The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Writers: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph Delteil
Cast: Renee Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, Maria Falconetti, Michael Simon, Antonin Artaud
Release Date – 19th Nov 2012
Written, directed and edited by the legendary Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, his black and white 1928 picture The Passion of Joan of Arc is not only one of the great movies of the silent era, it was recently voted one of the Top 10 Greatest Films of All-Time in the highly influential 2012 Sight & Sound magazine critics poll. It’s about to be reissued & here’s Ian Johnston’s review of this masterpiece.
Dreyer’s classic, available in three formats — Blu-ray, DVD, and Ltd Edition Dual Format (DVD & Blu-ray) SteelBook editions – is released in an exclusive, stunning new restoration in the UK on 19 November 2012 by Eureka! in their Masters of Cinema series & it deserves this critical exaltation and more. One of the most poignant cinematic experiences of any epoch, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is a unique phenomenon in the history motion pictures, an inscrutable and overpoweringly stirring work that blends the worlds of the viewer and that of Saint Joan into one shared incidence of hushed filmic hallucination.
Amazingly featuring the momentous Surrealist poet, actor and playwright Antonin Artaud, one of the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory (author of the Theater of Cruelty and The Theater and Its Double), as the sympathetic monk Massieu, Dreyer’s film charts the final days of Joan of Arc (Renée Maria Falconetti), captured by the Burgundian allies of her English enemies, as she undergoes the degradation that accompanies her trial for charges of heresy and witchcraft by Bishop Pierre Cauchon (Eugene Silvain). Fearing for her life, she withdraws claims to have seen visions of St Michael, only to renounce her recantation. Dreyer inexorably follows Joan through her imprisonment and execution at the stake on 30 May 1431, instructing his cinematographer Rudolph Maté to shoot the cast with high-contrast lighting in tight close-up to emphasize the expressions that convey the inexorable concentration of Joan’s cross-examination. Her unpleasant ecclesiastic inquisitors appear without make-up and their hideous faces seem to reflect their twisted inner souls, while Falconetti, filmed in softer grey, appears somber and inspired with internal assurance.
“It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film”. wrote Pauline Kael of Falconetti’s incredible, single film acting role. Falconetti was an actress in Paris who Dreyer saw on the stage of a small boulevard theater. The play was a little comedy, but Dreyer was transfixed: “There was a soul behind that facade.” During shooting The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer forced Falconetti to kneel excruciatingly on the stone floor set and then erase all expression from her face. The director wanted those watching the film to interpret concealed inner pain, which definitely registers in the constant close up shots of Falconetti / Joan. Dreyer filmed the same sequences repeatedly, hopeful that during editing he could discover precisely the correct hint in her facial expressions and wide eyes all her agony and suffering. All Dreyer’s extremely subtle use of pans, tilts, slanted angles, cross-cutting, spatially disorientating Expressionist style set design and visual montage are deployed with just one aim – just to place the audience within the centre Joan’s of tribulations without them comprehending his slight of hand.
The searing emotional power of Dreyer’s masterwork has continued to inspire cutting edge artists through the decades. In his 1962 picture Vivre Sa Vie, amid an adventurous mix of quotations, Jean-Luc Godard cites Dreyer’s close-ups of the martyrdom of Falconetti in shots taken from The Passion of Joan of Arc. Nana, played by his then wife Anna Karina, sees Dreyer’s film in a Left Bank theatre and cries in apparent sympathy for Joan / Falconetti. Already in Godard’s 1959 movie A bout de souffle Jean Seberg had been aligned with the saint of Dreyer’s film. Also in 1962, Robert Bresson made his own The Trial of Joan of Arc, using many of the acting techniques that Dreyer had deployed in 1928. On 27th August 1995 Nick Cave and the Dirty Three played a live soundtrack to the film at the National Film Theatre in London, while during 1999 Cat Power played her score of the film during many screening across America.
This exclusively restored high-definition Eureka! master is presented in the film’s original aspect ratio, in 1080p on the Blu-ray, in both 20fps and 24fps playback speeds. There are optional audio tracks: a piano score performed by Japanese silent film composer Mie Yanashita (for the 20fps option), and a radical accompaniment by esteemed American avant-garde musician Loren Connors (for the 24fps option). Newly translated optional English subtitles for Dreyer’s original Danish intertitles and the complete “Lo Duca” version of the film – the version (featuring an alternate edit and soundtrack) that circulated in France and around the world for decades before the rediscovery of Dreyer’s “director’s cut.” Together with an extended illustrated booklet featuring the words of Dreyer and rare archival imagery, this is the definitive home viewing edition of this celluloid masterpiece.
If you have never seen Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc you are definitely in for a treat. As the masterful French director Jean Cocteau once observed The Passion of Joan of Arc resembles a “historical document from an era in which cinema didn’t exist.” If ever ‘pure cinema’ ever existed, this is it.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is released on 19th November 2012. The whole film can be watched in full on Vimeo here but of course we recommend you watch it in it’s full glory by purchasing it in one of the formats listed above.
All words by Ian Johnston. More Louder Than War articles by Ian can be read here.
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