Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.
Roger Ebert's series of articles on what he considers great films is a helpful introduction. His essay notes that the set was built as a complex of houses, prison cells and courtrooms, all within four concrete walls (solid enough and thick enough to support men and equipment) linked by towers; also mentions how doors and windows are slightly out of plumb with each other and full of strange geometric harmonies, possibly following trends in German Expressionist production design and French avant-garde art.
Ebert’s article is remarkable as much for its detail (bet he actually went to the Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen to look at the scale model of the set) as for his failure to ask the crucial question: why did Dreyer build the thing? Going through the effort implies Dreyer planned to make use of it; he probably envisioned a series of deep-focus shots, with the characters posed in different positions throughout the sets a la Alan Resnais, or complex tracking shots that snake through the rooms a la Max Ophuls or Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (and in fact you see one such shot at the film’s beginning-- the camera traveling through what if I remember right was the prison guards' barracks, with soldiers eating, talking, lounging about). You assume Dreyer would use one or the other style, anything except what he actually did-- huge closeups that cut from one face to another like shuffled Tarot cards, dealing out Jeanne’s destiny in a series of images.
I think Ebert himself might have suggested the answer to his own unasked question when he mentions how Dreyer took one look at the script written for the film and threw it away, instead relying on actual trial transcripts. Was it possible Dreyer took one look at the extravagant set and turned his back on it as well? Was it possible that Dreyer threw caution (and all the planning involved) to the winds and relied instead on inspiration and instinct?
Ebert’s article is full of facts but discussing the film itself can only pay the usual lip service-- at one point quoting Pauline Kael (“It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film”) to describe Falconetti as Jeanne. He doesn’t even begin to do justice to the film’s intense tactility, the unblinking camera bearing down on the actors' faces, revealing every pore, wrinkle, nose hair, mole; every twitch of cheek, every faint smile, every tear squeezed out the corner of an eye. Jeanne’s smooth (if somewhat speckled) complexion makes marked contrast with the coarse vellum of the inquisitors’; Dreyer complements their faces with voluminous robes for the inquisitors, severely plain shirts for Jeanne. Even the torture-chamber scene gives one a prickly crawly sensation-- the thousands of sharpened spikes spinning over the skin, nibbling it away. Dreyer makes everything seem up close and personal, almost three-dimensional, as if the film were meant to be felt as much as seen. Then there’s the ambiguity: the film is a drama about a saint in the process of being martyred, same time it’s an investigation conducted by weary bureaucrats trying to make sense of a dangerous schizophrenic. You might argue the way Dreyer casts his characters gives the game away (inquisitors + big noses and bad complexion = evil; Jeanne + lovely liquid eyes = good); I say: not necessarily. The inquisitors’ twisted faces reveal vulnerability and confusion as much as cruelty; Jeanne’s face suggests spiritual ecstasy and complete insanity both. Dreyer is too much of an artist not to plant doubt about the integrity of both judged and judges, lend both sides a measure of sympathy (not having seen a subtitled version, I wouldn’t know if the dialogue is equally ambivalent).
Then there’s the sexuality-- why else call it “The Passion of Joan?” Watching the film alone in the darkened Alliance projection room was an unsettlingly familiar experience, as if I'd done this before: in a ‘70s-style porn theater, on a diet of triple-X features. Possibly porn filmmakers of the ‘70s took their cue from Dreyer-- they share his taste for simple sets and costumes, his preference for exciting imagery over boring dialogue. They even share something of his style, in the repeated giant closeups of human anatomy put up on the big screen, held there long enough for the raincoat crowd to achieve orgasm.
Dreyer for his part seems aware of the connection between spirituality and sexuality. The faces he presents-- the inquisitors’ leers, Jeanne’s rapture (as if she was experiencing multiple climaxes)-- could be choice excerpts from some triple-X compilation featuring Marilyn Chambers and a pack of hooded John Holmes wearing outsized genitals on their faces. It’s the focus, the total immersion on a single subject, the willingness to discard all else (a completed script, an expensive set), to zero in on what matters most that links these two kinds of filmmakers; the difference is, the pornographer zeroes in on the heroine’s genitals, Dreyer on her face.
Falconetti has an oversized nose with an eggplant-shaped head (Dreyer found her in a little boulevard theater, performing light comedy). She’s hardly a beauty in the league of, say, Milla Jovovich, star of Luc Besson’s ruinously extravagant Hollywood version The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc. Jovovich, a fashion model and Besson’s ex-wife, feels no scruples about taking her clothes off in front of the camera but when we actually glimpse her nakedness it has no impact; it’s yet one more supermodel sans clothes. Doesn’t help that Jovovich’s voice is so thin-- hardly one to inspire the French Army-- and that she looks constantly terrified, as if she knew she was trapped in the center of a multimillion-dollar piece of ordure with no quick way out.
Falconetti plays a more disturbing game with her audience. She removes not fabric but objective distance, makes us identify with her luminously transparent, infinitely more accessible Jeanne. Dreyer reportedly forced the actress to kneel on stone (again the similarity to porn, which is all about painful positions), ordered her to wipe all expression from her face, shot her over and over again in endless takes, then used what little footage he liked. Either Dreyer got what he was after from the considerable amount of film shot or Falconetti found herself totally identifying with the sorely tried martyr; the net effect was a complete shedding of all inhibition and self-awareness in the actress. Quite an achievement: when Falconetti’s Jeanne expresses an emotion you feel the surge from her face straight into you, as if her nerves were hardwired into yours. It’s like we live inside Jeanne’s skin-- actual sex would have been redundant.
The same time the film allows us to be intimate with her it also allows us to become complicit partners in her intellectual and emotional ravaging. Dreyer’s imagery couldn’t be more explicit: a dozen or so wizened old priests surrounding a girl of nineteen. They go at it for what seems like hours, taking turns or attacking all at once. Jeanne responds as any victim of assault would, with pain terror shock (and, perversely, not a little pleasure). Somehow she survives; with the cruelly enduring strength of the simple faithful, she survives to defy them all and be burned at the stake.
The word ‘mindfuck’ comes to mind for what they do to her, implying as it does something both nonphysical and degrading. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is arguably one of the earliest examples of a mindfuck ever, and I think part of the film’s power is that it’s also an arousing sight-- that something in me responds to Jeanne’s vulnerability, to the inquisitors’ unholy power, the most spiritual and most profoundly erotic film I've ever seen.
Published in Menzone 11.2.01, republished in Cambridge Book Review, Winter 2000-2001
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