The Passion of Joan of Arc

In the depths of silence, there is always oneself. (Carl Th. Dreyer)

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.

Von

When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.

But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.

The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.

Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.

No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.

His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."

In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.

Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see? 

After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.

Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."

Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)


(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.

Films I Love to Hate

[Just to assure my readers (all five of you) that the only films "I love to hate" are not all made in the U.S.A., I concentrate this time - as much as I can anyway - on a Danish film that has acquired a definite "cult" following.]





Ordet (1955)


"It is required
You do awake your faith."
(Paulina, The Winter's Tale, Act V, Scene III)

Kaj Munk (1898-1944) was a pastor whose religious preoccupations were often the subject of his creative writing. He had the personal courage, in 1940, to denounce the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and to attack Nazism in his plays.(1) This led to his arrest and eventual murder by the Gestapo in 1944. Because of this, Munk and his writings received a great deal more attention from Danish readers. His play Ordet was written in 1925 and was made into a quite straightforward film directed by Gustaf Molander in Sweden in 1943. In itself, this was a rather daring act in a nation (Sweden) that, to save itself from the fate of Denmark, was officially neutral throughout World War II.

The Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer made Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag) that same year in Denmark. Concerned as it is with the story of a young woman's sexual awakening and her being accused of witchcraft when her older husband dies suddenly (right after she has told him that she loves his son), the film quickly developed an unfortunate reputation as a horror film. It was shown in New York, where James Agee wrote of it, "Movies seldom contain any material, except by inadvertence or head-on outrage, which can interest the morally curious; this one contains a good deal, and none of it is inadvertent or outrageous."

Despite the critical and commercial success of Day of Wrath, Dreyer would not make another film for more than a decade. He had wanted to make a film of Munk's Ordet in the 1930s, but lacked the financing - that time-honored and insurmountable obstacle of filmmakers. Dreyer, despite being revered as one of the founders of Danish cinema, had to wait until 1955, when he was 66, to complete his Ordet. If he had retired from filmmaking altogether after Day of Wrath, he could have done so with his head held high. Ordet, while it is achingly serious, showed how ossified Dreyer's cinematic ideas had become.(2)

With his two previous films, Vampyr (1932) and Day of Wrath, Dreyer revealed an obvious interest in the supernatural. Both of those films originated with the assumption that such things as vampires and witches were real, and the effectiveness of the films has a sometimes hair-raising impact on the viewer (3), not at all mitigated by our knowledge that such things may be more fictional than real. But vampires and witches are nothing compared to what we are expected to swallow in Ordet, in which a clearly deranged man who is convinced he is Jesus Christ, raises his sister-on-law from the dead.

The scene takes place at the very end of more than two hours of the most tedious filmmaking conceivable, with actors moving very little, standing or sitting stock-still as if for a portrait and staring at a spot just past the camera lens, while droning on and on about which brand of Christianity - the guilt-ridden or the enlightened variety - is the one true faith. The outcome, in which the God of the Old Testament supposedly reveals himself through Inger's resurrection, is preposterous precisely for being staged and shot so matter-of-factly. The event has not even the effect of a magic trick, which involves some illusion or other, that one has just witnessed something that cannot have happened, and which calls for a suspension of disbelief.

Dreyer, who evidently believed in miracles, chose to refrain from trickery of any kind - no dramatic emphasis through lighting, camera angle, or action. His use of such "devices" are what gave Vampyr and Day of Wrath a certain level of realism - realism of the fantastic, that made them, if only momentarily, convincing. Inger's resurrection, however, is not intended to frighten us (although, in reality, it would have sent some of the characters who witnessed it screaming from the room).

Dreyer's approach is bald rather than bold. Instead of suspending our disbelief, Inger's awakening is intended to inspire belief. But the very realism he uses raises more questions than it tries to answer, or dismiss: would not the body of Inger, even in her insulated farm community, have been prepared in some way for burial - I mean in some way that might make her sudden return to life even more impossible? In the midst of so much humanity, even in so stifling a drama as Ordet, the appearance of the inhuman only produces a shock and, ultimately, distaste for everything that comes before it.


(1) Munk had earlier expressed admiration for Hitler. He was also decidedly anti-democratic and in favor of a "Nordic dictatorship." He quickly repudiated these views when the Nazis ignored Denmark's sovereignty and occupied the country.
(2) Alas, Dreyer would make one more film, Gertrud (1964). It is unbelievably slow, which was deliberate because Dreyer wanted the audience to adapt to the pace of a slower time, as he did in Day of Wrath and Ordet. To "adapt" to Dreyer's pace, you would have to take a horse tranquilizer.
(3) Specifically, the scene in Vampyr in which Allan Grey finds himself inside a coffin as he is transported to his grave, and Lisbeth Movin's scream in Day of Wrath when her husband drops dead.