Silent-ember: The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dir Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1h 22m, 1928)

It's October 1928, and Paris is, predicably, in uproar. The focus of French ire? A Danish film-maker called Carl Theodor Dreyer has dared, rage the French Far Right, headed by L'Action Francais, to make a film about that quintessentially Gallic icon, Jeanne D'Arc, canonised as a saint barely eight years prior. "Whatever the talent of the director (and he has it)...he cannot give us a Joan of Arc in the true French tradition"froths fellow film-maker, Jean-Jose Frappa, (whose retort, Saint Joan the Maid, will release months later), in one of silent cinema's most bizarrely backhanded compliments, and he's but the vanguard of an angry mob of fellow nationalists, government censors, and archbishops, who bear down on Dreyer's film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, a stunningly stark, and at times brutalist retelling of the trial and burning of the French saint that sees actors forgo makeup and Dreyer's production designers forgo the castle, instead placing the events in a towering, and positively industrial space.

Like Joan, they tear it apart, hack it down to shape, leaving Dreyer devastated, and like Joan, the film-or at least the negative-are lost to the fire, a fate that also befalls the edited version. The butchery continues, even after Dreyer's death, as people try to piece the film back together again, or cut it with baroque scores that utterly miss the point of the starkness of Joan. And then the miracle happens. The film steps from the ashes, back into light, found, of all places, in a Norwegian mental hospital in the early 1980s. A film that once run afoul of religion (and was banned in Britain for a number of years for its less than flattering depiction of English soldier) becomes practically cinematic holy writ, a film that, in dark abruptness and brutalist grandeur, towers over cinema in the features of the beautific Falconetti-as-Joan. What better film to round out this Silent-ember, than the film that practically defines the movement?

The year is 1431, and Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, has been captured by a coalition of the English, still waging the Hundred Years war, and the pro-English Burgundians the winter before, after the abortive siege of Compiègne. Joan has been, militarily and otherwise a thorn in the English side, a peasant girl who, as the purported representative of God, has inspired the French to a number of crushing military victories over the occupying English. What follows, from a historical perspective, is one of the most richly documented trials of the entire medieval period, and through the preserved trial record, seen as Dreyer opens his narrative, provides the film with much of its dialogue and major scenes, Dreyer placing actual spoken counsel, cross-examination, and the like into the otherwise spiritually inclined tale of the Maid of Orleans.

In short, the film begins with the capture of Joan, and works through the trial to her eventual execution via burning at the stake. Throughout, the English accuse her of witchcraft, of being part of "Satan's gang", a figure of unholy and hellish inclination, of leading the French into damnation, threaten her with torture, and eventually force a confession out of her, which she eventually recants, and is executed for. In another director's hand (Bresson's 1962 film, The Trial of Joan of Arc, for example), the material becomes dry, the regurgitation of centuries old legal documentation rote, and the sparsity works against a fascinating collision of faith and power.

In Dreyer's hands, however, it becomes a stark battle. We must begin with Falconetti herself, and here, Dreyer's cinematic language, of the innocent victim crushed down by the state, a young woman driven by her faith, her belief in God eventually martyred for her beliefs, is practically struck through the entire film. Much of this comes from the way in which Dreyer shoots his heroine, and the rest from perhaps the greatest single performance of the silent era. For Falconetti rules this film-Rudolph Maté's cinematography is enraptured by her, the camera holding on her face, eyes often lit with behind-camera lighting, eyes wide, or filled with tears. Far from the mask-like performances of the silent era, often caricatures of expression, there is something devastatingly natural about Falconetti, her fragility, her fear, or indeed fervour filling her face, the lack of makeup on the entire cast. only adding to this.

The Passion is a story essentially told by Falconetti's face-at points, Maté shoots her off centre, or gazing off camera into the heavens, past the men who plot her death, and cast her as a madwoman, or indeed, off-kilter generally, at off angles that hint at the German Expressionist school, or in shots that blur her features, or have her mostly off-screen. It's a perfect shorthand for the ever-more panicked Joan, as the battle between faith, and her own self-preservation rage across her features as the film slowly marches to the end of her trial. At points her eyes brim with tears, or the camera tracks, at almost painful close-up, the track of tears down her face, or her trembling expression, or the pure fear in her wide, vulnerable eyes, so often raised to heaven with either fearful surrender or ecstatic belief. That Falconetti was subjected to Dreyer's rigorous shooting, that the suffering is, at points, genuine, the young actress knelt for hours at a time, as he ran sequences again and again, only adds to the film's utter veracity, a woman pushed to the brink in front, and indeed behind the camera till we practically see her break apart under the stress of her trial.

This carries through to the costuming, lending her, especially once her hair has been shorn, in perhaps the film's single most visceral scene, a curious androgyne, that offends the figures of the jury, a figure midway between the hard-edged masculine of so many of the film's jury, and the unseen feminine-in fact, except in the film's ending crowd scenes, there are no other female characters in the film. So often she is shot from above, or from the front-even in his most simplistic shots, Dreyer is of no illusion that Joan is a victim, little more than a child, mocked and castigated and bellowed at for her belief in her God and in France itself. We feel for Joan because the film throws the images she sees, of screaming grotesques, and pressing crowds, and violent jailers that mock and grin and crown her, at us, the audience, in often claustrophobic closely edited shots. We never see the full extent of the building, and barely does the film step back, except when Joan is alone, or after her death, beyond a medium shot. This is a film almost entirely told in expressions, in human faces.

Enter, thus, our judges and executioners. In comparison to the beautific Joan, these are monstrous figures, (even if Dreyer did essentially pick the cream of early French Cinema's older talent), shot from below, or often in extreme close-up, craggy faces, wide, almost manic eyes, a collection of almost gargoyle-ish figures, macabre and ghoulish, whilst the English soldiers are even more villainous, horrifying figures that leer and grimace and spit on the figure of Joan. Dreyer essentially attacks the audience (and thus, Joan) with these figures. Their silent shouts, the rage, is palpable. They are men driven by dogma, by nationalistic pride-at points they wind themselves, not the young woman at the centre of their trial, in religious knots, or elsewhere hammer through a number of religious doctrines that, almost certainly alongside the Danish director, and the closeness of Joan to the French national character, is almost painfully close to the bone now, let alone in the late 1920s, as though the French church felt some sort of retroactive shame at the length of time it took Joan to be canonised, not to mention its open referencing of the mocking of Christ by soldiers transported to British soldiers mocking Joan, that saw the film briefly run afoul of British censors.

Much of the film, thus, is ranged between the grotesques, between these men whose faces are twisted and distorted and deformed by their rage, whose words bring despair and panic and fear into Joan's own features, and the vulnerable portrait of a young woman driven by her faith and belief to the point of self annihilation, as the film's raging argument of faith and God and power and whether a mere woman could be a conduit to the Almighty. Even as she moves beyond the boundaries of what the Church can agree on-indeed, the film is by no means slow to show that she has support, with one of her jury indicating that he supports her, the film descends, again and again, into these moments of abject severity, or abject misery for Joan-her recanting of her confession is a scene where the film practically tears at the heartstrings, even as she struggles on through it, knowing her death is certain, even as she is mocked, or simply watched by the passive men who put her to death.

Even Antonin Artaud, that great master of the theatre of cruelty, whose manifesto is writ large across the film, and who appears in a prolonged cameo as the Dean of Roue, and who perhaps is the film's one sympathetic ecclesiastical figure, is still impassive, still bound up in the fervour of his countrymen and fellow priests, when her execution is set. He, though, perhaps captures the film's intent better than any single critic, or fellow film-maker could. At its heart, he argues, The Passion's chief aim is this, to "reveal Joan as the victim of one of the most terrible of all perversions: the perversion of a divine principle in its passage through the minds of men, whether they be Church, Government or what you will". It is, at its basest, a film about men condemning, threatening, torturing, and eventually killing a young woman, in the name of the very same God that inspired her to action against the English that occupy the very country that her jury and executioners wish to see freed. The Passion attacks its heroine at every possible moment, visually and verbally, until she burns, and is proven to be right-the film's end, in brutal bloodletting, preluding the eventual expulsion of the English barely two decades later.

Yet for all the ecumenical debate, all the nationalist fervour, for the fact that The Passion never made a franc over its budget, the pain and anguish and pure scale of its production, the two fires that nearly, like its heroine, saw the film lost to history, for the film's co-opting by rock musicians, and the film's remarkable journey back to the light, the film towers above cinema. Its iconography, its unflinching camera work, its timelessness, its modernity, and silent cinema's great religious icon, the shaven headed Falconetti, are so ingrained in cinematic culture, in the visual iconography of the birth of cinema as a medium, that the two are intertwined. The Passion, though is the end of an era. The preceding October brought The Jazz Singer, and barely 18 minutes in, Al Jonson's voice comes out of the speakers, and exclaims: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet".

With it, the sound era begins, and the silent era fades, but for occasional deliberate choices, from view. 1928 leaves us with one final masterpiece. Silent cinema may have brought us many famous films, but none come close to the pure power, the pure art that is The Passion of Joan of Arc, the very pinnacle of silent cinema as a medium and an era.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)