The Nightmare Effect (Ms. Johnson)


 

​The Passion of Joan of Arc is a silent and cutting depiction of her trial. The camera angles highlight the sterile, disorienting, and solitary experience of Joan throughout her time being judged. The opening scene where she is among the judges demonstrates the hysterical quality of the trial. She walks into the bright and white-washed room filled with men of varying haircuts and facial expressions. The camera is situated above Joan’s head to emphasize the smallness of her existence in this room, as she is not taken seriously in her own trial. The camera when featuring the different faces of the judges begins to warp. Sometimes the judge is still and the camera pans across their unmoving face and sometimes the camera zooms in and out on a wide-eyed judge quickly having the clownish effect of being taunted. 

The camera moves from judge to judge momentarily forcing us into the view of Joan simulating her experience of being in a room full of strange, vengeful men. How many of these men are there? The camera angles and sporadic subject changes make it almost impossible to tell how many of them are in this room and where they are situated. Instead, all we know is that we are in a seemingly infinite room full of men, and they all have an expression of distaste on their faces. A nightmare. Our one touchstone is Joan’s face which is rolling around on the ball of her neck as if she were under a fainting spell. She is looking and absorbing her surroundings in a deeply emotional manner written across her face. She does not blink often, something that I feel must be painful in such a blindingly bright room. She is fully captivated by the pain and confusion of her surroundings. Her face is mostly pointing upwards whether towards the one she has devoted her life to, or to view the men that are towering over her. 

To watch a scene which consists of many men with strange camera angles and movements in a white room with a woman shocked, eyes wide open with tears streaming down her largely consistent expression is unsettling to say the least. The effect is almost hysterical. You may ask, how in the world is this tragedy hysterical? Nietzsche in 294 of Beyond Good and Evil states “in defiance of that philosopher who as a true Englishman tried to give any thinking person’s laughter a bad reputation, I would actually go so far as to rank philosophers according to the level of their laughter – right up to the ones who are capable of golden laughter.”

Laughter is not to be tampered with. We cannot condemn the urge that begins deep in our gut and skips right out of our mouths because it is conventionally base. Why can we not laugh at the most dire and serious situations? What is it about humour that feels like a negation? Fully engrossed in The Passion of Joan of Arc, I found myself laughing. It is a deeply hysterical laugh. Not a laughter that belittles her situation or the severity of the pain. I also believe that this laughter is not simply a coping mechanism, as that would negate the importance of laughter. Why was I laughing? The situation of Joan as demonstrated in her trial, was very real. As a person hundreds of years later looking into the fishbowl that this film creates makes the real so concretely real that it becomes almost fiction. 

Questions bubbled up every exchange of dialogue of how could this be what they were asking? How is this history? Why are people so insistent on exercising arbitrary justice? The nature of humans is hysterical. There is something so absurd (and by that, I mean outside of the scope of human reason) about watching something that is so classically human, that all I could do was laugh. It is historically classic to watch men persecute a woman over her beliefs and dress, people persecuting each other over religious belief, and people torturing each other over politics using their ‘innate’ sense of justice. The film emphasizes her pain, fear, and comfort in Christianity. The film also emphasizes the ridiculousness of men, trials, religion, and torture. So then, why film in the style of a nightmare? Does this pull us away from the reality of the situation? Does it play too much to the point where we can shrug this off? 

​Sitting in a theatre, you are fully engrossed in the film experience – sight and sound. The film features close ups of peoples faces for nearly an hour. No person likes to have a stranger that close to their face, let alone for an entire hour, silently. It is something instinctual as the heart begins to beat faster. It is like nightmares where your subconscious runs wild with whatever whim it pleases forcing the sleeper to endure mind bending images – images of strangers inches away from your face. If you want to watch the movie, however, you have to endure these faces and this closeness without ceasing. This is where the nightmare really kicks in. Are we dreaming or is Joan? Who needs to wake up for this to be over? There is a phenomenon when you tell a friend your nightmare and upon hearing about it, they laugh a little. It is hard to recount something teasing the human experience without a little laughter. 

This film, however, is doing something more than teasing the human experience. It is condemning the reality of the trial and the situation. Are we surprised? Are we confounded at the reality that humans can be this grotesque and harsh – words are failing to captivate the horror. I am not, and maybe that is jaded and base, but I am by no means complacent in this standing. The width of human action is far wider than we wish it to be. We do not want to admit to such things as a woman being burned alive, publicly, for her religious influences. I think it is far worse to not admit to this and to be surprised because that means denial and denial means comfort in ignorance and an unwillingness to recognize. 

So, why do I laugh? I laugh because I already know that humans can be this evil, and I know the story of Joan, but does this knowing lead to laughter? In my case, yes. I am able toadmit to the reality of the story while also regarding this film as an artistic narration of the trial through the visual medium. I am able to recognize that this film was not the reality of the trial but a reaction to the story/trial transcript and her being canonized. What the film maker did with his angles and the facial expressions is art and this art is to move us through the narration by evoking emotion. The subsequent emotions evoked are largely subjective while maintaining some consistency from person to person through things like closeness to faces and light. Thus, my laughter is the result of me encountering this art through the intellectualand the visual realms. I do not find burning people alive to be funny. I find it absurd that this is reality. This absurdity evokes a rumbling deep within my diaphragm that manifests in the sound of laughter. Laughter does not necessarily mean funny and less serious. This nightmare is reality. 

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