Visual Language

As I watched The Passion of Joan of Arc I thought about how unique it is in a silent film you are left to comprehend the story with only your visual observances, and then provided with a few varying subtitles to fill in any gaps. But still, you’re left with only having the physical actions/gestures of the characters. All at once someone who only knows French, or only knows English, or maybe can’t hear or speak at all can all understand the same movie. That is because there is no language barrier, you get pure action. I think something that can unify something like that is pretty amazing to me. I didn't read the assigned readings until after the movie. I found it interesting that In the beginning of “Metaphors of Vision” Brakhage talks about the same phenomena of understanding things, actions, emotions without word. I found it so interesting the first paragraphs I read are thoughts I had when viewing the film. 

The movie does this through the way the scenes are portrayed on screen. Throughout the entire movie, you rarely see what Joan is actually doing. You don’t know if she is twiddling her thumbs, sitting with her legs crossed, or even wearing shoes. You don’t know those things because you’re never shown them. Throughout the entire movie we’re only dealing with Joan’s face, which shows us more important things than what she’s doing with her hands. Thanks to the close ups of Joan we get to see her emotions, through the raising of her eyebrows, through the watering of her eyes, through the squinting of her face. We get to see how she is feeling. 

It is the opposite with the other characters though. Every now and then we get a close up of someone besides Joan, mainly showing scowls or looks of disbelief. We see the other characters and the things they are actually doing. Other than the general feeling of anger and outrage towards Joan, we don’t see any of their emotions. We never know how they individually feel.

Its all so perfect though, the points of view we get from the film. The camera shows us Joan’s emotion, which is what we are wanted to see, how she felt, her suffering. Then when it comes to all the other characters we only see their actions, which is all we are supposed to see, their feelings aren’t what we’re expected to care about. We’re supposed to care about how their actions against Joan have made her feel, and subsequently how we feel. We’re shown the writer’s feelings about the story of Joan of Arc through his and the director’s decisions on what angles to view the scenes.