Is Dreyer’s Silent Joan the Most Eloquent? : Carl Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)
Film Analysis in 10 Slides
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A Silent Classic
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc was voted as the 9th greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound’s 2012 critics’ poll and 37th in the directors’ poll.
Synopsis
Joan of Arc was a peasant girl in 15th century France who rose to become a national heroine. She believed that she was on a mission to fight against the English to free the French territory occupied by it and bring it under the rule of King Charles. After her capture, she is charged in the pro-British Church court for heresy for her belief in heavenly visions. She is accused as a daughter of Devil and sent for torture.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is not a biopic covering Joan’s life story. It starts with her trial and as the title goes it depicts the agony she undergoes (during the period of her trial) and finally her death by being burnt at the stake.
Structure
The entire film has been structured as a dialogue between Joan on one side and her interrogators and judges on the other side. Being a silent film, it communicates through the facial expressions of the characters. Hence it has been called a “documentary of faces showing nothing but big close-ups of heads” by the Hungarian film critic, and theorist, Béla Baláz. That was the time of French avant-garde movement and German expressionism so the heads are shown in odd angles and unusual compositions. Yet another structuring element is the actual dialogue recorded during the trial in the intertitles that contrast with the other worldliness of Joan and the expressionism of the film.
Renée Jeanne Falconetti
One of the reasons The Passion of Joan of Arc pips other films on Joan is in casting of the character of Joan. At 36, Renée Jeanne Falconetti was much older to play the 19-year-old Joan but Falconetti’s eyes conveyed the depth of agony in Joan as well as her strong inner world that surmounted it. She also could bring the rustic look of Joan to screen. On Falconetti’s acting in the film, film critic Pauline Kael wrote “It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film.” In the end when she is burnt at the stake it is utterly convincing and deeply moving.
Cinematography
The film deliberately avoids establishing shots denying the exterior view of the locations. It is full of medium shots and closeups which create a claustrophobic space surrounding Joan. There are no master shots to give a sense of coherent space. The relative position of characters within the space is also withheld by consciously avoiding eyeline matching. Most of the shots are separate without having continuity of action from one shot to another. This accentuates the feeling of Joan’s world being separate from the ordinary world of the interrogators. White walls make the shallow background in many of the shots resulting in lack of perspective which further confines the space. David Bordwell has explained that despite the fragmentation of the space, the principle of “dialogue seeks to override the film’s visual disparities by the force of a general intelligibility.”
Art Direction
It seems that the structures in the film — the court, the chapel, the houses and the courtyard — were all constructed in one huge set at an enormous cost. Roger Ebert has written about Dreyer’s model for the film’s set displayed in Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen which was “built according to a weird geometry that put windows and doors out of plumb with one another and created discordant visual harmonies… It is helpful to see the model in Copenhagen, because you will never see the whole set in the movie.”
Bresson’s The Trial of Joan Of Arc
The Trial of Joan of Arc by Robert Bresson, one of the all-time great filmmakers, is in his typical minimalist style. Unlike Dreyer’s expressionistic approach, the Bresson film is stripped to the bone, devoid of emotion. Bresson was critical of actors’ “grotesque buffooneries” in The Passion of Joan of Arc and “Falconetti’s way of casting her eyes to heaven.”
Bresson goes to the other extreme of making his film unexpressive. According to Susan Sontag, an admirer of Bresson, The Trial of Joan of Arc doesn’t work due to the “failure of communicated intensity on the part of” Florence Delay who played Joan. In his book “Notes on Cinematography”, Bresson has written that poetry “penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).” The Trial of Joan of Arc though is full of relentless dialogue with little room for ellipses. The ending takes the film to another level.
Rivette’s Joan the Maid 1 & 2
Jacques Rivette’s Joan the Maid in two parts is a complement of Dreyer’s and Bresson’s films in that it chronicles Joan’s life, doing away with her trial. Sandrine Bonnaire fits the role of the warrior-saint without the saintly halo. The film humanizes Joan and shows her like a normal person in flesh and blood although she does talk about her voices. As a historical, it covers the battles she fought for a rather reluctant King Charles, her capture and her martyrdom.
The film is punctuated by characters narrating the events briefly breaking the fourth wall and looking straight at the camera. This has the effect of dedramatizing the film by emphasizing its historical aspect. Joan is not among the narrators perhaps because her heavenly visions are problematic to the film’s scheme. With the result the film functions at a mundane level without a counterpoint.
Closing Thoughts
Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) looks at Joan with ambiguity and probes into the aspect of her voices. But it takes liberties with history. Milla Jovovich’s Joan, called “blood-thirsty” by the King, is far from the image of a national heroine.
Going back to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, the film has recurring images associated with Christ such as the crosses, the “crown” etc. It has been written that they point to the underlying comparison of her passion as in the film’s title to the Passion of Christ. This elevates Joan to the level of a Christ figure, which may run counter to the historical Joan. Such a symbolic depiction of her gives the film its power as well as its transcendence — perhaps reason why this silent film continues to rank high among critics and filmmakers.
