Crushing exhaustion, visionary ecstasy, peasant cunning and unconcealed terror wash over her features, variously overwhelming in intensity or almost vanishingly subtle. It is a haunting face because it is a haunted face, overshadowed by visions, by fear, by death. The film is meant to feel, not like a stage or screen drama, but like “watching reality through a keyhole,” in Dreyer’s phrase. One is left to contemplate rather than anticipate, to be caught up in the stream of images rather than following carefully from a distance.ĭespite the extreme artifice of Dreyer’s storytelling, the overwhelming impression the film creates is of persuasiveness, of truthfulness.
#The passion of christ movie summary trial
Without the conventions of continuity, cinematic time becomes unreal the trial seems to take place within a single day, but it could also be the events of many days blurring together. The constant close-ups create a fearful intimacy overwhelming the viewer’s defenses. Canonical cinematic principles such as eyeline matches between two characters talking to one another, or visual reference points carried from one shot to another, are almost never used.Īll of this makes it difficult to get one’s bearings. The subjects are also framed in every conceivable way, sometimes centered but also relegated to the margins of the shot, with empty, neutral space filling the background.įinally, and most importantly, one shot follows another with no obvious connection between them. The images are shot, moreover, from every conceivable angle, from overhead and behind the shoulder to worm’s-eye views filmed from trenches cut in the ground. Sometimes we see only part of a face - a furrowed brow and squinting eyes, or furiously working lips verbally assaulting a helpless ear. Images of faces, shot in medium to extreme close-up, dominate the film. But Dreyer’s contravention of established principles of cinematic storytelling was deliberate. Visually, though, Dreyer uses a deliberately disorienting style at odds with expected cinematic rules - a little like the notion of reverse perspective in Byzantine iconography.īyzantine perspective seems to be something of a myth (for one thing, the rules of perspective weren’t worked out until the Italian Renaissance). A transcript of the dialogue, which condenses the many sessions of Joan’s trial into what appears to be a single day, would be deceptively easy to follow.
This is not just because of the subject matter, but because of the singular visual approach uniquely identified with this film. The viewer’s attention is directed inward, in a contemplative, chastened way, like praying the Stations of the Cross or the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. In writing about this film, more than most films, I find myself trying to express something of the experience of watching the film, as much as the film itself. The experience of watching The Passion of Joan of Arc brings me closer to Good Friday than any filmed depiction of the actual trials and sufferings of Christ I have seen. One is left to contemplate rather than anticipate, to be caught up in the stream of images rather than following carefully from a distance. (While the shot in the Pathé film is a rare close-up, Dreyer’s shot is notable for the opposite reason it is a rare sustained shot of Joan that pulls back for more than her face and the tops of her shoulders.) Not only does the scene obviously echo the mockery of the Son of God, with his crown of thorns and the reed scepter, the medium close-up of the crowned Joan visually evokes a key shot from an early French Jesus film: the Ecce Homo close-up in the Pathé The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1902/05), directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet. SDG Original source: National Catholic RegisterĪbout halfway through Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is a sequence in which Joan, during a brief respite from her ecclesiastical inquisitors, is mocked and tormented by a trio of English soldiers, who place a straw crown on her head and an arrow in her hand as a mock scepter while ridiculing her claim to be God’s daughter.
One of the 15 films listed in the category
0 kommentar(er)
