I Would Like to See It: The Passion of Joan of Arc

Stage performer Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance as the titular maid in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is the stuff of cinematic legend. Her wild stare and tremulous body language, her naive and yet deeply dignified devotion; she never took another major role in film, but her intense commitment to the part of Joan has echoed down through the medium’s history. “Will I be with you in Paradise tonight?” she asks the crucifix she cradles in her arms like a child’s stuffed animal as she sits on the piled faggots of her own pyre. Dreyer insisted that no actor in the film wear makeup, a decision which aids in rendering Joan’s distress so believable and immediate that its domination of every character’s mindset feels not trite but inevitable. Even her harshest and most arbitrary torturers are moved by her sincerity, her childish confusion, her inexperience with theology and debate. They blanch, tear up, stare in awe at this wondrous woman-child, and then with angrily redoubled zeal return to the work of destroying her.

And the faces! My God, every shot is so rich with wrinkles and warts, blemishes and bald spots, a sea of astonishingly unique and compelling actors whose fine control over their facial musculature permits the film to linger in its extreme close-ups without losing its momentum. Watch Maurice Schutz’s eyes water as his long, heavily-lined face first trembles, then stiffens. Stare in awe as Eugène Silvain manages to convey in a matter of heartbeats his character’s doubts, his genuine relief when it seems Joan will confess and spare herself the stake, his petty, sputtering cruelty when she defies or outthinks him. Dreyer shoots at angles intended to make his actors look as grotesquely human as possible — the hawkish profiles of old withered prelates, the tufted hair and wet, plump mouth of a stout bishop — but there is such bottomless beauty and horror in that same abject and unpretentious humanity. These men are not chiseled Hollywood brutes, not beasts of latex and spirit gum and matted hair. They are us.

The Berklee Silent Film Orchestra’s choral and orchestral score, composed in 2019, is singularly transporting, a tragic aural tide washing over the jutting stones of the film’s sets and actors, at once tremulous and towering, delicate and transcendent. It invokes the presence of the divine as powerfully as Falconetti’s wide-eyed, tearful stare, but with a constancy and breadth of perspective that never wavers. The mystery and terror of God tangled inextricably through the carnival atmosphere of Joan’s trial and execution, soaring through the smoke and chaos of the riot which follows her burning, thundering under the shocking gush of red when she, feverish, is bled, or when a fat babe in arms releases the nipple in its toothless mouth to stare uncomprehending at the flames. The divine lives in these moments, these little things which are the sum of life. Dreyer’s film is a feast which turns to ashes in your mouth.