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Robert Bresson: Characters
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With Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, you get more or less exactly what it says in the title. Like Dreyer’s astonishing The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Bresson’s film relies almost entirely on the historical transcript of Joan’s interrogation and trial – with only the addition of eye-witness accounts from the rehabilitation that led to her sainthood, to inform the circumstances of her burning at the stake – but Bresson’s film is even more minimalist, portrayed with characteristic simplicity, naturalism, neutrality and humanism.
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As always with Bresson, the soundtrack is as controlled as the characters. Most telling is the use of creaking, clanging armor in the knights' movements, flights, and jousts. It's hard not to read these disturbing sounds, repeated to enervating effect throughout, as the guttural cry of humanity that the characters cannot express in their own voices. As "models," the actors cannot incarnate their characters in the usual ways. These are not nuanced performances, with actorly ticks and tricks. Bresson doesn't allow such expressiveness.
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Bresson returned from the medieval forest to modern Paris for his next film, Le Diable, Probablement (The Devil, Probably) (1977). Centered on four disillusioned intellectuals who bear witness to a society that is materialistic, inhuman, and exploitative, it was Bresson's most overtly political work to date. He called it "a film about money, a source of great evil in the world." The movie is dominated by a protagonist who hates both life and death and declares that "My sickness is that I see things clearly." As Bresson's most unsympathetic protagonist, he was, in part, why the film was labeled as the director's most uncompromising and daring film to date. In rejecting modern society, the character rejects the audience, who are complicit in the evils of society.
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Bresson's films do not correspond to conventional character development; each person seems to be driven by internal desires, isolated in his individual outlook from the worlds of others. Their inner conflicts, the various phases that Bresson's characters undergo in what he calls "the universal struggle of self-fulfillment" (Bazin, 33), are not outwardly revealed or explained (even though the voice-over and diary -- devices which he used extensively -- would have easily lent themselves to such first-person explanation). Jean Collet wrote of the extraordinary lack of psychological detail in Bresson's films:
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In Bresson... people act for no obvious reason, behave "out of character", and in general simply follow the destiny which has been mapped out for them. Often a character will state an intention, and in the very next scene will do the opposite. Characters who appear to be out-and-out rogues will unaccountably do something good, an example being the sacked camera-shop assistant in L’Argent who gives his ill-gotten gains to charity. At the same time it should be stressed that Bresson did not predetermine how his films would finally emerge; it was a process of discovery for him to see what would be revealed by his non-professional actors ("models" he designated them) after he trained them for their part.
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Bresson's films can ... be understood as critiques of French society and the wider world, with each revealing the director's sympathetic if unsentimental view on its victims. That the main characters of Bresson's most contemporary films, L'Argent and The Devil, Probably (1977), reach similarly unsettling conclusions about life indicates to some the director's feelings towards the culpability of modern society in the dissolution of individuals. Indeed, of an earlier protagonist he said, "Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations."
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