The Sheila Variations

In closeup: La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

Here is Roger Ebert's review of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928; dir. Carl Dreyer) which is one of the most startling and wrenching films I have ever seen in my life:

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 had been given a large budget and a screenplay by his French producers, but he threw out the screenplay and turned instead to the transcripts of Joan's trial. They told the story that has become a legend: of how a simple country maid from Orleans, dressed as a boy, led the French troops in their defeat of the British occupation forces. How she was captured by French loyal to the British and brought before a church court, where her belief that she had been inspired by heavenly visions led to charges of heresy. There were 29 cross-examinations, combined with torture, before Joan was burned at the stake in 1431. Dreyer combined them into one inquisition, in which the judges, their faces twisted with their fear of her courage, loomed over her with shouts and accusations.

If you go to the Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen you can see Dreyer's model for the extraordinary set he built for the film. He wanted it all in one piece (with movable walls for the cameras), and he began with towers at four corners, linked with concrete walls so thick they could support the actors and equipment. Inside the enclosure were chapels, houses and the ecclesiastical court, built according to a weird geometry that put windows and doors out of plumb with one another and created discordant visual harmonies (the film was made at the height of German Expressionism and the French avant-garde movement in art).

It is helpful to see the model in Copenhagen, because you will never see the whole set in the movie. There is not one single establishing shot in all of ``The Passion of Joan of Arc,'' which is filmed entirely in closeups and medium shots, creating fearful intimacy between Joan and her tormentors. Nor are there easily read visual links between shots. In his brilliant shot-by-shot analysis of the film, David Bordwell of the University of Wisconsin concludes: ``Of the film's over 1,500 cuts, fewer than 30 carry a figure or object over from one shot to another; and fewer than 15 constitute genuine matches on action.''

What does this mean to the viewer? There is a language of shooting and editing that we subconsciously expect at the movies. We assume that if two people are talking, the cuts will make it seem that they are looking at one another. We assume that if a judge is questioning a defendant, the camera placement and editing will make it clear where they stand in relation to one another. If we see three people in a room, we expect to be able to say how they are arranged and which is closest to the camera. Almost all such visual cues are missing from ``The Passion of Joan of Arc.''

Instead 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.

Falconetti, by contrast, is shot in softer grays, rather than blacks and whites. Also without makeup, she seems solemn and consumed by inner conviction. Consider an exchange where a judge asks her whether St. Michael actually spoke to her. Her impassive face seems to suggest that whatever happened between Michael and herself was so far beyond the scope of the question that no answer is conceivable.

Why did Dreyer fragment his space, disorient the visual sense and shoot in closeup? I think he wanted to avoid the picturesque temptations of a historical drama. There is no scenery here, aside from walls and arches. Nothing was put in to look pretty. You do not leave discussing the costumes (although they are all authentic). The emphasis on the faces insists that these very people did what they did. Dreyer strips the church court of its ritual and righteousness and betrays its members as fleshy hypocrites in the pay of the British; their narrow eyes and mean mouths assault Joan's sanctity.

For Falconetti, the performance was an ordeal. Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face--so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression. There is an echo in the famous methods of the French director Robert Bresson, who in his own 1962 ``The Trial of Joan of Arc'' put actors through the same shots again and again, until all apparent emotion was stripped from their performances. In his book on Dreyer, Tom Milne quotes the director: ``When a child suddenly sees an onrushing train in front of him, the expression on his face is spontaneous. By this I don't mean the feeling in it (which in this case is sudden fear), but the fact that the face is completely uninhibited.'' That is the impression he wanted from Falconetti.

That he got it is generally agreed. Perhaps it helps that Falconetti never made another movie (she died in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1946). We do not have her face in other roles to compare with her face here, and the movie seems to exist outside time (the French director Jean Cocteau famously said it played like ``an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist'').

To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' is an unsettling experience--so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire. Our sympathy is engaged so powerfully with Joan that Dreyer's visual methods--his angles, his cutting, his closeups--don't play like stylistic choices, but like the fragments of Joan's experience. Exhausted, starving, cold, in constant fear, only 19 when she died, she lives in a nightmare where the faces of her tormentors rise up like spectral demons.

Perhaps the secret of Dreyer's success is that he asked himself, ``What is this story really about?'' And after he answered that question he made a movie about absolutely nothing else.

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 emotional to watch. There are times when you literally do not know where you are. And this reflects the unbelievable intensity of Joan of Arc's experience as she is interrogated. The faces of the actors are flawed, there appears to be no pancake makeup on anyone. 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. It is unbelievably real. A lesser director would have chosen other shots, where there is no fly. But Dreyer was up to something else here.

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 (there is no sound anyway) - 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 - you cannot hide from it - and you begin to get the sense (and this is where it gets mystical, unlike any other film I have ever seen) that you are actually looking at a historical event, you feel like you are watching a film that was made before film was invented. It's that real, that unfettered. The modern world (despite the fact that we are watching a film - filmed by cameras) does not seem to exist. Without sound, The Passion of Joan of Arc ranks as the most powerful film ever made.

And Falconetti's performance cannot, in any way shape or form, be over-stated. It is one for the ages. It takes on a mythic proportion that has rarely been seen in film, before or since.

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 understood the power of the new medium, though, and moved the camera in on his actor's faces - he knew that film, unlike theatre, had the potential to be a purely psychological experience (not that there is not psychology in the theatre - it's just that the form demands something larger, something that can be seen all the way in the cheap seats). But a closeup is psychological. It is internal. It 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. It changed everything.

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 a break. 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.

That's the only way to describe the film. Shattering.

Screenshots below from this extraordinary film.

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