The Lotus position

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2012)

I subscribe to the notion that says there are really very few great films in the small history of the medium so far, truly great ones. It has to be so, and you have to make sure. I believe that you have to be versatile and familiar with a lot of films, but let really few touch you, if the touch is to matter at all.
My practice is that I normally resist emotional content and think less of films that solely try to exploit the fact we are, by nature, emotional beings, this being our weakness, and that is because most filmmakers, even a lot of otherwise great ones, are really tactless with these things to allow them into my life in that capacity. They are quick to wound and anxious to heal you back.
This I welcomed with no resistance. This is the most sorrowful cadence, purely concentrated interior space until the last minute. And it is, perhaps, the most spiritual film I have seen, quite apart from the obvious fact that it deals with god and transcendent faith.
Knowing this was altogether lost to us until very recently, and the chances it would be at all rediscovered really nonexistent, makes me feel like Nietzche confronted with the horse in Turin. So much beauty just a short step from being so casually erased from ever getting to know about it. But we did, and it wasn't. And how it was discovered is equally stunning, I mean can you imagine the chain of events? An original copy somehow ended up in a Danish mental asylum, and was it screened at all there? Did it mend some broken soul? Did the preacher let it do his preaching? And the cabinet opened 50 years down the line, the film is there. What are the chances?
And Maria Falconetti, the most mysterious figure in all of cinema with only this major role to her credit. Did she go insane from too much pain, as portrayed here? Did she open a brothel in Argentina, as rumored? Suicide? Or, so much more ingloriously, died from a crash-diet?
Further back in time, a teenage peasant girl in armor leading armies into battle and lifting sieges, guided by visions - god or madness, it doesn't matter, the words describe one thing. Her complete testimony before a mock trial survived and from the hands of her captors. Again, what are the chances?
So folks, let the multi-faceted story of this film being made sooth and guide you home. Because it is a stranger world than anyone captured on film.
Because all we have between us is testimonies of life, no doubt doctored, in our case by notaries at Rouen, the doctored version presented as truth, the truth always mediated by who's telling the story; we have blurred roles and so hard to surmise the real being, the woman as maiden, mad saint, icon, soldier, visionary actress, whore, real or imagined; we have staged fiction to frame our experience, mock trial, private dealings, confession, Sacrament, public execution, our film about these things, lost and foung again. And so, having caught a glimpse of this fabric that is chaotic, arbitrary life behind the images and stories we devise as scaffold to support a shape, we may concede at last that it's a world spinning madly out of orbit, beyond anyone's control except who writes the stories. Did god ever speak to her?
Except for one thing, that we have this film and performance about a woman having visions as our vision about her. This is our center, a woman appearing before a camera some time in 1927.
This is our spiritual center, and it is fitting that this maelstrom of a performance will be forever associated with and help explain a legend. This is where the divine madness of god speaks. In the utter, unbreakable, single-pointed concentration this woman and the man filming her embodied and sustained, this is the essence of spirituality.
I'm not just babbling here. I know of only one image where god appears, not the traditional god but the state of mind that might as well be described in those terms. It is the picture of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation at Saigon. A human being sitting calmly in the lotus position as flames surge out of him.
Oh, Falconetti is ravaged by emotion throughout and far from Guang Duc's meditative dispassion, a very Christian image of torment, a very Lutheran film, grim, recoiling under the gaze of an austere god, but it is very much the performance of a woman transforming herself into pure soul. In the end, she burns serenely. She burns and the world at her feet is torn asunder.