Foreign film with white robbed man on pedestal

I recall seeing a foreign film with subtitles that showed a man on a pedestal. I don't recall if the man was being punished or he was some kind of prophet, but he may have been speaking with God or some demon. My memory of it is pretty dim and vague, unfortunately. I think the film was in French or Italian and probably dates from the 1950s as I saw it on TV in the late 1970s (Channel 9 in NYC?) as I best recall. I must have seen it the same period that I first saw the great early Ingmar Bergman films on the same channel.