderful image of the Priest riding on the back of a young man’s motorcycle that nearly brings a smile to his face, another image of liberation and transcendence.  While the Priest is completely unassuming, there are prevalent images of iron gates, as if a human life is imprisoned in pride and arrogance while on earth unless adopting a spiritual transformation of forgiveness and love, learning to love even one’s enemies, lessening the weight on each human soul that has its own baggage to carry.  There are Christ-like references throughout, a profoundly contemplative work where pain and suffering may be the conduit that drives us closer to the Divine.  One of the great religious works, rivaling Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), one that turns questions of the everlasting into an everyday, ordinary experience.     

Au Hasard Balthazar

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR       A               

France  (95 mi)  1966  d:  Robert Bresson

A near perfect film, one of the great metaphysical films of all time and one of the most unique religious expressions, Bresson rids his actors of any facial emotion, yet this film never fails to provide an excruciating emotional release, offering a precise, yet extraordinary poetic glimpse into the sublime by identifying human suffering with a common farm animal.  People's lives revolve around Balthazar, yet their lives become increasingly insignificant as time goes by, as we identify instead with a donkey.  Voted among the Top-Twenty all time films from the most recent 2002 Sight and Sound Critic’s Poll (Read the critics’ complete list), this is a film that inspires without grandiose imagery or any memorable tricks or techniques, instead relying upon superb visual storytelling, which leaves out all the unnecessary little details as it follows the spiritual odyssey of a donkey named Balthazar, whose brays at birth are interspersed between the sublime Andantino piano movements of Schubert’s A Major Piano Sonata No. 20 (D. 959) Franz Schubert - Sonata  Wilhelm Kempff on YouTube (7:35), among the best and most effective uses of music anywhere in cinema, especially the very sparing use, which provides a haunting sensitivity to the character of Balthazar, and therein lies the essence of this film, as it’s a view of the divine through one of the most common and durable farm animals among us. 

It’s a bit like a Buñuel film, as there’s something of the absurd underlying this exercise of following the life of a donkey in a story that is enveloped in Christian themes, as from birth to death this film examines the human condition through the silent suffering of this animal, who represents a state of grace while all around him self-centered humans reveal themselves to be so much more miserable and wretched creatures, personified by the influence of a bad seed teenage sociopath Gérard (François Lafarge), a sadistic altar boy gone astray, but he is the love interest of an innocent young girl named Marie, Anne Wiazemsky, who later married Jean-Luc Godard and also wrote a book Jeunne Fille describing her experiences during the making of this film, who falls under Gérard’s charm, but he seems to bring havoc and ruin into everyone’s lives.  It’s a near wordless film, where cinematographer Ghilsain Cloquet effortlessly captures the rhythms of life with characters who come and go, their passing lives a story within a story.  One is even a Mary and Joseph (Marie and Jacques) story where Balthazar’s misfortunes parallel that of Marie, continually seen with best friend Jacques as children, but is continually abused and mistreated throughout her adolescent life, where characters are making choices that they end up spending the rest of their lives trying to undo, regretting lost opportunities that seem to have evaporated into thin air.  Some are seen as humorous, others are sad and pathetic, but all pale in comparison to the noble dignity of this silent creature, a saint who walks among us like a cloud, seen but unseen, used but unappreciated, as humans are too busy selfishly seeking life’s personal rewards by ignoring the natural mysteries that surround them. 

While this doesn’t have the spare minimalism of Bresson’s previous films, allowing brief interludes from a classical piano soundtrack to intrude throughout the film, even the use of a trained, professional donkey (see the mathematics circus sequence), it is one of his most accessible and easily his most transcendent, perhaps the best balance and purest expression of Bresson’s art, plumbing the depths of his own concept of spirituality, especially in connection to the physical world around us, as the profound emotional connection between this film and a universal audience is undeniable.  The entirety of this film makes all the difference, especially the effect the finale has on everything that comes before, moving through ebbs and flows of what life has in store for us, featuring petty characters overcome by pride or stubbornness, often exhibiting senseless or even idiotic behavior, expressing stupidity, meanness or drunkenness, where the hostile mistreatment of others can at times feel overwhelming, creating an indomitable mood of oppression.  But these human characteristics are always shown through vignettes, suggesting they are not a permanent human condition, but transitional episodes, where there is the feeling that evil is not inevitable, but correctable, just a behavior flaw, like a form of temporary insanity.  Bresson always finds harmony and balance by returning to the poetic grace of Balthazar who quietly endures despite his continual mistreatment.  By the end, Balthazar is centered in an idyllic pastoral paradise, where he walks among the flowers and the sheep and finds a kind of inner peace and contentment, a transcendence from all things earthly and human, so poetically rendered in the film’s enormously effective final scene. 

The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc)

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc)                 B                     

France  (65 mi)  1961  d:  Robert Bresson

Bresson, like Carl Dreyer before him, had notorious difficulties obtaining financing for films, according to film critic Andrew Sarris.  It has been said that “such intransigent individualists as Buñuel and Stroheim seem like Dale Carnegies by comparison.  At least Buñuel and Stroheim could promise the titillation of shock and sacrilege; Dreyer, like Bresson, could offer nothing but austerity and eternity.”  By paring away the irrelevant, “flash and fluff” that pads most movies, they hope to lay bare the human essence of the story, or as Bresson himself once wrote:  “You have to drain the pond to catch the fish.”  Certainly this rarely seen film is one of the most extreme examples of Bresson’s spiritual realism, his de-dramatizing technique that attempts to capture the actual tone and form of the original event, Joan of Arc's 1431 trial by the English for heresy at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government in France, and her subsequent execution, using as a basis the actual historical trial records.  That being said, this a most peculiar film, largely due to the complete impassivity of the actors on the screen.  It is startling just how undramatic, unemotional, and uninvolved they are, just the antithesis of Dreyer’s 1928 silent film, perhaps one of the greatest films of all time, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, which features extreme close ups revealing extraordinary passion and human emotion.  So while that was probably one of the motivations to differentiate this film, it may not work for everyone and some may call it a failed experiment, while others may call it visionary.

Bresson makes excellent use of the thundering sound of the military tympany drum, which is meant to be intimidating when heard, used exquisitely here at both the beginning and end of the film, almost as if it is a clear reflection of the unspoken voice of God.  While the austerity of the film is severe, continually showing Joan subject to harsh treatment and condemnation, with cries of “Burn the witch” heard offscreen throughout, what’s perhaps forgotten is Joan was a simple farm girl, only 19 and illiterate, who couldn’t even sign her name, using a cross instead, yet she was resolute and unwavering, holding her own without the aid of counsel against the finest educated judges and lawyers from England, demonstrating a remarkable intellect.  Her judges couldn’t fathom that she could realize the divine by avoiding the church’s aid and instruction, feeling compelled to lecture her about religious faith, testing her mettle under dire circumstances, forcing her to show them her divinity.  Despite using actual transcripts, what the film doesn’t show is the duration of the trial, how the many months of relentless personal assault both in court followed by more interrogation sessions inside her prison cell, where she was continually spied upon by her captors, eventually took its toll and physically wore her down.  Of interest, Florence Delay, the university student that played Joan went on the write novels and narrate Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), eventually elected to the Académie Française in 2000. 

Bresson’s film is a perfect example of Brechtian theater, which, of interest, was a rebellion against the German emotional expressionist theater of the 20’s by attempting to destroy any dramatic illusion of reality, making it apparent to the audience that they were not witnessing real events happening before their eyes at that very moment, but were instead sitting in a theater listening to an account of things that happened in the past in a certain time in a certain place.  Brecht’s epic theater was strictly historical, reminding the audience that they were getting a report of past events, very much in a documentary manner.  So Brecht eliminated stage decor, suspense leading to a dramatic climax, and any audience identification with the characters on stage, allowing no emotional connection, creating a distance between them, enabling the audience to view the action with a detached and critical spirit, to see familiar things in a different light.  This is theater of reason, not theater of emotion, or unreason.  While this may work in theory, it all remains pretty grim, and by the end Joan is engulfed in smoke and fire, while a dove lands and then flies away.  The final image reveals a burnt stake with chains on the ground, smoke rises, and there is a final abrupt strike of the drum.  Dreyer’s last shot showed Joan burning, where off in the corner one can see a cross, while Bresson’s last shot is a still shot of the stake, smoldering.  The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962.