EXCOMMUNICATION 3

 video 1

video 2

On May 30, 1431, after a preliminary inquiry, fifteen interrogatory sessions and a trial, which has concluded with her abjuration, as an elapsed heretic, Jean D'Arc was burned at the stake in the Old Marketplace in Rouen. Twenty-five years later, the Holy See reviewed the decision of the ecclesiastical court, found her innocent, and declared her a martyr. She was declared Venerable by the Church in 1904, beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. Her life story, which was discussed quite a lot while the process leading to canonization was going on, has aroused quite some interest in the cultural circles as well, so that, for instance, in 1908 a two-volume biography titled "The Life of Joan of Arc" was authored by Anatole France, and a play titled "Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue", written by George Bernard Shaw, started being performed in New York in 1923. Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, who has read both of the mentioned texts at the time, got obsessed with an "attempt to re-create the most important periods of the virgin’s life in the form of a film". He got a chance for it when, in 1927, the French firm Societe Generale des Films, has offered him a seven-million franc budget to make a film related to some personality from French history. So, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" was filmed in the vast concrete recreation of Rouen castle, complete with sliding walls to facilitate shooting, with insistence on realism in every aspect; actors were cast according to facial type, and every makeup was rejected. In this film he has further developed what he has appreciated the most in the films of David Griffith: close-up photography, individual types and realism. Dreyer was a Protestant with no real concern for religion or politics, and that is one of the reasons why he has favored interpretations of Jean D'Arc's life from the points of view of a person who had up to his thirties identified himself as an atheist, and later on as a mystic (Shaw), and a French writer associated to the Communist Party, whose writings were put on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Roman Catholic Church (France). He has rejected the script offered to him by the company and he went back to the original transcripts of the trial. He wanted to recreate things, not describe them, and he did so, inventing a hermeneutics of facial expression.

”Excommunication 3” is a direct comment on this film. By recreating the key scenes of its narrative, which are the scenes of the interrogation and the execution of its protagonist, it starts up an open dispute about the role of an individual in history, of the manner in which one, in a specific historical setting, becomes a scapegoat for the whole community, and of the social dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, in its most drastic form. The interrogation is paraphrased by the video using the same filmic language as the movie it relates to, isolating faces in close-ups, with no establishing shot or the shot – reverse shot procedure, dissolving thereby the space around them, and driving the attention towards the inner feelings of these individuals, with no indication who they are, nor how came they got imprisoned into that frame. Their faces are often being pushed to the edges of the frame, cut in various manners, and shown from odd angles. Even the text plates, which relate to the text plates from the original film, say nothing about these characters in the contextual sense, about the cultural, political, economical and moral standpoints they have. The execution is paraphrased by a video showing the burning of the Barbie doll, at the stake, in the classical manner of putting to death someone involved with witchcraft or heresy, in the ages dominated by religious canon. The Barbie doll was used as representing the idealized image of femininity, in an analogy to the image of Jean D’Arc in popular culture, the image that got extremely commoditized from the times when her life story was appropriated by the Church, and even the manner of the filming of this scene of execution quite something to do with Dreyer.

”Excommunication 3” is conceived as a video installation. Ten computer monitors, structured into the shape of the cross are supported by the iron construction, whose dimensions are 250x200cm, and placed into the middle of the room. Five monitors are functional and active, and the two mentioned video files are played on them, in continuous loop. The other five monitors are dysfunctional, burnt. They present no content, but represent the materialization of the final result of the process shown in the second from the stated videos. The burnt monitors were found in such a condition, with quite an impressive visual appearance, and a story untold, that one can only guess when facing them. They are used as ready-mades. The whole setting indicates a narrative, but, still, everything stays on the level of being only indicated. The place of synthesis of this narrative can only be the viewer, and the manner in which the synthesis is made, is upon the viewer. In that sense, this work insists quite a lot on some particular aesthetic of reception.

Stevan Vuković