The Trial of Joan of Arc

A Bresson film set in a courtroom. Joan has been captured. She has been handed to the English and is on trial before a church court at Rouen. The charge is heresy. Saying that she hears voices, wearing men's clothes, and claiming to answer directly to God rather than to the church. From there the film follows the order of the sessions. Question, answer, scribes taking the record, a break, the cell, more questions. The questions are traps. The judges try to bind her in her own words and each time she gets out through a narrow door. There is no rest in the cell either. Guards watch through a hole in the wall and she is never alone. She signs something. Then she withdraws it and puts on men's clothes again; that means the sentence is settled. What the narrative is interested in is not belief but language: the whole conflict of the film lies in the two sides using the same words with different meanings. The text is not invented. The screenplay was built from the transcripts of the 1431 trial and most of the speech consists of sentences from the record. The form is bare. No music, acting so flat as to be almost absent, a still camera and short scenes. Bresson does not use actors but people he has chosen. He takes the feeling not from faces but from the tone of a voice and the sound of footsteps. In the last section the camera does not look up. During the burning the narrative mostly looks at feet, at a chain and at wood. The film received the jury's special prize at Cannes. Florence Delay, Jean-Claude Fourneau and Roger Honorat are in the cast. Robert Bresson wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes bare form and Bresson's method. Who it is not for: anyone expecting an emotional narrative; for sixty-five minutes the film is almost only question and answer and it rises nowhere.