The Passion of Joan of Arc (Société Generale de Film, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (February 12) film on the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation was one of those legendary masterpieces I’d heard about bor many years but had never actually seen. It was Danish director Carl Théodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, produced by the Société Generale de Film in Paris and widely acclaimed as one of the greatest films of all time. Dreyer took his script from the actual surviving transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial for heresy, which ultimately led to her being burned at the stake, and according to some reports he originally wanted to make the film with sound, but his producers didn’t have the money for sound equipment. So he shot a film that’s basically pictures of people talking as a silent, and energized it with off-kilter camera angles and an almost exclusive use of close-ups. To play Joan he recruited an actress of such uncertain ancestry it’s not definitively known where she was born or what his first name was. Her last name was Falconetti, but Dreyer was such an exacting director she never made another film and reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown after the shoot, though she continued to act on stage as part of the Comédie Française ultil fleeing France for South America, where she died in 1946. Her first name is usually given as Maria but Dreyer billed her as Renée, and according to imdb.com she was born in Pantin, France, but many film histories list her place of birth as the Franco-Italian island of Corsica (also Napoleon’s birthplace). Falconetti had made two minor films in 1917 but this was only her third credit, her first starring role, and she never made another film.

She was 36 when she made The Passion of Joan of Arc – almost twice the age of Joan of Arc when she was executed – and her haunting close-ups have become some of the most iconic images in all film history. Acting with almost total, complete impassivity, Falconetti presents herself as a woman who has already abandoned this world and is preparing herself for the next. One “gets” how her persecutors and torturers were maddened by her complete refusal to acknowledge any emotion other than an overall sense of pain and loss. At one point she tells the court at her show trial that the “total victory” she hopes for and expects will come with her death, as indeed it does. Throughout the film it’s quite obvious that Dreyer is paralleling the trial of Joan of Arc with the trial of Jesus Christ – even the film’s title makes that point. Throughout the film Dreyer and his co-writer, Joseph Delteil, make the Joan = Jesus parallel quite strikingly, especially when Joan insists that she’s a “good Christian” (just as Jesus apparently insisted he was a “good Jew” and had not set out to start a new religion, but just to reform the one into which he was born). At several points in the film Joan is asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer – and she refuses, thereby reinforcing her inquisitors’ belief that she’s really possessed by Satan, since one theory behind witchcraft trials was that a person who had sold their soul to Satan could not recite the Lord’s Prayer or any other part of Scripture.

Though Dreyer commissioned elaborate sets to reproduced medieval France and thus pushed the limits of the Société Generale de Film’s budget, he framed the film so much in close-ups very few parts of the sets are actually seen. The few that are seen are pretty obviously relatively crude plywood constructions, yet another example of Dreyer’s ability to male lemonade out of lemons. Not only did he use stylized camera angles to liven up a silent film that’s basically images of people talking, his intense use of close-ups negates the cheapness and obvious phoniness of the sets. One of the most impressive sequences is the bizarre mechanical ballet showing the instruments of torture in operation, a series of gears, levers and saw teeth that certainly look intimidating enough. It was common practice for people conducting trials of this type merely to show the accused the instruments of torture, hoping that this would intimidate them into confessing without the people running the proceedings actually having to torture them. There’s an ironic line to that effect in Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, in which the Pope’s inquisitors decide to show Galileo the instruments of torture because “Mr. Galilei is well versed in instruments.” I’d seen these clips in documentaries about Dreyer and wondered why a film set in the 15th century would be using images of machines that looked like they were from the 19th or 20th centuries. Dreyer would return to these sorts of images in his very next film, Vampyr, in which one of the vampires is buried alive by being trapped in a mill and buried under the grain the mill is milling.

My husband Charles watched The Passion of Joan of Arc with me and was utterly transfixed (as was I), and 15 years later Dreyer, living in his native Denmark under Nazi occupation, returned to the theme in his film Day of Wrath (which elsewhere I’ve described as the film Ingmar Bergman spent his whole career essentially remaking), also about an innocent young teenage girl accused of witchcraft. One aspect that struck me about The Passion of Joan of Arc is the timelessness of intolerance; when Joan’s inquisitors fault her for, among other things, wearing men’s clothes, they sound very much like modern-day Republicans denouncing Transgender people. Though the one image I’ve seen of Joan of Arc that is (or at least is purported to be) from her own time shows her with long curly brown hair, Falconetti’s hair is dark but in a decidedly “mannish” cut that makes her look like a modern-day butch Lesbian. (More recently the standard hairdo for actresses playing Joan of Arc has been a short blonde bob.) When they shave her head to prepare her to be burned at the stake, there’s not that much hair left for them to cut off her. The cast of The Passion of Joan of Arc includes at least one other legendary “name” besties Falconetti: Antonin Artaud,founder of the so-called “Theatre of Cruelty.” He plays Jean Messier, the closest thing Joan has to a defense attorney in her preposterous excuse for a “trial,” and Artaud acted in at least one other great French silent: Abel Gance’s Napoleon, in which he played Jean-Paul Marat. (In 197t a semi-documentary, semi-dramatized film about Artaud’s life was made with Mick Jagger, of all people, playing him.)

The Passion of Joan of Arc was shown to great acclaim in Paris in 1928, after Dreyer had spent a year and a half making it, but within a few months the film’s original negative was destroyed in a laboratory fire. Then Dreyer pieced together a reconstructed version from his outtakes – he had shot so many takes of each scene he had plenty of material to work with – only that version was also destroyed in a laboratory fire and the film was presumed lost until 1951, when a print of Dreyer’s reconstruction turned up in France. In 1978 a nearly complete print of Dreyer’s original cut was discovered in a janitor’s closet in a mental hospital in Norway, and that’s the version in circulation today. The Norwegian government donated the film to Dreyer’s archive in Denmark, its Norwegian intertitles were translated into French (which probably wasn’t a big deal since the reconstructed version with French titles already existed) and the film was digitized by the Danish Film Archive and sent around the world.

Dreyer also wanted the film shown in utter silence – contrary to the usual practice of virtually all silent-film screenings of having live musical accompaniment. Dreyer hated the music the releasing company selected for the Paris premiere and never sanctioned a score. The version of The Passion of Joan of Arc shown on TCM and available on DVD from The Criterion Collection contains an original score called Voices of Light written by modern composer Richard Einhorn, who had been planning a major work on a religious theme when a friend who worked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art suggested Joan of Arc as a subject and showed Einhorn a still from Dreyer’s film. Einhorn asked to see the movie, and once he did he decided to write a dual-purpose score that could be used as accompaniment for Dreyer’s film as well as performed on its own. Like Dreyer, Einhorn used the transcripts from the real Joan of Arc;’s trial as part of his text. I found the score awfully busy and rather distracting in its use of voices (Einhorn wrote for a small orchestra plus chorus and vocal soloists);

I think voices should generally be avoided in silent-film scores unless the film is actually about vocal music (like The Phantom of the Opera, where it would seem appropriate to have a modern soprano dub in the arias of Marguerite from Gounod’s Faust when Mary Philbin is shown “singing” tem on screen). But at least Einhorn’s music has the right mood for the piece – somber and reverential but with an “edge” to it that keeps it from descending into the treacle Hollywood usually slaps onto religious films – and though it does not add much to Dreyer’s movie at least it doesn’t detract from it, either. Perhaps if Lili Boulanger – an incredibly talented French composer who was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome,who composed extensively on religious subjects, and who, like Joan herself, died way too young (she was always sickly and succumbed to the 1918-1919 flu pandemic) – had been around, she could have come up with a score to match the incredible creativity of Dreyer’s film.