The Passion of the Joan

note: This post started as a blurb in my monthly film log, but quickly outgrew its spot in there. I'm not gonna edit it or anything like that, but I'd like to put it up here instead, because I'm curious if anyone has any stuff to say in response to this. If someone could convince me otherwise or whatever. Part of my intent when I started this blog was to put out my impressions in a fairly unedited way and then sit back and read comments and see discussions happen and learn stuff from them.

It was never my intent to make this a showcase of my film writing or critical work or whatever it is that I do on here, rather it was meant to be an extension of my studies, another tool for me as a film student to learn. And it's true that attempting to regularly articulate myself about the things I see is helping me engage more with film and learn more about it as a result, but I'm hoping that other people out there have some stuff they can teach me, too. If anyone's reading this and has seen this movie, it'd be pretty cool to hear from you. I suspect I'm largely typing to myself, but it'd be nice to be proven wrong.

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You know, the big problem with me and this movie is that I wasn't moved by Maria Falconetti's performance. For some reason, I got really annoyed by her expressions, mostly that really wide-eyed one she uses throughout the film. This was a very gut level reaction that I had no control over and it more or less rendered me completely incapable of emotionally investing myself in the film's proceedings. That's a problem.

For a silent film, this movie's very talky. It's almost entirely constructed of conversations. This is one of the aspects of the film that seems useful to me. There is absolutely no way to keep track of what everyone is saying, so you can't really be expected to follow the conversation. This underlines a couple things, the inanity of the questions being presented to Joan, and her utter helplessness in the face of this tribunal. Her inability to say anything that can help her in a very literal sense is underlined in a figurative sense by the limitations of the technology at hand. It also means that a good part of the film must be told through people's expressions, which necessitates the technique of shooting the film mostly in close-up.

My problem with this is that it makes the proceedings difficult to follow. People pop in and out at random, and it seems as if the same territory is being covered in the interrogation over and over again. Perhaps this is meant to reflect the incessancy of the questions being thrown about in a structural way, the inability to keep track of what's happening reflects Joan's own confusion, but I don't think it's effective. Confusing the audience to reflect the protagonist's confusion works to an extent, but when the film itself becomes more or less unfollowable, as this did for me at times, I find myself becoming less and less empathetic and more and more aware of the artificiality of the proceedings at hand. Once more, maybe an intentional thing, but certainly not something that worked for me.

This isn't a question of visual literacy, either. I don't mean to say that I can't follow the conversations or the proceedings; simply that I can't follow the people, the cuts feel awkward to me to the point that the film feels very slapdash in a way. (I keep second-guessing myself and overexplaining because I'm aware that I'm reacting this way to a very heavily canonized and highly beloved film and I'm wondering if there's something wrong with me for not seeing what apparently so many others do, but I'm gonna stop doing that.)

Another qualm of mine is with the villification of the interrogators. I realize that Dreyer was working from actual transcripts and if that's the case then the questions can obviously be read as intended to ensnare Joan into condemning herself, but they can also be read as profoundly stupid questions being posed by profoundly stupid people. I always felt like the most effective aspect of martyrdom was that the martyr was condemned not by villainous assholes, but by people too dumb to know the wrongs they were committing. People condemned by assholes are simply victims. Martyrs are martyrs because people don't realize how stupid they're being and, because of the martyr, can later realize the ugly mistake they made and learn from it. By villainizing the judges to the point of near cartoonishness, Dreyer makes a statement not of redemption, but of condemnation and teaches us nothing. This film feels about as misguided as Mel Gibson's Passion was, just much less objectionably so.