62 The Passion of Joan of Arc

[DeprongMori]

Re: the CriterionForum review of The Passion of Joan of Arc

Certainly you mean Danish intertitles, and not Dutch intertitles.

[cdnchris]

Whoops. Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, May 14th.

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[Mr Sausage]

Our discussion is the winner of the Biopics List project. Thanks as always to domino for running the project.

[dda1996a]

I'll start with a question, what's your favorite soundtrack to this? (or like me you watched it silently).
This might be the only silent film that works so brilliantly without the need for any accompanying music

[All the Best People]

I actually watched it without any soundtrack whatsoever. And ... it kinda worked. The rhythm and varying size and disposition of the images creates its own music, and the final sequence is just so absolutely stunning that sound would seem almost superfluous.

Dreyer was in a wonderfully intentionally "disjointful" period in terms of decoupage in this era; the Bordwell book on him really illustrates his techniques well for this film.

[tenia]

I've mostly watched it silent too, and it works very well. The few times I've seen it with music, I've felt the partition wasn't perfectly adequate, and it actually disturbed my viewing of the movie.

[MichaelB]

20fps silent. Like Tenia, I now find a soundtrack actively distracting.

[Sloper]

This might seem like a silly question, but I actually think it's an important one: is Joan right to stick to her guns and let herself be burnt? (I mean on the basis of this film, not with reference to the historical figure.)

In Michael, you could think (as I do, on the whole) that Claude Zoret's 'transcendent' love is misguided and dysfunctional; and you might (though I don't) find the title character in Gertrud to be terminally lost in a silly quest for fulfilment that ultimately just causes pain to herself and everyone close to her. Even Ordet allows for the cynicism of its viewers - I'd even say that our presumed cynicism ends up being crucial to that film's effectiveness. You can always have ambiguous feelings about Dreyer's characters.

So what do we think about this incarnation of Joan? Is she a wise, holy saint? Is she mentally ill? Is she a teenager, high on her own drama and self-importance?

Watching it again I was particularly struck by the sense of her physical exhaustion: she staggers, she's shouted at, spat on, subjected to confusing theological mind-games, threatened with torture, drained of blood...and the palpable effect this has on her is recorded in merciless detail by Dreyer's extreme close-ups. Then she recants...then she sees something (what, exactly?) when her straw crown is swept up, and she recants her recantation...and, bowed and weeping with fatigue, she is tied to the stake. She even (rather sleepily) helps them tie her up when the rope falls.

There's something really poignant in the way that her friends and enemies keep taking her and her statements about herself so seriously, when it seemed to me, on this viewing, that all she really needed was a few weeks of bed-rest, a good meal or two, and some intensive therapy. Whereas many of Dreyer's films seem to portray transcendent aspirations triumphing in spite of the forces that try to drag them down, I wonder if this film also shows something very human and down-to-earth - an individual who is too close to us, for too long, for us to be able to idealise her - being 'dragged up' and invested with a spiritual importance (blasphemer, heretic, witch, possessed by Satan) she does not possess, and then destroyed for that. Viewed from that angle it has a lot in common with Day of Wrath.

Then again Joan's persecutors, like those of Herlofs Marte and Anne, are motivated more by political and personal motives than by spiritual ones, and you might say that they're just pretending to believe in this 'possession' stuff because it's a convenient pretext - so this is still, on one level, a story of an 'earthly' crowd versus a 'transcendent' individual. But I like that it works on another level as well.

[knives]

The film itself occupies her mind so much that to determine Dreyer's point of view seems borderline impossible and almost besides the point to me. She certainly thinks it is the right thing and the film mutates the reality to fit that.

[djproject]

When viewing it in 24fps, I use Einhorn (though I'm intrigued with Gregory/Utley as it was kind of one-time post-rock supergroup as it also includes Jonsi from Sigur Ros). When viewing it in 20fps, I view it silently.

What always sticks out to me with the film is where it falls in cinema history and what it has done for the form. I think this film is just as important as the Lumiere brothers' first films or Georges Melies's Voyage to the Moon or Porter's The Great Train Robbery or Eisenstein's (& Company) films and even more important than either The Birth of a Nation. For the first time, a film does more than just give a slice of life (Lumiere) or provide fantastic/escapist spectacle (Melies) or tells a story visually (Porter) or provides visual rhetoric (Eisenstein). Now, a film can provide a means of spiritual transcendence, spiritual reflection or apotheosis much in the same way that music and painting have done before it. It is now possible to have directors like Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu [yes, I've read Paul Schrader] or films like Baraka/Samsara or Wings of Desire or The Tree of Life.

[dda1996a]

I think it stands to this film's mighty powers that I watched it only once, about four years ago, yet I still have so many images from this film burned in my head. Also I am astounded every time by this film's powers whenever someone else decided to include it in their film (which excepting Vivre Sa Vie, usually ends up to the detriment of the film itself [a la Godard Mon Amour]).

[FrauBlucher]

I watched this with the Gregory/Utley score this evening. It didn't do it for me. It's too modern for my taste for the film. I do like the Voices of Light score. My next viewing I'll give Mie Yanashita a shot, plus I do like the 20fps better as well