Sublime and get the Masters of Cinema restored version

Rating: 10/10 (5 December 2012)

Freshly re-mastered and restored by EUREKA in their collection Masters of Cinema, this film is phenomenal for a 1928 film and deserves our rediscovery of it. It is of course in black and white. But the camera still catches a rather circular image with shades in the corners. But the shooting and the acting, the editing and the text are first class.
The movements of all the monks, priests and other church people always in a small crowd in a limited space is impressive in movement and composition to impress the audience of course, but to create an atmosphere in which the little and only woman of the whole film has to feel surrounded and is impressed and even psychologically pressurized, put under duress, manipulated into fear and angst. That gives Joan of Arc a tremendous power in her very unimpressionable lack of movement, frozen reactions, emotional restraint and yet constant suffering shown by the many tears she sheds.
The camera of the time is better for close-up shots on one character, one face, one action or movement and Dreyer uses that camera to the utmost. No conventional emotional expressions. Everything has to look real and natural, even when it is the ferocious fierce authority of these doctors and higher-ups of the church. Most of them are grotesque older men who look absolutely devilish in their smiles, their laughter or their piercing looks trying to nail Joan of Arc on the spot.
Dreyer thus can naturally avoid the real torture scenes and can deal with that sequence in an allusive and indirect mental way. We can see the machines but we do not see the real brutality imposed to Joan of Arc? Our imagination has to compensate. That is good because Dreyer's art is emotionally evocative when he is dealing with physical pain and torments. He can thus concentrate on the faces and their expressions. Dreyer is thus able to avoid the symbolism of silent films at the time, that symbolical acting that was so conventional and we can find a lot in Fritz Lang (though Fritz Lang also uses metaphorical symbolism) and in Hollywood that is producing at the time more comedies and comic farces than dramas and tragedies. The Russians are in another style with Eisenstein, more demonstrative, more political and ideological.
And that's where Dreyer's film is slightly weak. The whole film is a miracle of human expressivity that builds up the real atmosphere in this old century when religion was the only reference, Jesus was a real being you could talk to, God was another real character you could easily see in your sleep. The whole social life was dictated by this clerical catholic faith. The film shows marvellously how the faith of one can become the heresy of the other, not because the other is necessarily vicious, but just because the one used the wrong word, a word that means the devil in the language of the church. The church and its official beliefs at any time (and these beliefs can change with time) are the only yardstick everyone uses, Joan of Arc as well as the church officials in Rouen. But her declared faith in Jesus and God becomes for the priests and the monks, the abbots and the bishops the evidence she is possessed because she uses a direct address to Jesus or God and pretends she can communicate with them, which is not possible in this church at the time since communication with God and Jesus could only come through the priest and mostly from the top to the bottom, from God to the people, but through the priest.
Was Joan of Arc announcing the coming of the Reformation and the Protestant faith? Probably. The Middle Ages were coming to an end and the new spirit that gave the individual a tremendously more important role to play was already coming up.
But at the end of the film Dreyer falls in the trap of a popular upheaval against the English and a political conclusion about Joan of Arc and the French. Joan of Arc started something important in Europe and not only in France. She announces, represents the birth of nations which are going to bring in due time the end of feudalism. In this case, the birth of a French national feeling that will take two centuries to become something stable and real. The defeat of the English on the continent with their defeat in the One-Hundred-Year war is going to push England back into its borders and the national feeling is going to develop there faster because it is an island and because the last feudal entity, the Holy Roman Empire of Charles Quint and Philip II of Spain will make the mistake of attacking England that had been the first country to nationalize their church and religion in the European world at the time, more than two centuries before the French Revolution does the same in, France.
That complexity is not captured by Dreyer in his conclusion though he shows marvellously well how the feudal absolute control of the church on the people is coming to an end because individuals do not follow rules but follow their conscience, their intimate conviction. That is new indeed.
Spend some time on this brand new restored version of the film. If you get the Masters of Cinema version, you will have a second version edited after Dreyer and you will have an important booklet explaining a lot of things about Dreyer and his films, and the cinema at the time.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU