Passion of Joan of Arc, TheDirector: Carl Theodor DreyerGenre: Drama Publisher: Criterion (DVD) Released: 1928 MPAA Rating: Unrated Cast: Maria Falconetti |
A Review by David Abrams
01/15/2002
You have never seen a motion picture like The Passion of Joan of Arc. Truth be told, most of you have never even seen it at all. It is one of the great under-watched gems of cinema history.
Yeah, yeah, I know—critics like to toss around that phrase:
“You have never seen a movie like Citizen Kane.”
“You’ve never seen anything like 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Dude, you ain’t seen nothin’ until you see The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.”
And so on.
But I’m here to tell you The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film from 1928, will rouse you from that foggy cinema-torpor you’ve been feeling for the past few years. It will make you sit a little straighter, it will make you lean forward to catch every drop of golden silence, it will make you cry out, “Now that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen on the screen.”
Truth be told, you’ll probably be rendered speechless at the end of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s haunting masterpiece. I know I was. I sat there on my sofa, limp-limbed, the DVD remote loose in my numbed fingers, my mouth hanging slack. My brain was in overdrive, trying to assimilate all the images that had just flickered across the screen.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of pure, uncut, freebase emotion that you just don’t find in the cineplex these days. This is heroin cinema.
And, thanks to those nice cinephiles at Criterion and their beautifully-packaged DVD, you can now experience it in a luminous, hyper-realistic way that stops just short of the smell of burning flesh wafting from your home theater speakers. If you’ll indulge my hyperbole just a little bit longer, let me just say that this is the movie for which DVDs were invented. The black-and-white images have been restored to a level that’s as crisp with its blacks, whites and grays as Roger Deakins’ work on the recently Coen Brothers noir The Man Who Wasn’t There. Faces and images leap off the screen, throwing off the often muddy mantle we associate with films from the silent era. There are few--if any--pops, flickers or scratches to mar what eventually turns into a religious experience. (And that’s probably the only time you’ll hear “heroin” and “religion” used in the same breath in one of my film reviews.)
Dreyer constructs his film almost entirely of medium-range and close-up shots, seldom providing an established point of view or a spatial relationship between characters in the transition between edits. The effect is at once claustrophobic and liberating. By bringing his camera tight against the actors’ faces, he allows us to concentrate on characters like we’ve never concentrated before. There are no special effects, no busily cluttered backgrounds and—save for one strange shot where a tilt angle has soldiers marching upside down across the top of the frame—no flashy cinematography. The sets are stark, bare and white—textbook examples of German Expressionism (similar to the cold, sharp-edged sets in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari…in fact Dreyer’s production designer, Hermann Warm, was the same one responsible for the 1920 Caligari). Everything is designed to funnel your attention to the faces that fill the screen.
The Passion of Joan of Arc was made during that uneasy transition between silents and talkies—when Al Jolson was jabbering in The Jazz Singer, but the first Best Picture Oscar in 1929 went to a silent film, Wings (which was actually released in 1927). As Hollywood teetered between the quiet and the cacophony, Dreyer was working in France on a film that he would later insist be shown completely without sound—even sans a music score. “In the depths of silence, there is always oneself,” Dreyer said.
As a noiseless film, The Passion of Joan of Arc is, nonetheless, as loud as a preacher with a bullhorn. We don’t need speech, or even music, to appreciate what the movie has to say. Compare it to the average ultra-loud Bruckheimer bombast and you’ll start to wonder if the nice folks in Hollyweird have ever paid attention to Dreyer’s minimalist example. Or if, indeed, anyone in today’s Hollyweird has even bothered to see Joan. Alas, Dreyer just would not fit in with today’s crank-the-Dolby crowd.
The Passion of Joan of Arc follows the teenage French martyr through her last days on earth before she was burned at the stake. Liberally borrowing and condensing recorded trial transcripts, Dreyer presents a story of religious persecution and passion. Joan, played by Maria Falconetti, faces an English tribunal of priests, judges and scribes all bent on getting her to recant her statements that God had appeared to her in a vision—a heavenly message that included the commission to dress like a boy and lead the French army as it defeated the British in the Battle of Orleans during the Hundred Years War. Joan was nineteen years old when she was later captured by English troops. She was interrogated in twenty-nine cross-examinations that lasted several months, baffling the British persecutors into consternation at every turn. Joan obstinately clung to faith, believing she was literally a child of God and refusing to accept the Church’s authority. In this film, when the befuddled accusers ask her if she’s in God’s grace, Joan delivers a line that cuts right to the bone: “If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God so keep me!” For her heresy, she was burned at the stake in 1431. Dreyer shortens the months-long trial, distilling it to what appears to be a single day.
Make no mistake, this is a very slanted view of Saint Joan. The characters are displayed like allegorical figures in a morality play (Dreyer goes so far as to give one of the judges tufts of hair that stick out like devil’s horns). Joan good, Church bad. But truthfully, if we found someone like the illiterate farm girl wandering around the streets of New York City today, babbling about Voices from God and shedding the blood of her enemies, she would most likely be declared a paranoid schizophrenic and given a healthy prescription of Prozac.
But in the end, I could care less whether or not Dreyer’s Joan is historically accurate; what matters most is what the film has to say and how it says it. Dreyer called his work “a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life.” Joan’s body burns in a prolonged and torturous sequence, but yet I leave The Passion of Joan of Arc feeling cathartically cleansed and spiritually fertilized. This is probably the closest the movies have ever come to duplicating a church experience.
There is not much in the way of superficial action in this movie. There’s a trial. There’s a scene in Joan’s cell where guards try to assault her. There’s the part where Joan’s hair is shorn off. There’s a big Potemkin-like mob riot and massacre. And there’s the saintly barbecue at the stake. But that’s it.
Still, in Dreyer’s hands, it feels like a big, busy film. One reason for this is the superb editing and highly stylized composition. Notice how Joan’s head is nearly always cocked, as if she’s listening to heaven, thus creating a dramatic diagonal slash across the screen. Notice how most of the shots of the judges are angled upward from below (lending them a looming, threatening presence) and how most of the shots of Joan are from above (as if Heaven is looking down on her). Notice how you rarely seen anyone else in the same frame with Joan, compounding her isolation.
There are 1,333 individual shots, plus 174 title cards, for a total of 1,517 separate edits. Compare that to the average number of shots in a film of 1928—750—and you start to see how much movement Dreyer has worked into the relatively static narrative.
Even so, the “action” here is all internal, precisely captured by Dreyer’s camera and Falconetti’s intense performance. Actually, the word “intense” doesn’t even begin to describe what the renowned French stage actress pours onto the screen. Falconetti has become something of a legend in movie lore: though the Internet Movie Database credits her with a 1917 movie called La Comtesse de Somerive, she never made another film after The Passion of Joan of Arc. Like that 70’s pop group Starland Vocal Band, Falconetti was a one-hit wonder.
But what a wonder she is! Stripped of all makeup for the camera, Falconetti equally lays bare Joan’s soul in every frame of the film. Falconetti’s face is not especially a pretty one but her flat, chapped lips and saucer-sized eyes take us directly beneath the martyr’s skin. In the film, her jury of accusers call her a liar, a monster and a demon, but one look at Falconetti’s face angled toward heaven and you sense the goodness of Joan. Even if she was misguided or even deranged, you know that Falconetti believed wholeheartedly in the character. I can think of few other actors who have so convincingly slipped into the skin of their screen creations.
Dreyer obviously sensed what Falconetti could do with the role. Rumor has it that Lillian Gish was in consideration for the part, but when he first saw Falconetti, the Danish director remarked, “She has very wise eyes.” Those eyes became the focus of the film. Throughout her close-ups, Falconetti’s demeanor is like that of a deer startled by headlights on a dark country road. There are varying degrees of this big-eyed expression, but there is always that sense of wonder and fear. This, Falconetti shows us, is a teenager whose eyes have been blasted by the headlights of a God coming full speed around a bend in the road. As God bears down on Joan at 55 mph, there is fear, but there is also a kind of spiritual bliss on her face which resembles something you’d find on Michelangelo’s Pieta.
And then there are the tears. Before watching The Passion of Joan of Arc, I’d have told you that Demi Moore was the grand champion of screen sobbers. But now I’ve changed my mind. Falconetti’s genuine tears make Ms. Moore’s look like fake, smell-the-onion eyewater.
Interestingly enough, Falconetti earned her reputation as a vivacious comedic actress on the French stage. This role was, to say the least, a radical departure for her. Because it is the last (and perhaps only) film she made before dying in 1946, you have to wonder if she wrung herself so dry of emotion that she had nothing left for anything else. Whatever the reason, we should count ourselves lucky that Dreyer was there to capture Falconetti on film.
We should also thank our lucky stars that we’re even able to sit down and watch The Passion of Joan of Arc today. Apart from Falconetti’s one-film performance, the movie also has its own intriguing history.
The premiere of The Passion of Joan of Arc in Copenhagen on April 21, 1928 was the one and only time the complete, original version was shown. The governments of France and England, offended by Joan’s anti-Church and anti-Britain overtones, demanded that Dreyer make drastic cuts before it could be shown in their countries. And then, a few months later, a fire in a laboratory in Berlin destroyed the original, uncut negative. Undaunted, Dreyer realized he had enough alternate takes in the original raw footage to reconstruct the movie, shot for shot (though Dreyer always maintained that he could tell the difference between the two versions). More travesties followed. In 1933, an American producer recut that second print, shortening it by nearly 30 minutes and adding a needless narration by a popular radio announcer (included, in part, on the Criterion disc). Another version appeared in 1951—this time, the producers had superimposed the title cards over Dreyer’s gloriously-composed cinematography, in addition to slicing off the left side of the film to make way for an added soundtrack.
But then something bordering on the miraculous happened…
In 1981, a janitor cleaning out the closet of a mental institution in Norway discovered a print which appeared to be a copy of Dreyer’s original version. How it ended up in the dusty back room of a mental hospital, undiscovered for 53 years, is one of those intriguing cinematic mysteries that may remain unsolved. Rumor has it that the director of the hospital had requested a copy of the profound new film and, for some reason, Dreyer sent it to him. Perhaps the doctor intended to show it to his patients one night as a sort of relaxation therapy. We’ll never know and it doesn’t matter.
What’s important is the fact that we have Joan, Falconetti and Dreyer in all their glory. The Norwegian print has been restored—more than 20,000 individual blemishes painstakingly removed—and is now available on VHS and (the preferred format) DVD from Criterion.
A word about the DVD: The entire package is a collector’s dream. There’s a commentary track by Casper Tyberg, a Dreyer scholar from the University of Copenhagen; a history of the film’s many versions, including comparative clips; an audio interview with Falconetti’s daughter (though her French is so thickly indecipherable, I wished there had been subtitles); and a superb musical score, “Voices of Light,” composed by Richard Einhorn and performed by the Anonymous 4 in Dolby Digital 2.0. In keeping with Dreyer’s original wishes, there’s even an option to watch the film without any sound whatsoever.
Either way, you’ll be stunned into silence.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 01/15/2002
