Walking in the Cinema

Corners

2011-08-13T22:15:00.004-07:00

2011-02-12T16:42:00.008-08:00

The Bellboy (Lewis, 1960) // Oh, Woe is Me (Godard, 1993)

2011-02-09T11:12:00.004-08:00

The closest thing I've got to an Interview:

Abel Ferrara on Nick Ray & Body Snatchers

2011-01-20T17:03:00.004-08:00

“The latest lovely, desperate film by one of the most brilliant filmmakers alive...should be seen by everyone interested in movies or in life, without hesitation or delay.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum

“A masterpiece of contemporary aimlessness in furious motion. Every image is suffused with such elegant and exquisite insights into what makes the medium interact with its material that the total effect is intoxicating.” – Andrew Sarris

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself plays at Vancouver's Pacific Cinematheque from February 3rd to 7th.

Cinema, 2010

2011-01-17T21:36:00.041-08:00

2010 has been kind to me, and while the cinema of this year hasn't reached me on the level of last years masterpieces (Public Enemies, Two Lovers, and Adventureland), I've still had good times in the 90 or so feature films that I saw. Having acquired positions for both Mubi.com and Vancouver International Film Festival (the latter being volunteer) has provided me with chance to meet to film critics whom I admire while also giving me access to watch more movies! For VIFF I got the chance to view a great deal international submissions from relatively unknown filmmakers (but I only saw one which was actually good). And for Mubi I've assisted with editing work, which basically means I add films, films, and more films to our increasingly growing database. Blogging wise, I wrote my first piece of film criticism which might be worth something, and I also made a little short about two of my good friends– which wasn't my only venture into filmmaking this year, as I also shot my second narrative short during the summer, which will hopefully make an appearance in viral realms soonish. Anyways, enough "I's", lets get to the good stuff.

The Ten

1. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland/France)
The animals ("Des Animaux"), which originally protected the children on their way down Laughton's river in The Night of the Hunter return, but this time we are the children, and the river is an ocean that we cut across in a culture-sucking cruise ship as Llama's, Parrots, Kittens, and Owls look on at our wasted use of consciousness. But what cultural crime has been committed? Godard's furious mise-en-scene, and cacophonous video montages realize an invisible event which most of the world turned its back to. This digital vision of "our humanities" brings its creator to his knee's in front of the mediums future and our own. It's a masterpiece, really.

2. Karamay (Xu Xin, China)
Xu Xin's baroque 6 hour search for the cause of the deaths of nearly 800 children in a fire at Karamay's Friendship Hall in China is an arduous journey through static shots of the parents left behind: their words, their cries, all of it. Taking on an anti-didactic form, Xu abandons questions and opens the floor for every parent to repeat the same lamentations of those before them. In this act of repetition we begin to hear repeating rhythm's: in words, cries, and looks, to formulate that which is not being said.

3. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel De Oliveira, Portugal)
The 102 year old Manoel De Oliveira returns to the setting of the first film he made in 1931 and writes a sublime farewell to a world which was once photographic prior to capitalism's gaze. Apart of the schema is a photographer, a dead woman he photographs – who is reborn in a slight glance at his photograph, and a small group of manual laborers who work across the canal. The mysterious threads which binds these figures together will be up for future generations to unravel, as De Oliveira's images are so dense that only time itself may loosen their density, unless your name is David Phelps.

4. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Cinema realized and distilled in its most spiritual form since Tarkovsky. Enough has been said about this film by people much more articulate about transcendentalist cinema than myself, so I'll just let the image above do my job for me!

5. White Material (Claire Denis, France)
A visually ferocious look at the unreconciled colonialism in Africa, White Material moves in logical progression from Denis' debut, Chocolat. But Denis' vision of Africa has rearranged itself for the times, and instead of focusing on a colonialist child's upbringing, Denis' camera turns to a subject of slight difficulty. Isabelle Huppert's Maria Vial is a woman who's determination destroys all that which still resides in her colony, and while things slowly disseminate into violent finale, Denis, with her wonderful cinematographer Agnes Godard, both grapple the morale width of it all in languid, sensuous images that transmute the violence of this land into dust, heat, and skin.

6. Cold Weather (Aaron Katz, U.S.)
Manages to return American genre cinema to a Hitchcockian zone where characters are not merely solving a case but are also unconsciously solving themselves. In a fresh and rare way, this film takes on a Psycho-esque structure to allow a brother and sister reconnect the idea of talking with each other instead of talking at one another. Katz exuberant use of a RED camera makes this film look unlike any other detective picture or American indie before it, and it's just a lot of fun.

7. Around A Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, France)
Rivette snags a few worn-out concepts from recent Hollywood cinema (The Majestic, anyone?) and strings them together into a beautiful yet petit world of magic, love, loss, and the circus (or are they all the same thing?). Oddly staged to the effect that we, the viewer, are directly incorporated into the images by invitation via subtle meta-abridgments. I suspect, that Rivette brings us inside in order to experience this warmly staged yet familiar melodrama from a ethereal angle. The result? A quiet tale which is sure to envelop and entrench anyone with a sense of freedom that only an age old master could possibly concoct.

8. Morgen (Marian Crisan, Romania)
A tragic comedy about a Romanian named Nelu at a time where his schematic life is interrupted by an illegal immigrant to tumultuous and often times hilarious effect. One of the virtues (not to say they have vices) of all these wonderful films coming from Romania of late, is their way of cooking comedy and tragedy together for a strange brew of results. Even better is this/these film(s) obstinate depiction of heroism in the everyman, and the cyclical nature of the country in which they reside and in doing so, the films themselves, move like Sisyphus along with their subjects.

9. Hereafter (Clint Eastwood, U.S.)
In a year where Hollywood cinema is almost entirely schematic and programmed for a conclusion (The Social Network especially), it's just damn nice to finally see a film that's at its characters level: lost, confused, but fervently searching. Lit with those familiar silent shadows from Million Dollar Baby, these characters gently serenade around each other until the time is right. And when the time is right, classical music queue's spool up to the perfect decibel, and close-ups make a perfect sized smile to ensure that theater is warmer then when you initially came in.

10. Scott Pilgrim v.s. The World (Edgar Wright, U.S.)
The story of 'boy-meets-girl' is reborn through a bricolage of cultural byproducts and 8-bit Legend of Zelda tunes. Boy/Girl's plight has drowned in the quagmire of our digital ruckus. Lazy philistines have stolen art and it's all up to Scott Pilgrim to save it–- as well as redefine that four letter word while he's at it. The formal exuberance of Brian De Palma is rhymed with the existential concerns of Douglas Sirk. An auteur is born?

Runner ups

The Anchorage (C.W. Winter & Anders Edstrom, U.S./Sweden)
HaHaHa (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Germany)
Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, France)
Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, U.S.)

Of Mention

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, France/Germany/U.K.)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Ruhr (James Benning, Germany/U.S.)
And Everything is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh, U.S.)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu, Romania/Switzerland/Germany/France)
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania)

Performances

Isabelle Huppert – White Material
Mickey Rourke – The Expendables
Alice de Lencquesaing – The Father of My Children
Elle Fanning – Somewhere
Sang-kyung Kim – HaHaHa
and the guy who plays Morgen in – Morgen

Shorts

1. 607 (Liu Jiayin, China)
2. TRISCO (Nathan Earl Hess, United States)
3. Love Lust and Everything Inbetween (Drew Gregory, United States)
4. The Anthem (Apichatpong, Thailand)
5. Get Out of the Car (Thomas Andersen, United States)
6. Tripped Up: Part 1 - Movement (James Maki, United States)
7. octopus steals my camera and swims off with it (while it's recording) (“chimpsnatch”/An Octopus, ?) –watch this one with the sound off, and ignore the textual commentary for some petit-Brakhage visual fun!

Moments (from movies which did not make the top ten)

Elle Fanning ice skates to Gwen Stefani's “Cool” – Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, United States)
In Coppola's vision of L.A. Culture, all of its inhabitants live under the illusion that they're moving when they're actually not. Johnny Marco's (Dorff) sports car does circles in the desert, pole-dancers twirl in the misogynistic stasis of the male gaze, and the only trace of freedom left in this place is in the circles which Cleo (Fanning) makes at an ice rink. The quiet allowance of her fathers gaze, the reversal of shots– not so dissimilar to Johnny watching the pole-dancers a few scenes prior, and the tender agreement voiced by Gwen Stefani's slickly delivered words “I know we're cool” defines this father-daughter relationship in a quiet yet enveloping way.

Oki Gets Her Turn – Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
In a movie totally dominated by male perspective and a male hand clearly governing the show, it's just so god damned neat that Oki's Movie final moments rest in the lap of a woman. Male narration subsides for Oki's welcomed voice to slip into the soundtrack and begin to expound upon her physically similar yet emotionally differing walks with the two men from the films narrative. As the two walks reach their end, this quaint, pocket-sized movie begins to creep up on us with its calming emotional resolve, not underwhelming or overwhelming, but just about the right size to fit in your pocket and stay with you after you leave.

Sly and Mickey cry – The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, United States)
Outside of the films almost programmatic and video game-like “Mission mode” Sly and Mickey share a moment which is either the most talked about scene from a recent action picture, or the least. But it's probably the former, and for good reason to.

Mickey's degraded lips, in a close-up– which is just too close, murmurs words which just barely form themselves yet manage string together memories of fighting in Bosnia and the “god-damned Dracula-black” head space he was in. “There was this girl” Stallone says, and Mickey, like a relic from Nick Ray's cinema, says “there usually is.” This repose between the two men is only sustainable by them not directly facing one another but instead conversing via a mirror, and as Mickey's words go on and get to their point Stallone painfully retreats from his own reflection and into the dark. Strangely powerful, this sequence manages to cut through the films bone and gets to the marrow, and that is, American xenophobia and violence which lacks an authentic ideology at its foundation. But with this being an action vehicle, the film is bound to return to its violence. This scene goes on to be forgotten by the film in a way which is morally synonymous with Stallone's initial confusion brought on by this woman “who cares for something.”

Two Images of the Same Thing – Vapor Trail (John Gianvito, United States)
Two boys play on a muddy road during torrential rainfall at the water contaminated and American constructed Clark Airbase in the Philippines. One, clearly enjoying himself more than the other, lays down in a puddle. Gianvito then cuts to an old photograph, identical in composition, of a Filipino soldier similarly splayed out, but killed by an Americans hand.

Things

Greta Gerwig's murmuring in Greenberg
The tracking shots in Around a Small Mountain
Rebecca Hall's clarity v.s. Blake Lively's incoherence in The Town
Carlos' jacket in Cold Weather
That piece of paper that floats by in the first shot of Benning's Ruhr
and (only because I can) John Legend's voice on the Kanye West track "Blame Game"

The Worst

A Film Unfinished (Yael Heronski, Israel) Revives archived footage of Jewish life preemptive to the holocaust only to be looked at with nonconstructive lamentation. Interviewee's (victims) tell us their stories within the context of voyeuristic montage techniques that don't look so dissimilar to the tools used to build the core of a who-dun-it picture. Yet we know who did it, and while further generations need reminders, we do not need vessels of the worlds worst memories that are themselves, totally unmemorable.

Cold Fish (Sion Sono, Japan) Simplistic misanthropy drudges along to half-baked finish line reveal. Existential search on screen is almost completely bordered off to the audiences own questions and experience in just how god damned simple it all is. I've seen episodes of Friends with more formal exuberance than this.

The Man From Nowhere (Lee Jeong-Beom, South Korea) Boooooooooring.

Inception (Christopher Nolan, United States) a $160,000,000 audio-book.

Catfish (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, United States) Prime ingredients are left unacknowledged in the films crossover between misanthropic-mode to we-are-sorry-mode making the latter transparent and the former prevalent. The illusion that remains is kind of cute though.

Images

Retrospective Discoveries (Masterpieces)

The Mother and The Whore (Eustache, 1973)
L'Enfant Secret (Garrel, 1979)
The Bridges of Madison County (Eastwood, 1995)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001)
La Ceremonie (Chabrol, 1995)
The Addiction (Ferrara, 1995)
Mysterious Skin (Araki, 2004)
The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Le Bonheur (Varda, 1965)
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Carax, 1991)
The Apu Trilogy (Ray, 1955-1959)
Make Way for Tommorow (McCarey, 1937)
Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti, 1960)
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)
Comrades (Douglas, 1986)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948)
Teorema (Pasolini, 1968)
Les Hautes Solitudes (Garrel, 1974)
Phantom India (Malle, 1969)
Out of the Blue (Hopper, 1980)

On the Horizon

1. A Burning Hot Summer – Philippe Garrel, France
2. Hugo Cabret – Martin Scorsese, U.S.
3. The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn / The War Horse – Steven Spielberg, U.S.
4. A Igreja do Diabo – Manoel De Oliveira, Brazil
5. Promises Written in Water – Vincent Gallo, U.S.
6. The Tree of Life – Terrence Malick, U.S.
7. The Turin Horse – Bela Tarr, Hungary
8. Meek's Cutoff - Kelly Reichardt, U.S.
9. Paul – Greg Mottola, U.S.
10. You Aint Seen Nothing Yet – Alain Resnais, France

Visualizing Love: Eastwood's "The Bridges of Madison County"

2010-12-24T22:32:00.013-08:00

1. Boy (Robert Kincaid) Meets Girl (Francesca Johnson)

a space is opened for her to fit.

2. A Bridge

Their movements are recorded via two opposing tracking shots.

Robert photographs not only out of duty but of requirement to confirm his surroundings and her presence.

Francesca needs the same confirmation as Robert, except hers is vulnerable and noticed through that missing plank.

3. The Next Day (Love)

The opposing tracking shots are absolved for Francesca and Robert to now exist in the same shot (pan) but be divided into separate images...

Francesca now walks the bridge without feeling the need to confirm his presence.

4. Not a "Goodbye." Instead, A Final "Hello."

Francesca gets in her truck and puts a bag of groceries in the space which Robert once cleared, thus closing their spatial distance and making what remains of their love space itself.

Interior/Exterior

2010-12-17T23:52:00.001-08:00

A new film, starring Ellis Potter and Arash Memarzadeh.

2010-11-27T22:16:00.004-08:00

Leos Carax & Juliette Binoche in love and on set of the masterpiece, Mauvais Sang.

2010-11-21T23:41:00.001-08:00

seriously

A Matter of Insert Shots: Me and Orson Welles

2010-10-21T23:37:00.007-07:00

“Through art, we fight for eternity; but there’s no point because we’re mortal.”

2010-10-16T20:41:00.004-07:00

– Philippe Garrel on his new film A Burning Hot Summer.

Cinema of the Self

2010-08-06T13:12:00.005-07:00

Adventureland
dir. Greg Mottola
United States, 2009
Now that the Avatar kids have gone back inside, one feels the freedom to talk about the important contributions Hollywood made to cinema in 2009. For all intents and purposes, the two masterpieces: James Gray's Two Lovers and M. Mann's Public Enemies will soon walk away into the night after blatant disregard by critics (Enemies) and further disregard by audiences (Lovers). But what signals the salvation of these baroque stories of boy meets girl, is the little boy meets girl film which shows that Hollywood might not mind producing a profoundly personal albeit miniature reconciliation with youth.

Greg Mottola's Adventureland is that film, thrown at audiences as if it was just another byproduct of 90210 revisionism, and even if this were not the case– the mass would still have troubles accepting this picture for how close it really gets. It's to obvious an angle to spin off the idea of Kirsten Stewart being in that other movie(s?), which has no interest in the human being or the war for individualism that is adolescence. Instead, Stewart appears here as real as a young adult could be in the movies, and Mottola allows her the benefit of having a difficult and often inaccessible characterization. Mottola, who tried to embed similar personal vigour into 2007's Superbad, failed to embed Adventureland's sincere formalism and Hawksian dialogue structures, but succeeded in showing gentleness towards its subjects. No matter how vulgar characters get, Mottola carries their weight with a careful grasp knowing that vulgarity and youth exist within the same pot-exhaled breath. As opposed to other American portrayals of youth (which we certainly have a lot of, for only a few getting it right) that often operate under tired christian fundamentals interchanged with suburban “family value's” (no period, as no thought can end with those words), instead Mottola provides us with a sincere world where the troubles of parents and their young 20-somethings are handled with the same moral certitude and respect.

I keep asserting these properties which might as well be called The Mottola Caress, which is in someways interweaved with Philippe Garrel's whisper, in that both men's camera's are constantly bequeathed by their female subjects, whom represent bygone era's of their own lives. So goes the power of the cinema: synchronize ones subject (in the case of Adventureland, this is James... also known as Greg) with ones self, and put ones past and or obstacle (girl) in front of the camera and the kineticism of reconciliation gives birth the camera of the self. This camera allows us to experience a closeness with the individual running the show, while also giving way for us to explore ourselves through this individuals way of seeing things. I'm not simply describing an auteur here, but instead an auteur who demands cinema to be a form of reconciliation with ones past, and who knows how valuable this is to the world around him/her.

Adventureland begins with James, having just finished college, looking to grasp onto a schedule for the upcoming years of his life. Soon enough, the bourgeois pillow he has been provided is pulled from beneath his feet and he and his family are forced to leave their step on the ladder and return to the suburbia of olden times: where James grew up. Instead of being laden with retrospection and reconciliation this jump often forces movies to collapse to, Mottola's suburbia plays out like the purgatory that it actually is and hones in on the need for clarity amidst its murkiness. So, James grabs a summer job at a local amusement park which is rusted to its core, and exists for very little reason other than providing fuel for the mass public. While I might be selling Mottola as being a bit more critical than he actually is, the criticism exists only to bend these locales into what they might actually be, to him at least, and that is the launchpad for individualism (not to be confused with intellectualism). Dostoeyevsky and other names are tossed around, but most importantly the films primary struggle is that of James and love interest Em's investigation into the world of sex without love, and vise-versa. Not often does the movie about the budding individual hone in the authenticity of his/her relationships, and even more rare is just how truthful the surface of the primary relationship appears.

What might be the most courageous part of this quaint movie is the fact that James and Em's relationship is told through the murmurs of pot-smoke and at one point even reconciled through James' giving Em an eighth of weed as a gift. Never is there a misguided temperament shown towards their indulgences. Instead, drugs are photographed as a temporal artifact of youth, not necessary but unavoidable for a great deal of people getting comfortable with the shoes of self-consciousness. Similarly shown is James dad penchant for alcohol, which later fuels James own misconduct by crashing the family car. Things and people are interweaved they way they should be, and all humans fuck up at the expected rate.

A little needs to be said about the power of the song, and songs as the embroidery of youth. It's true that Adventureland indulges in the circumstances of its 1980's setting and provides our ears with the sounds of Lou Reed and The Replacements (a band I admittedly didn't get until Mottola provides us with an emotional context of what a Replacements record sounded like in the 1980's), but for every Velvets' cue, there's a Falco one. What's important is how the emotions remain contingent through the profane music as well as they do through the sacred. Anyone can make characters emotions apparent through good pop songs, but it's a total testament to the power of the image reigning over sound when it prevails over the unavoidable diarrhoea of pop culture. This is what makes Mottola more formidable than contemporaries like Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach, who instead neatly organize their characters to abide by their sensibilities, whilst their soundtracks conveniently deliver to every recognizable “quiet moment”, when in truth, a Wes Anderson movie would buckle under its own tidiness if Anderson cued a Scorpions song. In short, the world doesn't need any more movies which pretend as though we can sneak by the audio-visual victimization of pop-culture. Power to the cinema which isn't afraid to stare in the face of banality and shine on it the ray of the individual, whom reign over vapidity by staring it in the face!

Anyways, James' summer moves by on a bridge of collapsing hearts, and characters finally come around to one another. Most importantly, the obstructions in Em's and James' relations, Ryan Reynolds Mike and Margarita Levieva's Lisa P are also lovers in repair, whom beguile us with frustration but by the time the means reach the end, Mottola refuses them to brandish them with the “bad-persons-stamp.” America no longer needs this kind of cinema which misinterprets the cesspool that is suburbia, and feels the need to delineate its persons as either “bad” or “good” instead of “in progress”. Thankfully, the final ignition between James and Em' cannot take place in suburbia, and instead plays out in one of the smallest and most beautiful depictions of New York City in modern American cinema. Simply seen through a bus ride, an alley, then an apartment, Mottola's miniature New York exists only to hide these kids from the rain. In a final image, the two share a kiss which is eventual to the loss of James virginity, but the kiss is captured against the rain speckled window where the two evaporate into the suggested flux of N.Y.C. The image goes on to evoke the temporal poetry of a certain 1970's movies tag-line:

“The rain people are very fragile... one mistake in love and they [might] dissolve”

Mottola's courage comes from his ability to look at the inevitability of relationships in the eye and not care. To document the moments which fled, moments which are otherwise as pliable as the warped image of a rain drenched window pane.

I can't refrain from remembering a girl I once liked. She'd give me rides in her car and we'd casually engage with the sounds of the radio as byproducts of moments and little else. It was never mutual but it didn't matter for a little while. Anyways, she wasn't so dissimilar to Mottola's Em and was quick to call his film bad for reasons which escape me. Willingly, I'll guess that her negative opinion and indeed a great deal of others, roots from how close Mottola's film gets to the casualness of youth morals, to the constant repair we undergo until we find what we like about ourselves and other people, and just how awful we can be when provided with the futility of suburban life. But don't fret– it's not like this personal contrivance altered how I saw Adventureland or anything...

1. Self-Deprecation & La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

2009-04-21T11:27:00.025-07:00

Self-Deprecation
Much has been said about Carl Theodore Dreyer's "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc" which was found in the closet of a Norwegian mental institution (in perfect condition) back in 1981, after the original negatives were both lost to fires. I'm afraid that an 18 year old, like my self, may not have anything particularly new to say in comparison to the many film scholars that have studied the film in fine detail. Yet the entire time while watching the film I realized that writing about film is nearly as important as watching films, if one is to develop an independent set of cinematic viewpoints. Whilst prose is not my strong point, I hope that this blog helps develop that, and many other things.

I plan to write notations on at least one film every week, I will not lazily view films as I once have; because that will not result in a particularly interesting article. Instead, I will walk in films, approach every theme which my young mind gathered, and then document a walkthrough of my gatherings onto this page.

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
Dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is Dreyer's 9th film, and the 2nd film of his which I've had the pleasure of seeing. The first was his 1955 output entitled 'Ordet' which I will not go into fine detail on, but I will say that both are similar in their depiction's of religious questioning, martyrdom, and their overall approach to mise en scene.

Dreyer begins the film with a small modern introduction into the fact that the film is an adaptation of a historical transcript of the actual trial, yet by the time the film ends we, the viewer, knows that this is not sincere as it lets on, due to the numerous situations in which Joan is alone with only a character or two whom could not possibly of transcribed the presented events. Henceforth, the opening acts as a self-conscious reminder that we are watching something scripted, and that the truth of history is not particularly important in the confines of cinema. Images, are the truths that the medium is reliant upon, and the images in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc ring with a truth that is rarely matched:

Renée Falconetti. A performance of emotional martyrdom founded upon those switchblade eyes that glare past the camera looking at the crimes of man with disappointment and disillusionment, whilst her gaze also looks introspectively into her own humanity and faith, and the trials issued question: Is she in fact sent from god? Renée's emotional performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema, it's also one of the greatest manipulating devices that Dreyer utilizes in the film. Due to their being little setup (other than our own knowledge in history), the whole film feels like a state of denouement with no evidential climax. This structure, allows for Falconetti's performance to never be undercut; tears will hang from her eyelids and seemingly never drop, whilst the majority of the film feels like an entirely singular scene (which places Falconetti at the forefront) which fluidly merge into one another, due to the lack of establishing shots. Instead, Dreyer utilizes the close-up like it has never been used before: consistently, and unrelentingly. This approach is also the framework for Dreyer's exposition of his themes, which are, for the most part, outlined in the many faces in the film:

These faces of the bourgeois, whom have distanced themselves from the god in which they praise through their modern tendencies of disbelief. Belief is the foundation of religion, and while they all obviously believe in God and his son Jesus Christ, they are incapable of expanding their beliefs beyond that. By this point, the church is a detractor from religious progression due to peoples faith being limited to a set of rules which do not permit new found saviours. It is a church that does not permit hope. This is another issue which pains Joan as she presents her case to the judges, whom look down on her with a sense of superiority perfectly outlined it's Dreyer's slight lowering of the camera.

This effect of imposed views via Dreyer's placement of the camera is a prominent technique used throughout the film:

Are we (the viewer) God, looking down upon the crimes of man?

Whilst, simultaneously looking down upon Joan with the hope that man is incapable of?

The incapability of hope is one of the primary themes that I retrieved from this film, whilst, as previously discussed; the old and bourgeois have been numbed to such a phenomenon. The youthful/peasant figures remain prominently hopeful within the film:

These figures and others, look towards Joan with a sense of inevitable anguish which outlines their overall faith and intrigue in Joan. Joan serves as a figurehead of escape from their barren lives dictated by a dying religion which limits truth & faith instead of offering any. While Joan may not be the saviour which she proclaims to be, this is not Dreyer's true inquisitive purpose. Dreyer, instead appears to be more interested in questioning the nature of faith; and it's place within man and society.

In Joan's final moments, she finally realizes the lack of faith in man; and so she turns her head to the sky, turning to her own faith and the beauty of the world which her father/god has created:

Then she turns to the last image in her existence, an image which speaks for itself: