When Jacques Rivette set out to make a film on the life of Jeanne d’Arc, the subject had already inspired two masterpieces: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). Rivette’s two-part Joan the Maid, which Facets Video has recently released, is thus the third. (I also value Otto Preminger’s much reviled 1957 film of Shaw’s Saint Joan, but I can neither expect much sympathy with this opinion nor pretend that Preminger’s film is comparable to the other three.)

Based on historical materials assembled by mediæval scholar Régine Pernoud, Rivette’s 1993 film has a textual — one might say a documentary — force that neither Dreyer’s nor even Bresson’s can claim. The available documentation on Joan is so extensive that the script need add little in order to give a thorough account of what she did and how she died. The film provides little distraction from the essentials — there is no psychologizing of the characters and no elaboration of the social and scenic context of events beyond what can seem to emerge easily through their naturalistic staging.

Over the four-hour length of the film, Sandrine Bonnaire’s performance as Joan gains in stature, until you don’t want to part from her. At first she seems severe. She tends to glare at people, and she tries less hard than she might to ingratiate herself with men — both those whose favor she must court and those she leads in battle to win France for Charles the Dauphin. Her voice is low, conversational, undemonstrative. Bonnaire and Rivette emphasize such humanizing details as Joan’s anger at English soldiers’ calling her " whore, " her agony when she is wounded, and above all her laughter.

The film neither idealizes nor debunks Joan but views her head-on. When we read that she captained an army at age 17, we marvel, but as Rivette shows them, her feats don’t look very hard. Maybe war was simpler then, or maybe war has always been simpler than we would like to think. As Rivette and Bonnaire present her, Joan suggests a novice movie director protected by a seasoned crew that humors her as much as obeys her. (Army life in this film is more sitting around than fighting; in this respect it’s like a film shoot.) She doesn’t do miracles; she just uses common sense and takes the initiative.

The biggest surprise here is the lack of emphasis on the trial. Joan isn’t even captured until halfway through part two. In an audacious move, the film skips over four months of judicial proceedings — including much of what is most familiar and dramatic in the story — to take up the trial with the special churchyard session at which she signed her famous " abjuration. " Probably Rivette assumes that his audience has seen the Dreyer and Bresson films, which cover the missing four months in detail. Also, the abjuration session gives us the gist of the trial: the major accusations against her, the attitude of Joan before her judges, the crucial signature. The vindication of Rivette’s boldness is that when the time comes for Joan to burn, we’ve seen enough of her ordeal that the execution takes on its full tragic power.

Rivette shows women and their place in the mediæval world with great subtlety. Joan is, for a while, held prisoner by one John of Luxembourg, and the film dwells on the relationships she develops with the three sympathetic women of the house. The script makes the misogyny of Cauchon, Joan’s major persecutor, explicit. And in her final denunciation of Cauchon, after she has been sentenced, Joan alludes to a community of women: " If I had had women around me, this would not have happened. "

This is the first major Joan film in color, and Rivette uses it to achieve a cinema of pure beauty. Charles’s coronation, shown in real time, becomes a highlight of the film: the gorgeous interplay of reds, golds, and blues; the camera tracking gracefully; each cut a reconquering of space where a camera movement would have been impossible or meaningless. The black frames Rivette leaves between shots become important to the texture of the film, heightening our awareness of the stone and the bright sunlight that dominate the images. Giving the words in the film time and room to echo, the black frames also stand for all that we don’t, and can’t, know about this incredible woman whose story Rivette tells so well.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001