Poor Joan of Arc has been been used as an instrument of so many different, and often contradictory, causes that it is by now next to impossible to find the living, breathing woman underneath the cant. She is like a medieval manuscript on which, over the centuries, the original text has been almost completely obscured by palimpsests. Shaw wrote in his preface to Saint Joan:
She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she refused to accept the specific woman’s lot, and dressed and fought and lived as men did.
And Shaw did Joan a further disservice by using her to his own purposes, no differently from all the others. Did Joan herself know that she was all the things Shaw said she was? Of course she didn't. She wasn't a fool, but was no genius, either. She was very much a young woman of the 15th century, when Christianity was still a religion of ecstasies, when average people could claim that they met angels and had conversations with them without being presumed psychotic. But the Devil was equally real to them, and the Church was the only agent of salvation - which is why Joan was burned. Not because she was a witch but because she had challenged the Church's authority.
Separating fact from fiction in the case of Joan of Arc is especially difficult. When Orwell pointed out that history is written by the winners, he couldn't have chosen a better example than Joan's. Two sides fought it out for control of France in the Hundred Years War. Joan appeared as if out of nowhere at the age of 16 and almost as quickly was spirited from the scene. To the French she was sent by God. To the English, she was sent by the Devil, since surely God must be on their side. She was captured and delivered into the hands of her enemies, who went to the trouble of putting her on trial. Shaw argued that the case for the prosecution was argued successfully, leading them to no other conclusion but that Joan was a heretic who had superseded the authority of the Church. On these grounds she was found guilty and sentenced to be burned at the stake on May 30, 1431.
Upon winning the Hundred Years War, the French reopened the case against Joan and reversed the tribunal's verdict. In 1909 the Vatican beatified Joan, which is a required step to eventual sainthood. And in 1920 she was canonized as a saint. New books about her, her exploits and her miracles were written and published. It was only a matter of time before film, the new artistic medium for the masses, would get around to telling her story. Two films went into production at the end of the 1920s. One, La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, had a big budget and thousands of extras and concentrated on the heroic Joan, victorious in battle, the curious figure of a young woman in shining armor armed with nothing but a banner, leading the French to victory before being betrayed and martyred by the enemies of France. It was released in 1929.
Every bit of this history only leads us further away from Joan the young woman who was put to death in an exceedingly cruel way five hundred years before - by now almost a hundred years more. Carl Theodor Dreyer was chosen to direct another film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, this time concentrating on Joan's trial and execution. Some objected to a Dane being entrusted with the story of a French heroine, but he was by then one of the most distinguished filmmakers in Europe, and he was the perfect choice for our rediscovery of Joan. The moment Marie Falconetti, who is Joan in Dreyer's film, enters the first scene, in men's clothes with her hair cut short, with chains on her hands and feet, everything Shaw informs us of the significance and meaning behind her shortened life becomes suddenly immaterial. Dreyer brings the real woman into our presence. He gave enormous authority to Falconetti and worked with her indefatigably. He concentrated our attention on the faces of his characters by using close-ups almost incessantly, disturbingly to audiences at the time who were unused to the unrelieved intensity. (The actors also wore no makeup, so that the very texture of their skin is revealed.) Of course, the close-up is a photographic narrative device to heighten the intensity of a scene, but Dreyer knew there was little or no room for relief during the trial scenes. The only thing that brings relief is the unusual - and ingenious - shifting of the camera angles, often breaking the time-honored rules of line-of-sight.
For the actors, the experience must've been overwhelming, especially since Dreyer chose to shoot in sequence, as each scene is presented in the script, which was in itself based on the record of the trial. The climactic moment during the shooting came when, prior to Joan being taken to the place of execution, Dreyer did what Falconetti begged him not to do: her already short hair was trimmed further down to the scalp, in preparation for her being burned alive. The execution scene is more overpowering than any sequence in Eisenstein (even if Eisenstein discounted the film for its "individualism"). The flesh and blood presence of a human being who is shown being tied to a pillar, beneath which bundles of wood are set alight, Falconetti's tear-stained face being obscured by smoke and her look of terror when she feels the flames touching her flesh. Antonin Artaud, the creator of a Theater of Cruelty, is ironically shown below the pillar holding a crucifix on a long staff up for Joan to gaze upon as she is dying. Then the strangest thing happens, which is mentioned nowhere in the historical record. The people who at first had gathered for the carnival and who have witnessed the ritual burning alive of a young and healthy human being are suddenly inspired to revolt. The English soldiers, armed with weapons known as "ball-and-chain flails" smash into the crowd and beat them back, before raising the fortress' drawbridge.
Sometimes, fledgling cinephiles, overwhelmed from their first encounter with films that have come to define the art of cinema, and some of the required reading, both scholarly and critical, that provides them with needed background and context, will thenceforth proceed from film to film expecting a comparable emotional connection, a personal response whose intensity comes close to that first experience. Like a powerful intoxicant or like love, every subsequent encounter becomes an increasingly desperate - and futile - attempt to repeat the first time - the first high, the first love.
From the moment when our cinephile understands that a repeat of their first experience is unattainable, they're faced with a choice: suffer further disappointment by measuring every film by that first high standard, or compromise by allowing that, if their filmgoing lives are to prosper and yield as much exaltation (with pleasure to spare) as possible, it's wiser to lower their expectations, and lessen their disappointments.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the films that have stood out since its first release as an inimitable work, comparable in stature with a half dozen - if that many - others. Its reappearance and restoration was one of the events in the incredible history of the film that only deepened its legendary status. I hadn't had a chance to see it until the Criterion DVD was released when I was in my forties. Criterion provided me then with the option of watching the film with a musical score composed especially for the occasion or of watching it in silence, as Dreyer himself wished. I watched it in a silence that intensified the hypnotic power of the film's images. It was one of the most overpowering experiences of my life, comparable in its gravity and effect to finishing War and Peace or Moby Dick. I was transformed by watching it, enlarged, uplifted only to feel noticeably heavier upon coming back down. When he saw the film in 1929, Mordaunt Hall, in the New York Times wrote: "As a film work of art this takes precedence over anything that has so far been produced. It makes worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams. It fills one with such intense admiration that other pictures appear but trivial in comparison." Ninety years later, with the addition of innumerable films to our understanding of what a great film can be, I am in complete agreement.
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