Film Forum

GIOVANNA D’ARCO AL ROGO
Italy/France, 1954
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Tullio Carminati, Giacinto Prandelli
Approx. 80 min. 35mm.

The love affair between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini aroused headlines around the globe, but the films they made together sold few tickets and provoked hostile reviews in Italy and America. While waiting for VOYAGE TO ITALY to secure a release in its home country, Bergman and Rossellini found a more fulsome reception on the stage when they were offered an opportunity to mount Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel’s Jeanne d’arc au bûcher in Naples. (Joan had been Bergman’s childhood idol, and she had already received an Oscar® nomination for playing the Maid of Orleans under Victor Fleming’s direction.) Honegger and Claudel’s 1933 oratorio was conceived with a minimum of spectacle, just Joan tied to the stake, singing on a bare stage; Rossellini’s maximalist rendition enlarged the scale of the piece, adding optical tricks and projection effects. The production was a triumph, and within two months, they were producing a film version before taking the show to La Scala. “Italians today are sick of realism,” observed Rossellini. “They want Technicolor.” Instead, they got JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE, Rossellini’s first color feature, in Gevachrome. A miasma of strange pastel tones, Joan deliberately evokes the hand-painted, antiquarian pleasures of George Méliès–an especially apt register when Bergman sullenly looks on, her death sentence pronounced by a pig and a jury of sheep. “It’s not at all filmed theater,” proclaimed Rossellini, “it’s cinema and I’d even say neorealism, in the sense that I’ve always intended.”

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

35mm print courtesy Cinecittà.