Renee Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Dreyer (1928)
Actors should at least know that the bar was set. A long long time ago.
Pauline Kael:
One of the greatest of all movies. The director, Carl Dreyer, based the script on the trial records, and the testimony appears to be given for the first time. (Cocteau wrote that this film “seems like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn’t exist.”) As the five gruelling cross-examinations follow each other, Dreyer turns the camera on the faces of Joan and the judges, and in giant close-ups he reveals his interpretation of their emotions. In this enlargement Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly – isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin. No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution. Maria Falconetti’s Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film. With Silvain as Cauchon, Michel Simon, Andre Berley, Maurice Schutz, and the young Antonin Artaud – as Massieu he’s the image of passionate idealism. The staging, and the cinematography by Rudolph Mate, are in a style that suggests the Stations of the Cross. The film is silent but as you often see the (French) words forming you may have the illusion that you’ve heard them.
And not just her interrogators, but she is flesh too: the flesh and the spirit. Her suffering is earthly, but she’s seeing something Beyond. The knowable and the unknowable in one face. Any more complicated set-up would diminish the power of this tension. What a collection of images.
// The knowable and the unknowable in one face. //
She really is otherworldly. But yes: flesh too. There’s a moment when a fly lands on her face. She does not brush it away because she is somewhere else.
I am so grateful that this performance exists – although I know it was a grueling experience for her. Talk about leaving a bit of yourself onscreen. She leaves everything. She leaves stuff she will never get back.