A Restored ‘Passion of Joan of Arc’ Still a Transcendent Masterpiece
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Version 0 of 1. “Silent film was not ripe for replacement,” the German film critic Rudolf Arnheim wrote in 1930, a year after talking pictures came to dominate the market. “It had not lost its fruitfulness, but only its profitability.” The innovative masterpieces produced during the last days of silent cinema validate the truth of Arnheim’s thesis: F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (1927), Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” (1929) and, especially, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928), which opens on Friday for a 12-day run at Film Forum in a new digital restoration. Canonized in 1920, France’s national heroine Joan of Arc — the teenage peasant who led a French resistance against the English during the late stages of the Hundred Years’ War — was undergoing something of a revival when a new studio, the Société Générale des Films, approached Dreyer, a Danish director respected for his individuality and seriousness, to make a film about Joan. The company had recently backed Abel Gance’s lavish pageant “Napoleon.” Dreyer’s film was also expensive, but — as it is nearly a chamber work — its sense of spectacle was almost antithetical. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is based on the transcript of Joan’s trial for heresy and ends with her being burned at the stake. The first two-thirds are shot in a never clearly established interior. Much of it consists of close-ups as Joan (the stage actress Maria Falconetti, then in her mid-30s) confronts the sneering French clerics who are her accusers. The most sympathetic of these is played by Antonin Artaud, who later developed the “theater of cruelty.” The movie is Joan’s trial in both senses of the word. The Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs described the film’s inquisition scene as a duel in which “it is looks that are crossed, not swords.” The intensity of Falconetti’s performance is all but unparalleled. (The only equivalent in silent cinema that comes to mind are Lillian Gish’s solo scenes in Victor Sjostrom’s 1928 melodrama “The Wind.”) Cast wildly against type (Falconetti had been known for light romantic roles), she embodies a spiritual anguish worthy of a medieval Pietà. Eyes widened and miraculously capable of dropping a single tear, her Joan is dazed yet resolute. When the clerics accuse her of being sent by the Devil, she accuses them of the same. “This woman’s arrogance is outrageous,” one title reads. Although “Joan” has the sense of a slow crucifixion, it is often frenzied. Dreyer’s camera is frequently in motion, at times hysterically so. “Joan” is not just a movie shot largely in close-up, but one without establishing shots. Dreyer accentuates this disorientation through maneuvers that have no technical name — turning the camera upside down, having it pirouette to follow an action as it is reflected in a puddle of water, or moving the camera forward to recoil quickly. The editing is no less kinetic. Given this percussive montage, Dreyer was taken by some contemporary critics as an admirer of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. If anything, he was a rival. Dreyer’s editing is not only strongly rhythmic, but also daringly disjunctive in its use of jump-cuts and deliberate mismatches. Space, already deranged by off-balanced compositions and unusual angles, is thoroughly pulverized. The ending, as the crowd riots and is beaten by English soldiers while Joan burns, could almost be Dreyer’s answer to the “Odessa Steps” sequence from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.” The miracle of “Joan” is that it manages to be spiritual and visceral. It was conceived as a sort of documentary. Makeup was forbidden. The sets were constructed as actual rooms (although they were never fully shown), and the movie was shot in chronological order. This “realized mysticism,” as Dreyer termed it in a 1929 essay, is reinforced by the score, Richard Einhorn’s 1995 oratorio “Voices of Light.” The music, however bombastic, never overwhelms or distracts from the images — as hypnotic and fragmented as they are — and may actually render them stronger. The world seems unstable, even when the camera is static. Not time but space is out of joint. “Joan” pleased neither French audiences nor clerical authorities and was recut to mollify the Archbishop of Paris. (In a story as strange as the film, an original print was discovered in 1981 at a Norwegian mental institution.) Film aesthetes, however, were generally knocked out. The poet H. D. began her review in the British magazine Close Up with the declaration that Dreyer’s “Joan” was “a film that has caused me more unrest, more spiritual forebodings, more intellectual racking, more emotional torment than any I have yet seen.” Writing in the National Board of Review Magazine, the critic Harry Alan Potamkin called “Joan” religious but not sanctimonious, ending his review by stating: “It is a transcendent film.” Even the anticlerical enfant terrible Luis Buñuel was impressed, praising “Joan” as “the freshest, most interesting film in the current motion picture season.” (He could not, however, resist tweaking Falconetti whom he compared to a willful child: “Not letting her have dessert to punish her childish integrity, her transparent stubbornness — that we could see; but why burn her?”) In The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall began his long, extremely favorable review mainly devoted to Falconetti’s performance, by stating, “France can well be proud.” It took some 500 years for the Roman Catholic Church to declare Joan a saint. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” was canonized more or less instantly. If novels like “Madame Bovary” or “Crime and Punishment” are must-reads, then “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is a cinematic must-see. |