Uploaded 1 March 2000

Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Giovanna d’Arco

One would expect godless and nihilistic attitudes to be at antipodes with those of a very Catholic miracle play. In fact, this is not the case.  Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (“Joan of Arc at the stake,” 1955), Roberto Rossellini’s mise en scène of an oratorio by Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel modeled on medieval mystery plays, [1] draws Joan (Ingrid Bergman) up out of nowhere into a limbo, a blackness with stars, and sends her back into the void at film’s end. So where is she now? Salvation remains a postulate, unanswered.

Meanwhile, in the body of the film, Joan is trying to find out what’s going on from Saint Dominique, and she finds herself flashing back to being burned alive, and revisiting (like Crocean ricorsi – mental reruns) her trial, the king’s entry in Rheims, and so on – episodes treated like a journey through a series of mystery-play tableaux. At first Joan makes her visits while staying within the dimension of limbo, detached with Dominique from earthly affairs. Then sometimes she takes a few steps and joins the action.

With this simple device, Rossellini alters the clear time frame of Claudel’s oratorio (which Rossellini understood as taking place during a pause in Joan’s ascent from the stake to heaven, akin to Roberto Enrico’s 1962 Incident at Owl Creek (La rivière du hindou), where a man re-runs his life at the moment of being hanged). For Claudel’s Joan stayed tied to the stake, but in Rossellini’s movie, she passages constantly through time and space, through tableaux resembling avia crucis, and the result is a more interesting vagueness which suggests her passion is an eternal return.

A mobile Joan also permits Rossellini to alter Claudel’s nationalistic thrust. Claudel, re-enacting a Mass, had Joan bless a folkscene reunion of Heurtebise (the bread of the North) with Mère aux tonneaux (the wine of the South), presaging the reuniting of North and South and the end of the occupation of France in 1431. And a second occupation of France, during World War II, a few years after Honegger’s 1935 oratorio, had endowed Jeanne with the added allure of the Resistance (“We’ve drunk too much beer,” sings the chorus). And it is perhaps for this reason that Honegger and Claudel had added a prologue in 1947, in which “France was lifeless and empty. And darkness covered the face of the realm…From the devouring depths I raised my soul…Save us!”

But Rossellini eludes this reinforced nationalism, retaining only the existential anxiety of Claudel’s lines, and reduces (or raises) Joan’s relationship with “France” to I-thou relationships with individual French people, just as at the end of Paisà he had put the struggles of the devouring world war in terms of relatonships with individual partisans, or in Europe ’51 had put the tenebrous desperation of postwar Europe in terms of individual asylum inmates crying to Bergman for care. And Rossellini narrows anxiety further, again as in Europe ’51, to the heroine’s introspective drama – the drama of Joan’s terror battling her faith, of her fighting the voices summoning her to the stake, of her fleeing her election as a sacrificial victim. Thus for Rossellini, the 1947 prologue frames not a patriotic event but an existential journey which is finally only a moment of the human spirit. “I’m going! I shall go! I went!” she declares, finally, conflating all temporal dimensions and making now into everything. She is caught in a machine, tried by a court of beasts and surrounded by robots in a world without sanity, and expected to be heroic nonetheless, to resist in the name of love. We’re not far from Pierrot le fou. Joan cries desperately at the stake that the comforting priest is no longer there, and again Rossellini’s mise en scène has altered Claudel’s sense to terror, because with Rossellini we know that the priest, who maybe was there last time, has never been there this time, so maybe this time, Joan despairs, she will not be saved. Giovanna d’Arco al rogo is a movie about dying, about trying to be brave while dying, as past and future collapse. Giovanna‘s drama is entirely of this world, with all its doubts, perplexities and horrors.

Rossellini in his other movies with Bergman had stuck her on a volcano, humiliated her in front of her neighbors, locked her in an insane asylum, confronted her with death in the ruins of Pompeii, driven her to suicide, and now he burns her at the stake. And as always, he raises her to heaven. This is the constant Rossellini myth of the hero, stripped to naked basic self, who re-runs events to find meaning in them and then imposes a private revelation on the world. Joan defies church, state, and even academe. John Ford’s heroes, like Bresson’s country priest and Lagrange’s Tristan and Iseult, also come to realise they have been chosen as sacrifice; but they submit with far less freedom and far more agony than do Rossellini’s heroines. Because Joan’s “faith” is no simple allegiance to assigned doctrine or dutiful obedience to her voices; it is more a choice of action – action for “joy…hope…love”; and the result, in a Rossellini who always maintained that “from a very humble position you can revise the whole conception of the universe,” is that Joan’s fire will compel reality to change, just as Garibaldi’s flame will change Italy in Viva l’Italia, and Joan, like Garibaldi, is introduced while voices-off evoke a wandering Christ not knowing where to lay his head – when suddenly: “There was a girl called Joan! Who, who, who, had ever dared say such a thing?”

So Giovanna, like Europe ’51, is an existential melodrama, pulsating between courage and despair, persistence and panic, joy and pain, a hero’s journey through changing paintings with music in each lyric moment engendering the next moment of terror. Rossellini glories in painted backgrounds and proscenium frames, and in Murnau-like lighting and superimpressions that create Méliès-like effects of découpage to mirror Joan’s existence in two temporal dimensions. It’s another adventure; what could be more “neo-realist”? The drama is the person against the landscape, the authentic against artifice. Joan of Arc’s defiant authenticity in face of church, state and academe brought out the romantic even in Jansenists like Dreyer and Bresson. And so too Rossellini, to accent the person, wants us to experience Ingrid Bergman in the finest performance of her career – in contrast to Stromboli and Voyage in Italy where it may be said that it was more a question of his performing upon her. Now, even more than in Europe ’51, the effect is sacramental when she walks forward into medium shots, simply because Bergman really has the most essential quality of an actor: thereness, a sense of a person inside the image, inside the voice, inside the artifice–the ultimate revolution. [2]  Thus the most traditional gesture becomes, with Rossellini, the most avant-garde. He teases us into grasping for Joan emotionally, the way Joan grasps when she steps forward toward us.

The result of all this is that, when Joan makes her choice, throwing her hands soaring up to God and down again as she exults, “It’s I who’ll burn like a pretty candle!”, there is no more beautiful moment in cinema than her stepping out from black limbo into the hands of soldiers and onto the final tableau — the stake dominated by the church that burns her alive.

Footnotes:
[1] Details of Rossellini’s theater and film productions of Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher are in my book, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (New York: DaCapo, 1998) where, however, I had not yet had an opportunity to engage the movie itself.
[2] Bergman uses her own voice in Giovanna d’Arco al rogo but, alas, some of her human presence is lost in the French dubbing (Jeanne au bûcher) where, as Truffaut put it, Claude Nollier’s “voix banale…, très ‘comédie-française” has replaced Ingrid Bergman’s “bel accent bourguignon-lorrain” [in the work print for the French edition]. Nonethless, the difference is instructive. Cahiers du cinéma 48, June 1955, p. 38. Signed Robert Lachenay.