Contrasting Visions of a Saint: Carl Dreyer's the Passion of Joan of Arc and Luc Besson's the Messenger
2004; Salisbury University; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Mormonism, Religion, and History
ResumoEmerson, writing Nature, describes his perceptive experience as though he were a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God (10). Emerson's immersion into complete spiritual realization of nature is interesting for, among other reasons, the visual metaphor he uses to express an unquantifiable experience. A transparent eyeball is, literally, a blind eye. The phrase transparent eyeball is a kind of paradox-what kind of eye cannot see? But we understand this usage of Emerson's as a metaphor, and its paradoxical nature is important. To make sense of it, we need to redefine what terms seeing is meant. Emerson intends seeing as sense experience plus insight; hence the visual metaphor. But this redefinition, Emerson also anticipates the material basis for the plastic art form that will best express the modem artists' ability to evoke the spiritual through the real world: the motion picture. Andre Bazin writes that the motion picture is in itself a kind of miracle, and emphasizes that the cinema re-establishes the ambiguity of reality to the world (Cinema and Theology 393). The cinematic image is a factual one; it is materially real, which presents us, according to Stanley Cavell, with an ontological paradox: the mimetic quality of motion pictures makes a world present to us viewers as real, yet we are screened from this world at the same time. In other words, we participate the viewing experience of a real world, but one that we know by the images and impressions it leaves behind. The fact that an analogy to religious experience can be seen here was not lost on Bazin. The cinema is the art form of modernity; that is, it not only presents a subject, but also imitates itself the process. Bazin considers it this way: Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. (What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 14) Given the popularity of religious subjects for films, this suggests that Emerson's transparent eyeball represents modernity the position of the viewer, under the influence of the dual phenomena of suspension of disbelief and persistence of vision. The viewer becomes nothing the confines of the theater (or the TV), taken into the presentation of the world on screen. And, the viewer sees all, all that the camera allows; this is the necessary lynchpin of modernity that defines the transcendent experience of cinema. I have chosen for this paper to consider two films that very nearly bracket the history of cinema: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928), and Luc Besson's The Messenger (France, 1999). Dreyer, a German Protestant with no real concern for religion or politics, and Besson, a French director with an eye toward the epic possibilities of contemporary cinema, worked two opposing angles of the Joan story. Their films, of course, reflect the time of their production, the commercial context, and budget constraints. But when these concerns (though valid) are dismissed, we can see that Dreyer worked well within a style Bazin would come to define as Neorcalism bringing the human story of Joan to life, while Besson pursued a kind of nation-founding mythic tale of epic scope, one that necessarily sublimates the divine mission of Joan to the historical qualities of his spectacle. Dreyer's film opens with a shot of the actual text of the court proceedings of Joan's trial, attesting to the fact that he wished to make a film about the trial itself, and as close to the event as possible. …
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