1999: 
directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
written by Carl Theodor Dreyer (with the collaboration of Joseph Delteil)
Criterion #62.
Title.
You can call it The Passion of Joan of Arc. Criterion does.
As you can see, the title card seen on this disc calls it La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, so that’s what I’ve called this entry. But this title screen and all the other French intertitles are not original; they were set in 1985 or thereabouts, when the complete first version of the film was restored under French supervision. The source for this restoration was a single print that had come to light in 1981. These French-language titles were created as replacements for the intertitles on the rediscovered print, which were in Danish, the language of the film’s director, as prepared in 1928 for the world premiere in Copenhagen. Just recently those original titles were finally released, at least in the UK, on a newer, better-restored Blu-Ray edition, not from Criterion.
Why the 80s restorators felt that the movie absolutely had to be released in French, even if that meant losing all those original 1928 intertitles, is unclear. I suspect it has to do with the nationalistically possessive attitude the French have toward Joan and toward this movie: having always known it, from the later cuts, as retitled in French, they weren’t about to give up their Joan to some other language just because that happened to be the historical reality.
This is to say that I think the true original title of this movie might reasonably be considered to be Jeanne d’Arc’s Lidelse og Død (which is literally “Joan of Arc’s Suffering and Death,” which seems to be the standard Christian term in Danish.)
Then again, maybe not. After all, no matter what the intertitles say, the mouths on screen are certainly speaking French. A viewer of any nationality is expected to be able to translate the mouthform of “oui” without assistance. So maybe the surviving Copenhagen copy, historically significant though a premiere is, should indeed be seen as a translation of a French film.
Luckily, this stuff doesn’t matter.
Movie.
This is that movie with all those beautiful extreme close-ups.
Extreme close-ups are indeed beautiful. At a distance of one inch from the face, you can’t tell that these people are from 1928. Their skin is not from 1928, and looking in their eyes you can see that their minds weren’t, either. This is what it would have been like to be in love with someone in 1928: the same. At a distance of one inch, people are without historical limitations.
And then of course one thinks: this must have been true of the medieval people they are portraying, too. Their pores were undoubtedly the same as ours, their flesh the same. The real Joan of Arc, in the real 1431, from one inch away, would have been just like a person who is only one inch away.
We all know it’s good to flex the historical imagination toward vivid commonplaces: to imagine what ye olde shoelaces really felt like to tie, imagine what was in ye olde cupboard, etc. But to be pushed up this close, into kissing range, to where you can smell the skin, was closer than I’d ever thought to try going before. There’s something new to feel, at that distance. It’s as though historicality gathers, like fog, with distance (and makeup), whereas up close and undecorated, we’re all crystal clear, the same as we’ve ever been.
Of course I already knew it and have already spent many an hour thinking it. But one always knows things better after seeing them and feeling them in a movie. (I considered qualifying that, but I think it stands. Movies teach us how to be aware of the world, perhaps more deeply than any other art.)
So that — the purity of the extreme close-up — is for me the principal virtue of this movie.
It is also a movie about something. Here I am less sure how I feel.
I recognize that this angle of critique is getting a little old around here, but:
What is the point of stories about persecution? I mean what is the therapeutic point; what are we doing for ourselves when we make them and watch them? Why this? What is this movie up to?
You could say that it’s avant-garde and essentially intellectualized, formalistic — the ultra-modern photography and editing suggest it — but it doesn’t feel to be that at all. It feels quite sincerely and intensely emotional about what’s happening to poor poor visionary Joan.
To accuse the movie of being merely the agonized self-pity of the misunderstood might seem petty; it’s clearly a far greater piece of work than that. But the agonized self-pity of the misunderstood is actually a very rich tradition. Not just Romanticism, but Christianity itself, right? Poor visionary Jesus, right? And poor visionary you, if you dare. This is a fine monument in that hallowed tradition.
Self-pity is philosophical: Is there room among men for the purity of truth? Good question. I worry about that too. When Falconetti lets a perfect single tear go — repeatedly! suck it, Meryl! — I’m on board. Goddamn this council of condescending jerks, trying to snuff out grace itself! Goddamn them! Damn dirty apes!
But as that perfect single drop of pain dries up, that’s where my wondering comes in. Why is this being done to me? To anyone? Why was the real story of Joan of Arc — who was persecuted for her military actions, not her tears of purity, though you wouldn’t know it from this movie — rendered into this simplistic witch-trial emotional scenario, with these glistening eyes at the center of it? When she burns — spoiler: she burns — and we are horrified and heightened, what spiritual principle have we moved toward? Is it to the good? Or just in a circle? I’m not sure. I’m wary.
The political motivation of her persecutors is not explored. In fact their psychological motivation is not explored. They are bad guys. Some of them are softer than others, and some nuances are hinted at in a few sideways glances, but at the dramaturgical core, they’re just doom judges and she’s just a unearthly creature of grace that they are set on destroying.
But okay, it’s like devotional art. Only one idea at a time, intensely rendered. Simple, deep images for meditation. Everyone gets to pick their own devotional. This isn’t mine. Or at least martyrdom isn’t. But faces might be. I was moved, and that can be enough. What else is there?
It’s like what I said about Charlie Chaplin: his vast egoism is healthy for the viewer, as long as it goes unobserved. Being transported is an absolute good, so long as you don’t name what’s happening. This is at the heart of the Wagner debate: how to keep your rapture without defending it.
This, like that, is moral art with no moral but plenty of force. So is every person’s face, I suppose.
Music.
This film has no score. Apparently it was shown with the standard theater-discretionary live accompaniment in 1928, but Dreyer didn’t specify anything in particular and apparently was skeptical about the inauthenticity of music. Decades later, complaining about the classical music that had been stuck on the version then in distribution, he said crankily that the film would be better shown silent. No makeup? No music! The first option on the disc is just that. Complete silence for 80 minutes.
That’s weird.
The film is stark and bare, “like silence,” and so one wants to believe the silence is working in some bracing MOMA way. But in the absence of sound, one’s inner pulse starts attending to the editing rhythms, as though they were the movie’s heartbeat. They aren’t; they’re just the flickering of its attention. Taken as a rhythmic foundation, the cutting is jittery and counter-intuitive; dramatic time feels constantly disrupted and shuffled and misjudged, rather than synthesized into heightened montage-time, which is clearly the intention. To feel that, we’d need some steady grounding, laid down in actual music. Speaking as a pianist: the visual is very right-hand, so we feel the lack of a left hand.
That’s my opinion. Others will tell you that the silence is ideal. But, like I said, it’s aesthetically tempting to say so in denial of one’s actual experience. It just seems like it would be cool for the silence to be ideal. But it’s not. You can’t make a sandwich without bread.
So here we have this acknowledged masterpiece of cinema — simultaneously of avant-garde, mainstream, historical and religious interest and thus frequently programmed at museums, festivals, and arthouses alike — that still lacks a standard musical score. An enterprising film composer can surely see that here is a great opportunity. Programmers aren’t going to want to solve this problem themselves; they’re going to want to do whatever everyone else does. So why not take a stab at being the guy who wrote the score that everyone uses? If you can be the standard, and you can maintain the rights: woo-hoo! Score! So to speak.
Well, meet composer Richard Einhorn! Who is Richard Einhorn? He is a composer! And he has played all the angles on this one. His score is “not actually a score, but rather music inspired by the film” … music which just happens to sync up perfectly with the film for 80 minutes! A miracle! You see, being miraculous in this way, it is suitable for live performance with or without the film — both at events promoted as classical music with film accompaniment, and those promoted as film with live music — as well as for sale on CD as a pure classical composition, released by Sony Classical. The important thing is that it is not a score! It remains at all times Voices of Light by composer Richard Einhorn. Score!
So: the other soundtrack option on this disc is to watch the movie while hearing the non-score Voices of Light by composer Richard Einhorn. We can also watch a little promotional video where composer Richard Einhorn yaks about his process and his intentions with Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, which is more indulgence even than Philip Glass got, back on La Belle et la Bête.
Yes, so I’m a little cynical about this, but: I watched it first silent. Then I thought, “okay, I have to,” and watched the Voices of Light version. To my surprise, I preferred it. It is far from ideal. But given the choice between no soundtrack and this soundtrack, I choose this soundtrack. For any other movie, that wouldn’t be saying much. And for this one it isn’t saying much either.
Voices of Light is a very Nonesuch/BAM kind of thing, vaguely slick vaguely serious mood music for the cultural intellectual crowd. Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex turned down to 5, via Philip Glass, via Howard Shore. Chorus and strings do a lot of tasteful chugging. There are some medievalist gestures but nothing that Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame couldn’t swallow. Post-minimalist, pre-Raphaelite, neo-classical, non-confrontational. I am being a little mean but I basically like stuff like this. I like the lulling rhythms that say “relax, relax, rest assured that even as you relax you are urbane and culturally discriminating (or least high middlebrow) circa 1988, relax.” I like stuff that lets the mind soften without retracting its validation of your taste. Piercing attention didn’t used to be as obsessively revered among the cultural elites as it is now. A topic for another time.
The score gives the visual what I said it demands: a grounding rhythm, over which the visual rhythms can be read as thought rather than feeling. It allows the emotions to enter the space and survive intact through all the cutting. Einhorn’s sound world does not grate against the visual. It basically invites feeling. I felt, while watching and listening.
But all the same it is not a good score, not the right score. It honors one stratum of the movie’s emotional life to the exclusion of others; its anachronisms reduce our range of possible thoughts to only the intersection between the 1928 visual and the perpendicular 1995 audio. And it gave me a bit of a sense of that condescending post-modern retro affection: trust us, this old black-and-white movie really is wonderful, transcendent. Sometimes it feels like it’s trying to subordinate this world-class movie to its own soggy ends; which after all is the explicit intent when it’s played at orchestral concerts “accompanied by film projection.” Just the fluffball title Voices of Light should give you a clue. This music isn’t nearly as offensive as that Philip Glass opera (also NOT A SCORE) but it has a little of the same hubristic blandness.
I mean it, though: I basically enjoy this style! Here’s our sample: an instrumental interlude that is one of the few short sections that are unique to the “with film” version and are not included in the “without film” version as heard on the Sony CD recording. (This transitional cue would fall between the 3rd and 4th tracks of the CD.) When you hear it, you’ll get it.
Misc.
I’d say that Mike Nichols got those inaudible angry jabbering mouths at the end of The Graduate from here, but he probably didn’t. They came to mind while watching anyway.
Because of all the close-ups giving it that ahistorical quality I mentioned above, my mind kept trying to identify the actors as people I’d seen recently on TV, or the like. Then I’d have to remind myself that, no, this guy definitely couldn’t be “that guy,” because this was 1928 (and France, to boot).
Connection to the previous movie: is broad and obvious. I don’t know why I’ve started playing this game but I have. This one was a gimme. Next time is going to be harder.
The other stuff on the disc, besides the Voices of Light promotionalia, are a few brief excerpts, not particularly enlightening, from an interview by Einhorn with Falconetti’s daughter; and a full commentary by Dreyer scholar Casper Tybjerg.
The commentary is entirely academic, not a personal response, but done with complete integrity and unforced expertise. I enjoyed and appreciated it even though I don’t usually think such things are necessary. In the case of this particularly quizzical sort of mute high art film, it was welcome.
He mentions that the actors were required to maintain real tonsures for the entirety of the six month shoot, regardless of how long they appeared onscreen and regardless of whether their costume included a skullcap. One of the actors later said that Dreyer was “a certifiable lunatic.” Hearing this quoted, I immediately believed it — not literally, of course, and not in a derogatory sense. But to make extreme art in good faith, one must be extreme. He must have been. I for one would never ever make this film. Is that criticism or praise? It’s neither.
Again I think of the Scorsese comment about something rare happening when an artist’s feelings are out of control. And of what seems to be my broomlet refrain: that all art encounters are social encounters. There are two kinds of social satisfaction: being intrigued by someone who is different, and being put at ease by someone who is the same. High culture validates the former, pooh-poohs the latter: “art should be an encounter with the extreme, not a warm bath.” But nowadays I think there is no general principle, no art ethic. Life is a balance of same and different; we alternate between which we need. Right now in my life I think I benefit more from sames than differents. Whereas this film is different, fervently different, different from almost anyone out there.
It seems to be telling me that if I do not identify with it, I am putting it on trial and burning its flesh. What? No! Not at all! Stick around, Jeanne and Carl, mingle, everyone’s welcome. Jeanne d’Arc, Mike; Mike, Jeanne d’Arc. So glad you could make it, truly. Get a drink, have fun… I’ll be back around, but right now I’m just going to check and see how things are going in the other room.