Carl Th. Dreyer’s expressive benediction portrays the virginal heroine as larger than life, her freckled visage dominating the compositions with tear stained compassion, her intelligent eyes reflecting the arc lights of an arch angel, revealing depths of humanity beyond the soul’s mirrored lens. Eschewing establishing shots, Dreyer films almost entirely in close-up allowing the characters to expose their flaws thematically, through physical grotesqueries and jaundiced expressions. This is a story told with the eyes wide shut to the injustice of religious mysticism, or balistraria that discharge curses like poisonous arrows. Dreyer depicts one elder priest with tufts of oily hair that look like demonic horns, and another whose wart become cancerous nodules of fatalistic demarcation. Joan is held in stasis by the camera, a devoted young women whose shaven head cannot hide her beautiful countenance. Dressed in men’s clothing, she has bigger balls than any of the priests who are enslaved to archaic documents that overrule basic human rights.
Dreyer often films from low angles casting the church mongers as monsters looming above the heroine (and audience), their ghastly presence omniscient like insane gods without appeal to their ignoble decisions. Joan is abused and debased but remains human, and though a few priests are sympathetic to her plight, they have been castrated by the very Church whose hypocrisy violates any sense of transcendental morality. His inspired montage worships Eisenstein’s cinematic philosophy, and the clashing imagery in quick cuts generates passion and friction, leading to the pyrrhic climax.
As the fire claims a young woman, burning away her flesh so her spirit can soar to the heavens, the holy cross becomes obscured by smoke and sin, while the villagers embrace their own judgment at the risk of sword and mace. A prescient tale of extremist belief through violence and power.
Final Grade: (A+)
