The Favorites - The Passion of Joan of Arc (#8)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928/France/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer) appeared at #8 on my original list.

What it is • Joan of Arc lived from 1412 to 1431, dying when she was still a teenager; her legendary accomplishments - turning back a British invasion of France, following the voices she heard in her head - were achieved nearly six centuries ago. In over a hundred years of cinema, there have been dozens of adaptations of her life (Wikipedia counts forty - including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure!). Nine countries have participated (all Western except for Japan - which aired a French opera). Acclaimed directors, including Georges Méliès, Cecil B. DeMille, Victor Fleming, Roberto Rossellini, Otto Preminger, Robert Bresson, Paul Verhoeven, Werner Herzog, Jacques Rivette, and Luc Besson, have offered their interpretations. Geraldine Ferrar, Michèle Morgan, Jean Seberg, Hedy Lamarr, Julie Harris, Geneviève Bujold, Janet Suzman, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Leelee Sobieski have all played Joan - Ingrid Bergman even played her twice, once for her husband (joining a tradition stretching from Méliès' wife Jeanne d'Alcy,  to Besson's wife Milla Jovovich, though d'Alcy didn't marry Melies for another thirty years and Jovovich divorced Besson between the film's production and release). With such a storied history - and I haven't even mentioned the excellent La Marveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, which followed the film being reviewed by barely a year - you'd think there would be some difficulty in determining the Joan of Arc masterpiece. But there isn't. The Passion of Joan of Arc routinely appears near the very top of all-time great lists, Carl Theodor Dreyer is widely considered the greatest filmmaker to tackle the topic, and Falconetti is praised as the most superb Joan. That's an understatement, actually; many would rank her performance as the greatest in the entire history of cinema. The Passion of Joan of Arc, which focuses exclusively on the trial and execution of Joan, has a tumultuous history. It was controversial when it was shot - territorial French critics despised the idea of a Dane reproducing their saint - and it was frequently banned and censored. Multiple, corrupted versions existed for decades until the original cut was discovered in the early eighties in, of all places, a Norwegian mental institution. Rather differently from Dreyer's sound films, Passion (considered by many the apex of silent cinema) consists almost entirely of close-ups of actor's faces, a riveting, hypnotic symphony of actors' expressions exemplifying the art of intercutting reaction shots.

Why I like it •

The Passion of Joan of Arc

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Few people remember that The Passion of Joan of Arc ends with a rousing action sequence. It’s as good, in its own way, as anything Eisenstein ever did, yet with its own very unique character. Dreyer, unlike Eisenstein, is linking shots which create a fluid meaning yet, pregnant with a kind of integral power, could also stand alone – they are not dependent on their connections with one another for their sense of purpose. This is Dreyer’s approach throughout Passion, neither foregrounding montage nor mise en scene, or rather foregrounding both – the propulsive music of his editing and the graceful aura of each individual close-up.

Sometimes I feel that cutting between close-ups robs us of the power in character interaction, in which two different people share the same space. Not here: the intensity of the back-and-forth not only suits the subject matter, in which Joan is isolated (“alone with God” as she puts it) against her interrogators, it also carries a sharp aesthetic power, the power, perhaps, of individual realities, states of consciousness which share the same space but not the same experience (hence, in a visual medium which communicates the metaphysical by way of the physical, not even the same space).

At any rate, viewers tend to forget, or not talk about, the violent conclusion because what comes before is so overpowering, so fundamentally sound and right, that it puts even this riveting finale to shame. The Passion of Joan of Arc is much like Joan herself, at least as she’s represented in this film: so pure and sure of itself, so able to allow to its inner integrity to dictate its every choice and action, that it shines like a beacon from the screen, right back at the projector which cast it out, as if to challenge and discredit its genesis in mere material.

Jazz Age Visions 1926 - 1929 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 2

The second chapter of "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.

View "Chapter 2: Jazz Age Visions"
(2015 update - includes Vimeo embed after the jump)


Jazz Age Visions

Following the first flush of discovery, when the miracle of movement held everyone in thrall, great directors began pushing cinematic boundaries. The tempo picked up, the effects became more elaborate, the techniques sharpened and personalized. This adventurous spirit reached its height in the late twenties - the films here provide name after illustrious name in the auteur canon. It would be another forty years before filmmakers had such freedom again, yet most of these young men would continue working, albeit often under difficult circumstances. Here was where they got their start - in the last, heady days of the silent era, as the Jazz Age boomed towards its bust and visions spoke louder than words.

The Passion of The Passion of Joan of Arc

I have to tiptoe around discussing The Passion of Joan of Arc, because I'm planning a series on 150 of my favorite classics, and Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece will almost certainly be included in that series. What can I say now that I won't say then (a commitment to review all the films I've bought or received as Christmas or birthday gifts holds me to this task)? The metaphor of Plato's cave has occasionally been used to describe the cinema: movies are the shadows on the wall, depicting a simplified version of the reality which lies outside the cavern in the bright sunlight. But sometimes I wonder if this interpretation doesn't have it backwards: do the greatest films allow us to penetrate reality in a way that mundane everyday experience often does not? Does this shadowplay actually allow us to go forth into the sunlight and see more clearly; is it a kind of preparation for the initially bright and overbearing sunlight? In other words: can cinema put us closer into contact with the spiritual, the overwhelming force of the universe, that Ground of All Being, which some in the past and some today have labelled "God"? If so, Passion is one of those films, and Dreyer may be the greatest director of all time.

Well, I'll leave the rest of my ostentatious pontifications for a later occasion and step aside for the remainder of this post. I often have doubts about historical writing in the blogosphere - why rehash what you've already read elsewhere? (Sometimes, though, a blogger steps up the plate and knocks historical writing out of the park - see the Self-Styled Siren's recent musings on George Sanders for an outstanding example.) But the history of The Passion of Joan of Arc is so extraordinary that it bares repeating, and luckily the Criterion Collection includes a remarkable essay called "The Many Incarnations of Joan" which documents this history. It does not seem to exist on the Internet so I hereby present, in its online debut, the essay in its entirety (save a few minor modifications), following the jump.