La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

(205th - 7.8 - 7-Classic)

A couple of years ago I was a silent movie novice. I hadn't really seen much silent cinema and I didn't know much at all about it, but even so I was massively shocked to find that 80% to 85% of silent films are completely lost. They don't exist any more. They're gone. And that's not just a few here and there; it's almost all of them!

The Passion of Joan of Arc isn't a lost film, but it was thought to be for many years. It was censored before its release in 1928 and the original negative was destroyed by fire. A second negative was reedited from alternative takes but this was also lost to fire. All seemed lost until 1981, when a complete Danish copy in very good condition was discovered in the closet of a Norwegian mental hospital, of all places. It has been professionally restored to what must be something very close to the original, and made available to the audiences of today along with a highly appropriate soundtrack, 'Voices of Light'. This composition by Richard Einhorn that was inspired by the film works well indeed as a soundtrack. The choral grandeur fits the religious subject magnificently.

I don't know exactly what I expected from The Passion of Joan of Arc. Knowing that what little experience I have with silent film is with slapstick shorts or Lon Chaney horror classics, this was always going to be a little different from anything I've ever watched before. It's a film made in France by a Danish director at the end of the silent era about the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, made only eight years after she was canonised. All I knew about it was what I gleaned from watching a long and fascinating documentary on director Carl Theodor Dreyer immediately before The Passion of Joan of Arc. This pointed out that it's based closely on the record of her trial that exists to this day in the Bibliotheque de la Chambre des Deputes in Paris, and the script provides exact transcriptions of the questions given to Joan and her answers. The tantalising glimpses of the film promised something very special indeed and those promises were soon fulfilled.

What Renee Falconetti does in this film could just be the greatest single acting performance I've ever seen. She took the part of Joan of Arc after all the major French actresses of the time refused it, due to Dreyer's insistence that part of the role involved her being shaved. She was a stage actress who never appeared again in film, and that choice helped lead to the role being identified with her forever. After seeing her stunning performance, I can understand why. Even restricted into performing without a voice, she is still mesmerising from the first moment we see her.

Her eyes are huge pools that shine brightly and shed frequent tears, though these tears never alter her demeanour. She never weeps. The tears merely trickle and she ignores them. She is also frequently still, her head tilted piously, looking intently at something only she can see, while her judges and elder priests are far more dynamic and obviously unsure of how to proceed. Lips quiver, eyes wander, gestures are hurled and exhortations made, nervous tics and a variety of indignant reactions make themselves apparent, while Joan remains still and kneeling.

She has to put up with plenty, both as a character and as an actress, yet she always manages to be something above everyone around her. She looks holy, pure and simple, and never loses that look regardless what happens to her. She is bled, with stark realism, to alleviate fever; she is prodded with a stick; ridiculed; humiliated; forced into a false confession; shaved bald; and, of course, after she recants her confession is eventually burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic.

If there was anything more to want in this film beyond Falconetti's tour de force as Joan, there's still much more to experience. Dreyer put together a film that still looks unique today, over 75 years after it was made, and that puts it into a very select company indeed. I don't yet have enough background to back up statements like this one, but I have a feeling that The Passion of Joan of Arc is something apart from everything else cinema has ever given us.

For a start, Dreyer concentrates almost exclusively on close-ups, so we experience the story through individual expressions. It's immediately obvious that Dreyer chose his cast for their looks, something obvious not only because this is a silent film that relies on visuals entirely, but because these characters are so easily distinguishable. We see the faces of so many of those judging her, but never in one mass. They are consistently separate from each other, or only in small groups, as if they were disconnected jigsaw pieces. It's up to our minds to put the puzzle together. The camera pans across small groups, zooming quickly in and out. We remember prominent warts and long beards that turn faces into triangles. One judge is wizened like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, another has eyes that bug like Peter Lorre's, yet another is bald but for a tuft of hair on either side of his scalp like demonic horns. The wizened guy is superb. While others rage, he is constantly calm and collected, yet calculating like an evil wizard.

These faces occupy sets as distinctive as they are. They were designed by a man called Hermann Warm, who had also made the stunning avant garde sets for one of the great expressionistic silent horror films, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which I also caught recently. These are highly minimalist and starkly white, so as not to distract from the close-ups of features. They don't resemble anything I've seen elsewhere.

The camerawork is simply incredible and must have been highly innovative in 1928. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté, who I know as the director of one of my favourite films noir, the original DOA. What he does is so artful that it's impossible not to find depths beyond something that on the surface looks so cool. I didn't even need to force myself to look for meaning, the camerawork just drew me into it. One notable shot shows us a barred window entirely in silhouette so that it looks like a flag. We watch the spears above a bunch of marching helmets, pan across a bunch of raised hands, follow a stool carried aloft. Are these looks upward telling us where Joan will soon be?

Maté's camera is rarely still and each shot is short and sweet, as minimalist as Warm's sets. The close-ups are occasionally so close up that the camera has to pan down them for us to see them in entirety. Even the torture implements are shown in closeup, sometimes so closeup that we have no clue what they are. We see revolving spikes but not what they belong to, pan down links of chain but don't know what they connect to. We see a man turning a wheeled torture device so fast that we see him only stroboscopically. Swinging hooks are shown in shadow at expressionistic angles and another shadow of a helmet and pike reflected against a pillar is stunning. My favourite movements are when the camera is suspended from an arch and rotated 180 degrees vertically to follow soldiers through the archway from outside to inside.

It's incredible to realise that all of this stunning work was done over 75 years ago. The Passion of Joan of Arc is the newest of the seven movies from the twenties in the Top 250, made only six years after Nosferatu, the oldest of them all. It's a silent film that came out at the very end of the silent era, a full year after The Jazz Singer had ushered in sound. In fact the next movie Dreyer made, the inferior but highly stylish horror film Vampyr, is the closest I've ever seen to a silent film with sound.

And while Maté, Warm and especially Falconetti excelled themselves, the whole thing was put together by Carl Theodor Dreyer. He was one of the most totally uncompromising directors that cinema has ever seen. He made no panderings to commerciality at all, something of course completely unheard of nowadays, but something that led to a masterpiece like this. It's hard to imagine something this distinctive being made by anyone today outside of a couple of maverick outsiders. If Dreyer couldn't make a film his way he wouldn't make the film at all, and that's why his career of over forty years only left us thirteen films, just like that of Stanley Kubrick, in this way his closest equivalent in recent times. Dreyer also broke many cardinal rules of direction; he often deliberately hired actors who were not professionals and he frequently forbade them to use make up. I can't help but wonder what he would do were he to be starting out today, in a world where blockbusters have to advertise themselves on talk shows and cereal boxes and Happy Meals.

The Passion of Joan of Arc profoundly affected me as a work of art but it touched me as something else too. If not for the unexpected copy in that Norwegian mental asylum closet, this masterpiece would have been lost from our culture. Now I've seen it, that's a loss I don't want to think about. Yet I have to think about it. If this was only saved by chance, which other masterpieces have already been lost to us and which are in danger of being lost? Most importantly, what can we do about the situation?

After I was shocked by the extent of how much of our culture has already been lost, I've investigated this on a much wider scale and I haven't liked much of what I've found out. The preservation of culture, whether film, book or music, is an expensive and time consuming task and while there are many individuals and organisations dedicating much effort there's so much more that needs to be done. What's most upsetting is that it isn't just a case of finding enough people to do a job, as the current state of copyright legislation means that there are many legal obstacles thrown into the path of those who already have technological obstacles to cope with.

It's bad enough to know that I won't ever be able to see every Hitchcock, every Chaney, every Chaplin, because some of their output are lost films; but it's somehow worse to know that movies from other actors' filmographies still exist but I won't ever be allowed to see them. I'm a big Peter Lorre fan who loved Mr Moto's Last Warning, the one Mr Moto film that lapsed into the public domain. The problem is that I am unable to see the other seven in the series. The reason I can't is that the fear of politically correct backlashes from minority groups has led copyright owners such as Fox or Disney to withhold from the public films like the Mr Motos, the Charlie Chans or even the Oscar winning The Song of the South.

It can't be a good state of affairs when the public is unable to experience its own culture. We live in a technological age where there is no valid reason for this culture to disappear, but political correctness and bad legislation is causing exactly that. Every day we're losing more films, more music and more literature and that sucks. The Passion of Joan of Arc was almost lost to us; let's work to make sure that nothing else is.