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The Passion of Joan of Arc
(film, 1928)
For many contemporary viewers, silent films are an art form they cannot imagine actually enjoying. In the popular mind, silent films are a repository for overly dramatic gesturing, slapstick pratfalls, and jittery, poorly lit camerawork. While these characteristics might accurately describe some of what was produced in the early years of film, they are not true for the great artistic masterpieces of the era. The finest silent films are triumphs of visual creativity and storytelling, and are as relevant for the contemporary viewer as when they were first made. One such film is Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the first films to fully explore the possibilities of movies as a serious art form.
The Christian church has always shown a great interest in martyrs, and the early history of the faith is punctuated by the stories of those who gave their life for what they believed. By the Middle Ages a new kind of martyr began to emerge—one who was persecuted not by unbelievers but by church authorities in response to perceived theological heresies. Joan of Arc, burnt at the stake in 1431, was such a woman. The Passion of Joan of Arc, based on careful research of original court documents, chronicles the intense struggle between those Dreyer called “the blind theologians and schooled jurists” and this simple woman of deep faith. Throughout the film there are many parallels drawn between her own ordeal and that of Christ—she is mocked and jeered, a “crown” made of rope is placed upon her head, and her hair is sheared like a lamb prepared for the slaughter. When the judges finally force an admission of guilt out of her, it doesn’t take, as she recants her confession and willingly goes to her death. Her body, tied to the stake, is consumed by the flames of a roaring fire, but her spirit and soul rise with the smoke, finally set free.
The Passion of Joan of Arc movie poster, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-US]
One thing that sets this film apart from its contemporaries is the visual power of its design. Filmed on simple but evocative sets and consisting of carefully composed images, it is masterful in its creation of mood. Never before had a film so effectively exploited the emotional power of the extreme close-up. Dreyer pushed the camera deep into the personal space of his actors as he drew a contrast between the persecuted young woman and her angry, mocking persecutors. Because Dreyer did not allow the actors to wear makeup, we see every pore and imperfection in each face as the camera draws close enough to reveal the interior struggles of the characters, penetrating to the very depths of their souls.
We perceive the intense physical, psychological, and spiritual pain etched into Joan’s face as actress Renee Falconetti delivers one of the greatest performances in the history of film. Her large, round, unblinking eyes fill with tears and her lips tremble. Though the only words are those flashed on the screen on the title cards, we clearly understand what she is experiencing: fear, shame, indignation, and finally resignation. Contemporary accounts tell us that when Falconetti wept for the camera the eyes of the entire crew were filled with tears. Interestingly, this unforgettable feat of acting was both her first and last appearance in a film. But it was a performance that exhibited the possibilities of what film acting could be.
So inspiring and potent is this film that it was banned in occupied Europe during World War II. Nazi authorities feared the impact that this story of French heroism might have in inspiring the populace. Even today, The Passion of Joan of Arc is unequalled as a tale of heroic faith in the face of overwhelming odds.
Carl Theodore Dreyer was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1889 to an unwed mother who gave her child up to an orphanage, from which he was adopted at age two. He was raised by his adoptive parents in a Lutheran home. As a young man he was a journalist for a time, and then got a job with Nordisk, the most important Nordic film studio of its day. Initially he was a scriptwriter, but then he began to edit films and eventually got his opportunity to direct. One of his early films was Leaves from Satan’s Book (1919), the first of several films that dealt with religious and theological concerns. Although Dreyer spoke with great clarity about his style and philosophy of filmmaking, he said little of his personal convictions about faith. We are left to draw our conclusions from his films, which give evidence of a profound understanding of the nature of faith and belief, and which point to a spiritual world that intersects with and interpenetrates our own.
The Passion of Joan of Arc was his last film of the silent era. It was followed by the weird and nightmarish dreamscapes of Vampyr (1932), a supernatural thriller with an injection of spirituality. Then, as so often happened in his career, there was a long gap of time when he could not get funding to create another film, despite the fact that his earlier films were so widely esteemed. The wait was finally broken by Day of Wrath (1943), a powerful film about religious intolerance and persecution, a common theme in his movies.
In 1954, after another sizeable gap of time, he produced Ordet (The Word), an undisputed masterpiece and one of the most remarkable religious films ever made. Ordet is a portrait of the struggles of faith within a farm family and between two divergent sects of Christianity within their town. One of the family sons wants to marry a woman from another branch of Christendom, a sort of Romeo and Juliet scenario. Another son, Johannes, suffers from delusions that his family thinks have been caused by an excess of theological study. He has come to believe that he is an embodiment of Christ. It is unclear whether he is simply mad or some sort of holy fool—possibly he is both. Following the death of his brother’s wife after a miscarriage, Johannes summons the faith of his young niece to pray for her to be resurrected by the power of Christ. The scene where the wife awakens from death and sits up in her coffin is surely one of the most remarkable scenes in all of film, a resurrection filmed in a realistic and understated manner—and all the more powerful for its subtlety. Just as believable is the newfound embrace of faith by her once-skeptical husband, who holds her in his arms as the screen goes dark.
Dreyer once referred to his filmmaking as “realized mysticism.”1 Though some critics have tried to downplay the spiritual content of his films and focus instead on their intense psychological power, it is clear that Dreyer took his faith seriously and portrayed it with dignity and respect. “I would dedicate a hymn to the soul’s triumph over life,”2 he once wrote. It is this very triumph of life over death that fuels so many of his best films. He sought to use his careful observations of reality in the service of spiritual themes, attempting to make the supernatural moments in his films completely believable. Such moments play out without fanfare in his films, as do the moments of great emotional upheaval. In real life great dramas are acted out quietly, so the quiet intensity of his explorations of human passion, together with his openness to spiritual realities that exist alongside physical ones, are what make his work so enduringly powerful.
An indispensable key to creating this kind of realism came in making every element of the film convincing. Dreyer was obsessive about every detail, always wanting to get everything just right. One of his cameramen tells the story of a delay in filming an outdoor scene caused by several days of inclement weather. The day the rain finally stopped, a studio executive visited the set to see if production was on schedule, and enquired of the cameraman if the filming was going smoothly now that there was finally a sunny day. “No,” said the cameraman, “Dreyer won’t film the scene because the clouds are moving in the wrong direction.”
The end result of this emphasis on detail and realism is that the miraculous becomes believable in the context of his films. Dreyer was dead serious about making his audience take even the miraculous events seriously, hoping to make us question the tidy assumption that the only reality is the physical. In his films, the spiritual erupts in the quiet realism of the story, ever so gently but ever so intensely.
One of Dreyer’s great dreams was to make a film biography of Jesus, and he got as far as creating a finished script, but he never found the funding to make it a reality. He even indicated that the resurrection scene in Ordet was a kind of trial run—an attempt to see if he could make such a miracle believable, knowing the resurrection would be the centerpiece for filming the life of Christ. How unfortunate for all who are moved by the work of this meticulous visionary that Dreyer never had the opportunity to fulfill this dream. Who better to have told Jesus’s story in film than a director who had such a gift for making the spiritual visible?