In Closeup: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

Roger Ebert writes:

You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti. In a medium without words, where the filmmakers believed that the camera captured the essence of characters through their faces, to see Falconetti in Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you….Dreyer cuts the film into a series of startling images. The prison guards and the ecclesiastics on the court are seen in high contrast, often from a low angle, and although there are often sharp architectural angles behind them, we are not sure exactly what the scale is (are the windows and walls near or far?). Bordwell’s book reproduces a shot of three priests, presumably lined up from front to back, but shot in such a way that their heads seem stacked on top of one another. All of the faces of the inquisitors are shot in bright light, without makeup, so that the crevices and flaws of the skin seem to reflect a diseased inner life.

It is Dreyer’s use of close-ups, and, as Ebert points out, the lack of any establishing shots that make the film so terrifying and claustrophobic. There are times when you literally do not know where you are. And this reflects the intensity of Joan of Arc’s experience as she is interrogated. The faces of the actors are flawed, moles and scars and nose-hairs. There is one scene where Joan sits, tormented by the questions, listening to who knows what in her own head, and a fly buzzes around her face, sometimes landing on her neck, her forehead.

The heads LOOM at you, throughout the film. It is captivating – in the best and worst sense of the word, meaning: you cannot look away, but you also feel trapped. You yearn to escape, to flee from that dungeon space … but because Dreyer does not set up the scene so that you know where the exits are, you have no idea where you would go. He makes you lose yourself in the faces.

I watched the film with no sound but there is a version of the film with music as well. Both versions are amazing – but I highly recommend watching it with no sound first. There is a ton of dialogue, of course – since it’s an interrogation scene – but there are very little subtitles. You get the whole story from the expressions on the faces, and the behavioral tics captured by the camera. I must borrow a thought from Cocteau (lifted from Pauline Kael’s review) because it is completely accurate, and reflects my own experience: Without any background sound, the film takes on a comfortless blasted-open atmosphere and you begin to get the sense (and this is where it gets mystical, unlike any other film I have seen) that you are actually looking at an actual historical event, you feel like you are watching a film that was made before film was invented. The modern world (despite the fact that we are watching a film) does not seem to exist. Without sound, The Passion of Joan of Arc ranks as the most powerful film ever made.

Pauline Kael writes:

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.

In the early years of film, many directors, who came from the theatre and vaudeville, filmed the movies from a theatrical perspective – long shots, lots of action, where you can see everyone at the same time, identical to what you see on the stage. D.W. Griffith grasped the power of the new medium, though, and moved the camera in on his actor’s faces. With a camera, you can go close, and film, unlike theatre, had the potential to be a purely psychological experience. A closeup is the equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy. Whatever is going on there is a one-on-one exchange between the character and the audience. We are privileged to get that close. It was THE breakthrough in early films.

Carl Dreyer, while not the first to move his camera in that close, took it to a level which can be called almost psychologically disorienting … and you begin to wish he would pull back, so that you could get some perspective But if Joan of Arc doesn’t get a break, then neither should you in the audience. Close-ups have never been used to such a shattering effect.

Screenshots below from this extraordinary film.