A Film Canon

This is one of the most extraordinary films that I have ever seen. Dreyer restricts his visual focus to Joan's face and body, as well as those of her interrogators and witnesses, which he sets against a series of empty, amorphous spaces. As the film progresses, assymetrical compositions foreground these voids (whitewashed prison walls, monochromatic, snowy sky), allowing Dreyer to completely identify his aesthetic with the silent medium, suggesting the presence of something so profound that it has already defied sound, and is on the verge of defying visuality. Hence the pervasive use of diagonal sight-lines, which direct the gaze towards something just outside the edges of the frame. The result is a cinematic approximation of the visionary experiences for which Joan was executed, producing an overwhelming affirmation of them as visions, rather than mere hallucinations. At the same time, Dreyer's restricted focus ensures that Joan's body - or, rather, the body of Maria Falconetti, the non-professional actress who plays Joan - retains an irreducible residue of reality, a resistance to signification that brings her torture and execution into traumatic phenomenological relief. This is particularly evident in the final scene, in which the flames that engulf her body gather the various whitenesses of the film (including, most importantly, that of the sky, with which she has increasingly associated the looming presence of God) and raises them to a pitch beyond which they can no longer be seen, necessitating the ten seconds of darkness that follow. In this way, Dreyer affirms Joan's martyrdom and, more generally, provides a kind of cinematic theodicy, using all the devices at his disposal to evoke a God whose terrifying incomprehensibility is epitomised by his distribution of bodily pain and confusion, and whose symbol - the crucifix - is invariably pictured without a body, a mere arrow shot into the surrounding impenetrability.