La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

The stripping of Joan

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.

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc

The Fashion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever;  Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.

Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school about Joan but stopped short before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world;  Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek / Ordet

 
Two miracles

Warning: plot of both The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Ordet discussed in close detail)

Maybe the funniest joke in Preston Sturges' classic comedy--about Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton wearing one of the most salacious monikers in all of cinema) who after a night of drunken partying with a band of soldiers finds herself pregnant--was that it got made in the first place, in 1944, under the supposedly watchful eyes of the Hays Office (and in fact they were watching: when the picture was being developed the Office approved of only ten of the script's pages). 

Film critic James Agee managed to upstage (or top) the joke, though, with his appreciative quip: "the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep." 

I dearly love the film but do feel that both film and Agee's topper were topped in turn by the Office itself when it cautioned the filmmakers (sometime during script development) to depict the men as "normal, thoroughly fit American soldiers who have had an evening of clean fun."

The VVitch (Robert Eggers)

Super natural

Robert Eggers' debut feature The VVitch is suitably chaste and sensual--chaste in that it uses the absolute minimum in prosthetic (and digital) effects (thank god); sensual in that the whispery trees, the velvet night, the cracked bark of tree and coarse weave of cloth and unearthly aureole of moon have prominent place in the film's visual palette, to the point that the children's near-bloodless faces stand out in shocking contrast. You feel as if these young Puritans, their family freshly banished (for 'prideful conceit' apparently), are constantly mooning you with their pink milkfed cheeks; on the other hand the parents tend to blend into their surroundings--all dried timber and weathered stone, no pink or milk in them at all.