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Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Written by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Joseph Delteil, from Delteil’s novel
Starring Renée Maria Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, Antonin Artaud
France, 1928
Not Rated (some intense images)
HYMN
At a young age, Joan of Arc, a country maid from Orleans, was seeing visions of saints and believed she was born to save France from British occupation. She dressed as a boy, and with her powers of persuasion, befriended the Dauphin and led an army to defeat the British. After many victories, she was captured and was interrogated in 29 cross-examinations that lasted several months, and was burned at the stake for heresy at age nineteen, in 1431. She was a successful warrior, a conflicted girl, and she became a martyr.
About 500 years later, she was declared a saint by the church, and she is now very present in school textbooks and in our culture, certainly in our movie culture. Carl Theodor Dreyer made his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, in 1927. It premiered in Copenhagen in 1928, was later censored and reedited, then was lost in a fire. Devastated, Dreyer put together a new film with unused takes, which was later thought lost to another fire. Since then, The Passion of Joan of Arc was seen in incomplete, murky versions, until it was found in the closet of a Norwegian mental institute in 1981. The film’s legend is strikingly similar to its subject, and the film itself evokes the intense passion of the heroine it portrays.
I have seen The Passion of Joan of Arc three times in two days, and it grows in its power with each viewing. I am shaken by it. The story is so familiar that I wondered how moving the film could possibly be for me. It is Dreyer’s outré structure and Maria Falconetti’s performance as Joan that takes the film to heavenly heights. It has already spawned numerous pretenders to its throne, namely a version with Ingrid Bergman, a Jacques Rivette film that was also reedited (and now has a horribly uneven flow), and a recent Luc Besson film with Milla Jovovich as Joan. None can match this, one of the most religious of films.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is most discomforting because of its intimacy. It revolutionized the importance of the close-up, and the entire film is shot in telling close-ups and middle shots. There is no sense of space or time (the several cross-examinations are whittled down to one interrogation that lasts a day), and we cannot get a feel for Joan’s environment because we are not allowed to see the distance between characters. We never see the film’s entire set, either, in one shot. While this angered studio heads because Passion’s set was the most expensive in French history at the time, Dreyer’s style is extremely potent and creates a queasiness in the audience.
In Sunset Boulevard, a film about a movie star named Norma Desmond who is neglected after Hollywood’s transition from silents to talkies, Norma sneers, "We didn’t need words, we had faces." The statement takes on a whole new meaning once you have seen the luminous face of Maria Falconetti. Falconetti, who gives arguably the most famous and celebrated performance in silent and international film, cannot truly be described here. This was her only work in motion pictures; after Passion, she returned to her thriving career as a stage actress and comedienne. Her face is explored by Dreyer’s camera, as are the faces of her inquisitors. Dreyer refused to use make-up, and the actors are totally naked and become their characters. We see every line and blemish.
In the first few acts, Joan’s shock and religious ecstasy is perfectly created by Falconetti, who hardly ever blinks in earlier scenes. The camera captures tiny nuances, like the simple tilting of her head, lifting of an eyebrow, or the travel of a tear. After my first viewing of The Passion of Joan of Arc, I found Falconetti’s performance to be moving, but overdone. Upon the subsequent viewings, it became clear that hers is one of the purest pieces of acting ever put on celluloid, because her performance gives itself completely to what the film is about and what Joan of Arc stands for today; her face expresses religious struggle and conviction in every crevice. It is unforgettable, and is that "window into the soul" that Dreyer calls the human face.
Dreyer’s film may be technically inventive, but it comes off as simple and earthy, like its heroine. Because it is made to feel so personal, it whooshes by like a compact episode, like Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. The Passion of Joan of Arc is like the Eisenstein trailblazer in more ways than one. Firstly, Passion’s only flaw, I feel, is in the two crawls that open and close the film. They are unnecessary and make the film seem a bit like patriotic propaganda or a sentimental tribute, when it is clearly more than that. Potemkin comes across as, essentially, communist propaganda. Another similarity is some of the shocking images to be found in both films. Potemkin features despicable close-ups of maggots in meat fed to Russian soldiers, and brutal killings on the Odessa Steps. Passion has a non-violent blood-letting scene in which we are spared nothing, a montage of the torture gadgetry Joan is threatened with (which include spikes and saws and other such perverted mechanisms), a close-up of a head of a corpse with maggots squirming in the eye hole, and a finale where protesters of Joan’s execution are murdered, much like in the Odessa Steps sequence. Thirdly, The Passion of Joan of Arc’s editing often shows influences of Eisenstein’s quick cuts and use of montage. In the sequence located in the torture chamber, the montage of torture tools cuts between the swinging or turning objects and Joan’s fearful reactions, and since that editing style is seen often today on MTV, modern audiences can subconsciously compare it to a music video. The sets, especially in the torture chamber with its spiked wheels and such, are more than a little reminiscent of German Expressionism found in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which is no wonder since the two films share the same production designer, Hermann Warm.
Curiously, Eisenstein’s reaction after seeing Passion was mixed. He recognized it as interesting and moving, but he said it was not movie, but a collection of photographs. Many other critics at the time voiced their dismay at the obsessive utilization of close-ups, which one reviewer called "irksome." I agree that it causes dizziness, uneasiness, and lends a sense of monotony to the film, but I think that works to Passion’s advantage.
Throughout the film, Joan’s inquisitors, who are monks and heads of the church, are illustrated as sinister, which brings about one of the many paradoxes in The Passion of Joan of Arc and in Joan’s life. Our protagonist is preached to about holiness in the torture chamber. The inquisitors hypocritically claim to be acting in Joan’s best interest while they are intentionally and clearly trying to trip her and use her own words against her. The very burning of Joan of Arc, who so believed in God and her visions, by the people of the church is an event of great irony. Joan of Arc, while she is considered a saint, was accused of witchcraft and had friends who were murderers. Her visions are a tad unbelievable; that God would send someone to punish an entire race of people is a bit inconceivable, and if she had lived today, she would be labeled mentally ill. The Passion of Joan of Arc accents the parallels between the martyrdom of Joan, who fought for her nation, to that of Jesus Christ, who fought for humanity.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a collection of some of the most beautifully designed shots in history. Rudolph Maté, the great cinematographer, is like a music composer; he hits the perfect notes and if you freeze-frame some of the great shots in his oeuvre, the power reverberates. He would go on to make the assassination in the rain in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent one of the most exquisitely framed and photographed sequences ever; to capture the intoxicating, smoky aura of Rita Hayworth in Gilda; and be a force behind The Lady From Shanghai (his final film), but he totally absorbs us here. The most haunting shots in this film, for me, are near the end: Joan is preparing for her execution, and we see her praying in the bottom left of the screen as a window, its bars now photographed as a symbolic cross, is seen above her. Hermann Warm’s sets are characterized by odd shapes and details, and by the recurring motif of the cross. As Joan is burning, she simply stares at a cross that stands beyond the smoke and flames for hope (another echo of Christ’s persecution).
One critic has said that The Passion of Joan of Arc explores the themes of personal religious belief versus a collective, regimented belief practiced in the church (Passion seems to condemn the regimentation of the masses and advocate individuality, which may explain Eisenstein’s reaction to the film, since Potemkin illustrates his belief in the power of unity.) It is here where Joan clashes with the authorities of the church. She is continually questioned about her male attire, her visions, and if she is in a state of grace. The Passion of Joan of Arc speaks to me in the same way The Seventh Seal does. Before I hit the double-digit ages, I was an active church-goer, but as I grew up, I began to question Christianity, especially the rules of the Bible and the church, and I have been struggling ever since. I feel religion is too important and too personal to be just a set of laws and history, and, because Joan cannot articulate her visions and religious beliefs into words in a trial, she is condemned. The film has struck me on such an intimate, personal level that I shiver at the thought of it. It is quite an overpowering experience.
Carl Dreyer prefers silent films watched with no score, which is probably why he never chose a definitive one to accompany The Passion of Joan of Arc. He is known to have said that music is an artificial stimulator that he has no use for. Dreyer was on a search for the simple truth with this film. He directed in hope of a documentary honesty. I have watched Passion both with and without score, and it is powerful both ways, but several times more so with music. On the marvelous Criterion DVD edition of the film, we are given Richard Einhorn’s score, inspired by the film, called "Voices of Light." It is brilliant. Silence may be golden, but once you have heard the film with "Voices of Light," watching it with no music leaves a void.
I do not know much about classical music (I am, after all, from a pop generation), apart from the fact that I love Tchaikovsky, so I had to look up what opera and oratorio meant, the two genres of music "Voices of Light" is classified as. The score is a sweeping oratorio ("an extended musical work usu. based upon a religious theme, for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra…" from Webster’s) that is rooted in music from the period in which Joan of Arc lived, but it is very modern. Performed by female vocal group Anonymous 4, it makes The Passion of Joan of Arc mysteriously spiritual. The seventh movement, which is heard in the torture chamber sequence, is gorgeous and sounds like transcendence itself. While The Passion of Joan of Arc is simple in its complexity, with a singular aim, its merging with "Voices of Light" brings more emotional intensity to both pieces because Einhorn’s score is multi-layered and baroque (almost Gothic). It lends a side of strange mysticism to Dreyer’s masterpiece.
But the technical aspects of The Passion of Joan of Arc ultimately boil down to Falconetti. She is everything in this movie. Dreyer once said, "She created the images, not me." You can believe she has been touched by the Divine Hand, and she makes Joan of Arc human, not superhuman. When Joan gives in to signing an abjuration of her visions, we can understand and sympathize. We can comprehend her frustration and her desire to believe that it was God’s will that she carry out her mission against Britain, and her inevitable doubt of it. Her fear of the stake is human. Falconetti is emotionally naked and is Dreyer’s vision of Joan of Arc. Her performance is repressed pain and harrowing faith. The film becomes our prayer and our paean of and for unfaltering religious conviction; when it ended, my body quivered with a silent "Amen," as if I had let go of something, or attained something.
By Andrew Chan
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