This film is amazing. Carl Theodore Dryer's
Le Passion of Jeanne d'Arc is a must-see for anyone with a true interest in film, theater or acting.
The Story In The Film
The story is taken directly from manuscripts of the famous trial, with very few additions. The real trial was comprised of 22 sessions of interrogation, over a span of 6 months. Dryer eschews the famous military deeds of our heroine, and the splashy accusations of sorcery, to focus on the trial itself, and the universal conflict between simple faith and politicized theocracy. He includes here only the moments from the trial that he considered "significant or typical", and condenses the story into one day.
The story begins with the opening of the trial. Renee Marie Falconetti, as Joan, is immediately captivating and will remain so until her last frame. This is an astonishing performance. Dryer tells the story almost entirely in close-up, and Falconetti shows us the soul of Joan with unvarnished (and un-made-up) openness. The result is one of the most moving performances I have ever seen.
Also of note in the cast is the founder of the Theater of Cruelty
movement, Antonin Artaud, who plays the sympathetic but ineffectual young monk. As a student of theater history, I can't tell you how excited I was to see such a person do his thing.
The action of the film involves Joan being interrogated by a roomful of powerful figures bent on forcing her into a confession of heresy. They use tactics of debate, trick questions, forgery, bribery, blackmail, torture... and are confounded at every turn by the simple faith of their captive. In the end, they put her to death for her insistance that she will save France through a great victory and that God will deliver her, and one wonders if they ever saw that in her martyrdom, they bring about both these events.
The Story Of The Film
Criterion presents us with the dual story of Joan and that of the film itself. Like Joan's simple, direct connection with her God, this film was met with outrage and censorship because it did not echo the commonly accepted conventions of the story, nor did it support the politically motivated claims on Joan by contemporary French government factions. Dryer foregoes the depictions of the peasant girl hearing voices, and the virgin knight in shining armor, and instead gives us a starkly honest hour and a half with the psyche and the faith of the martyr.
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Also an echo of Joan's treatment in the film, the film itself was censored, cut, denounced and burned. The original negative was lost in a fire shortly after the film opened. Dryer's insistance on multiple takes paid off, in that a second version was cut together from alternate takes, but this too was thought lost to fire. For 50 years, the film existed only in the form of vastly inferior mock-ups, until 1981, when a dusty copy was found in a closet in an insane asylum in Copenhagen. (Have you
ever?!) It was sent to the national film board, only to wait another three years before curiousity got the better of someone and it was discovered to be the previously "lost" second version. Now known as the Oslo version, and restored beautifully in 1985, we finally have this glimse of the height of silent film.
Dryer assembled a crew of trailblazers in the art of camera movement. The first sequence in the trial is one of maybe three establishing shots in the whole film, a 45 second dolly-shot that sweeps the entire courtroom. He uses extreme and conflicting camera angles to heighten the sense of disorientation that Joan feels. Her agitation is expressed in fast-cut changes in point of view. The film is comprised of over 1500 shots - double the average film of the 20's. The sets are simplistic, inspired by illuminated manuscripts of the day and the unbalanced proportions heighten the sense of things being askew. The near-constant close-up treatment of the actors echos the close-quarters combat that is the central conflict of the film. Crosses play a symbolic role, both the naturally-occurring ones and the manicured representations of them. Joan's nature is compared cinematically to flowers, birds and a crown that she weaves of straw. This is the level of detail that makes great film.
In my opinion, while this film has a great deal going for it in the acting and the compelling story, the thing that sets it above so many other films is the dedication of writer/director Carl Th. Dryer to truthfulness. The film cost 9 million francs. I fed that into a currency converter and without adjusting for inflation, that's nearly $2 million USD. He had a castle built with four towers, a moat and a drawbridge, city streets and a central square, occupying some 700 sq. meters and kept the cast on site for the six months in which he shot the film more or less in sequence. No makeup was allowed on any actor. Falconetti's hair was really shorn off for the final scenes (over her many protests), and a
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stand-in really was bled for the scene following the torture. The monks really did have their heads shaved, despite the fact that they wore skull-caps that would have hid their hair. This prompted one actor to label Dryer a "certafiable lunatic", but the result of it all is such a fascinating piece of film.
Contemporary reviewers hailed
The Passion of Joan of Arc as a masterpiece. I agree. They also regarded it as an "art film", and there I disagree: I think the universality of Dryer's subject and the fame of the story make it very accessable to a broad range of people. Catch it, if you can!
