Bokelskere.no

"The drama was that there was no drama."

"I see my films as exercises,as attempts,as efforts toward something I'm trying to understand but that,whenever I think I'm getting close,recedes."

"I won't Claim that my performers speak exactly as we speak in life,but I will Claim that they speak truthfully."

"Isn't there a documentary aspect to A Man Escaped? Absolutely. I maintained a tone bordering on documentary, to preserve the sense of reality at all times."

"But don't you have an aversjon to filming death?The film's subject isn't in the strangeling hands.It's elsewhere,in the currents passing throught."

"What do you think of the "Jansenist" label that is so often applied to you?I have been given other labels too.Jansenist?...I believe in predestination combined with chance.In the sense of autesterity,the lack of decoration in my films,then perhaps.I once said to George Sadol,"For the current to pass,you have to strip the wires."

"I will tell you what struck me the most when in preaparing for this film I read the "minutes" of the trial of Joan of Arc.Her youth.Her magnificent insolence before the cardinals and scholars who where preapared to send her to the pyre.("Go away!" "This isn't your trial,"etc.)Throughout the interminable interrogations- from which she emerges less exhausted than her interrogators-I imagine her lancing her obstinate replies from the high of that second floor sometimes depicted by fifteenth-century painters:the floor designated for spiritual things,as opposed to the ground floor that represents material reality."

"Have you presented Joan trough the lens of sainthood?I show her as she portrays herself.I want to insist on the fact that in this film I have rejected uncertainy in favour of keeping only what is known.I'm thinking now of the last moments,when the minutes of the trial stop and we have to resort to the testimony of witnesses at the rehabiliation trial.These testimonies don't always match up.For example,one of the witnesses says that Joan took up dressing like a man again,after agreeing to stop,in order to protect herself from English soldiers;another,her confessor,insist that it was the English who hid her dress in a bag to force her back into men's clothes.These are all people of faith who had been in close contact with her.And the question of men's clothing is not unimportent."

"And you know in poetry,meter is already an idea.Above all,that I'm looking for-I don't claim to have achieved it-but I'm trying to speak cinema in a language all its own,and I refuse to get dragged into making filmed theater."

"Mouchette rolls down the hill,and the water closes around her as if around nothing.It's the same sleight- of- hand-which is what death is- that I wanted to make palpable in the Trial of Joan of Arc,with the pyre and the suddenly empty chains.what is the signifiance of Monteverdi's Magnificat?The music isn't about sustenance or reinforcement; it precedes and it concludes.It envelops the film in Christianity.It was necessary."