Joan of Arc (18 page)

Falconetti's agonized face, a face of a beautiful, anguished, but still-healthy young woman, is juxtaposed against the wizened, hate-filled faces of her judges and the horrifyingly gross and vacant faces of the crowds, like the spectators at one of Van der Goes's crucifixions. The austerity of the film's technique—the movement between faces, the sparseness of the setting (a bare cell, an official courtroom), the symbols that are invoked to indicate Joan's visions (the shadow of a cross, a skull, a crucifix against a smoke-filled sky), the very slowness of its movement— gives it the hypnotic quality of dream, or rather, the liminal zone between dream and waking.

The film's greatness would be impossible without the nuances created by Falconetti, who was nearly psychologically destroyed by Dreyer's demands on her in the course of the film. She never made another film, and her daughter wrote a bitter book about her mother's fate at the director's hands. Dreyer found her in a Paris boulevard theater: “She was playing there in a light modern comedy and she was very elegant in it, a bit giddy but charming.”
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There is certainly no hint of the giddy, or even the superficially charming, in Falconetti's Joan. This is Joan after she has been defeated; ostensibly, the film covers the whole trial, but none of Joan's sprightly, impatient give-and-take with her judges is suggested. She has been overmastered by the gravity of her situation, by its hopelessness and deprivations, from the first moment we see her on the screen. She is a transcendent victim, but a victim nonetheless. Nothing suggests that she has the slightest impulse to help herself or to resist her fate.

Conversely, Shaw's Joan seems to suffer for less than twenty-five lines in a 125-page script. She is a sturdy Yorkshire lass with no doubts, no equivocations, no one she can't outtalk. Like all of Shaw's heroes, she is dauntless and hyperarticulate. We meet her when she convinces Baudricourt, by her sheer high spirits, to outfit her. She moves to confront the dauphin, whom she addresses as “Charlie” and whose effete malaise she overcomes because she seems to offer him a kind of maternal protection from the bullies who surround him.

Shaw's Joan, first played by the triumphantly earthbound Sybil Thorndike, is religious only because her creator, in feeling he has to be true to history, cannot make her otherwise. His unease with this aspect of her leads him to some marvelous leaps and sallies, particularly in his preface, which, as is the case with so much of Shaw, is at least as interesting as the play itself. Shaw was fond of presenting himself as a man of paradox, if not perversity, and this leads him to portray Joan's persecutor, Cauchon, as a just man who was standing up for what he believed in and tried to create as fair a trial as he could. Shaw also defends the Catholic Church as at least as intellectually respectable as modern science and pseudoscience. This leads to some fancy philosophical cartwheels to explain Joan's voices, to which he is sympathetic but in whose literal truth, he hastens to reassure us, he cannot believe. He explains them, at one point in the preface, by calling Joan a “Galtonic visualizer”: “Joan was what Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a visualizer. She saw imaginary saints just as some other people see imaginary diagrams and landscapes with numbers dotted about them and are thereby able to perform feats of memory and arithmetic impossible to nonvisualizers.”
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At times, he seems to understand the strength of her faith, the depth of her attachment to the sacraments. The priest who held the cross for her so she could see it at the moment of her death says: “When I had to snatch the cross from her sight, she looked up to heaven. And I do not believe that the heavens were empty. I firmly believe that the Savior appeared to her then in His tenderest glory. She called to him and died. This is not the end for her, but the beginning.”
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Yet he is much more comfortable with a position she reverts to, that she was a girl of great intelligence and common sense. When Baudricourt tells her that her voices come from her imagination, she says, “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.”
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And during her trial she says (contrary to the facts) that her voices are always right “even if they are only the echoes of my own common sense.”
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The vitality of Joan's language carries the play along; Joan is not a complicated character; she experiences almost no conflict except for the few moments when she takes back her recantation because she understands that she is being offered not freedom but life imprisonment. In her evocation of animal joy in the natural world, we fully experience the poignance of her choice.

But she returns after death in the play's epilogue, cheerful, undeterred by having been burned. She forgives all her enemies and humorously contemplates the spectacle of herself as a canonized saint. Almost to the end, Shaw remains a Shavian. When Joan suggests that she try for the miracle of bringing herself back to life, all the characters—Dunois, Charles, Cauchon—who have just finished expressing their reverence for her, are horrified at the thought. The soldier who presented her with the two sticks in the form of a cross to hold in her bosom and who in return is given one day a year off from hell, which he says is as dull as “a wet Sunday,”
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must return to his infernal residence just before the curtain comes down. The play ends not wittily but poignantly, with Joan declaring, "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”
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The press of the world shaped the idea of Joan for Brecht and Péguy in a way that it did not for Shaw and Dreyer. It would seem at first that there would be little similarity between Bertolt Brecht, the creator of the alienation effect and supporter of Marxist revolutionary violence, and Charles Péguy, the romantic Catholic socialist who advocated communitarianism based on the spirit of the Gospels. Yet both created a Joan who is moved primarily by her overwhelming response to the plight of the helpless victims of the larger social disorder and the effects of violence upon the lives of the poor.

And in both their dramas, Brecht's
Saint Joan of the Stockyards
and Péguy's
Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc,
the public or ritual aspects of drama are employed. Brecht invokes street music, and Péguy the litanies and chants of Christian rite, but both aim for a drama that is not out of touch with its communal roots. For both of them see in Joan a type: the martyr for the cause of the people. Of course, their ideas about what can and should be done for the people are radically different. One only has to listen to the different tonalities of the titles of their works—
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
—to feel the difference. Yet both see in Joan one who hungers and thirsts after justice and will not be satisfied on this earth.

Charles Péguy wrote about Joan again and again. This is not surprising, as he was a native of Orléans, scene of Joan's greatest triumphs and the seat of her cult. But Joan's claim on Péguy was not a mere matter of geographic accident. Its roots were historical. For Péguy came to political maturity as a result of the Dreyfus case. He was the only prominent Catholic thinker to support Dreyfus, and he estranged many of his natural religious allies by taking this position. Originally a supporter of Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader, he broke with him later as a result of Jaurès's anticlericalism. Péguy's relationship with the official Catholic Church was vexed; the right-wing authoritarian cast of the French Church in his time appalled him, and he was public and vocal in his criticism of it, as it was in its criticism of him. And yet his vision of a better world was indelibly Catholic and French. The French soil itself was sacred to him, and the ways of rural France conducive to social salvation. Modernization, industrialization, urbanization were the enemies of the spirit; the mystery of the sorrow at the heart of the universe could only be solved for him by the mystery of Christ on the Cross.

So in the same way that Brecht requires indulgence of a contemporary reader—a post-Marxist reader who has seen the Berlin Wall and all that it represented collapse—a reader of Péguy must silence his or her initial resistance to the Romantic Catholicism that forms a basso continuo to his
oeuvre.
Yet the passion for justice that informs both works bathes them in a light that, in its life-or-death quality, compels our attention and our regard.

As Péguy was moved by the Dreyfus case and the injustice that it represented to embrace a program of communal sacrality, Brecht was moved by the economic collapse of Germany in the twenties to see the only possible hope for the poor in revolutionary Communism. In May 1929, the police chief of Berlin had prohibited all demonstrations, and the young Bertolt Brecht saw from a window the breakup by the police of a Communist demonstration, which resulted in the deaths of twenty people. It was in this year that he wrote
Saint Joan of the Stockyards,
a drama set in Chicago. The villain, a megacapitalist named J. Pierpont Mauler, destroys the lives of everyone around him by his unfeeling speculation, even though he claims to be a sensitive man who can't bear the suffering endured by the cattle whose slaughter is required for his potted meat. Joan Dark is a Salvation Army girl, a member of the Black Straw Hat Brigade, who believes in personal salvation for the poor through personal acts of charity and a devotion to the Gospels. In the end, Joan gives this up for a Marxist philosophy, saying, with regret for her collaboration with the oppressors, “Take care that when you leave the world you were not only good but are leaving a good world.”
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The play is dramatically uneven; Marxist clichés (“The Communists turned out to be right. The masses shouldn't have broken ranks”
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)
are mixed with moments of piercing emotional insight. In Brecht's version of Joan's recantation, she wants to abandon the poor to go back to middle-class safety. Here she speaks of physical realities that the strikers must endure:

But, like the original Joan, she recants her recantation and dies to bear witness to the capitalist oppression of the poor. For she has understood that without the necessities of life there can be no goodness, no spiritual value, no humanityworth speaking of at all. She defends Mauler's victims when he calls them subhuman. She takes the part of the woman who agrees to keep quiet, in exchange for twenty free lunches, about the fact that her husband fell into the bacon maker; of the boy who takes the husband's coat in return for his silence and a job; of the tin cutter who lost an arm and who doesn't warn Joan, when she pretends to be his successor on a dare from Mauler, of the dangers of his job.

There is an echo of this deep sympathy for the plight of the poor radically transformed, yet audible, in Péguy's
Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc.
Joan, despairing, prays for understanding for the sufferings of the poor as a result of the war. Joan says to her friend Hauviette: