Neither tedious nor a masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (30 March 2007)

I've heard that this film is notoriously unwatchable; I've heard that it is one of the greatest moving pictures of all time. Given my negative experience of other 'great experimental' classics -- "Napoleon", "Metropolis", "Greed" -- I had a suspicion that my own reaction might lie on the former end of the scale: but when the chance to see it presented itself, I felt I ought to take the opportunity. To further my cinematic education, if nothing else.
Oddly enough, while it seems to be a film that normally evokes a violent response in one direction or the other, I found myself left floating mildly in the middle. I didn't think it was the greatest film ever made, but I didn't find it unwatchable either.
On the most basic level, I can't help feeling that Dreyer picked one of the most unsuitable subjects for a silent film possible: a dramatization of a verbal transcript! I can see the trial of Joan of Arc being presented as an effective radio drama, along the lines of Dorothy L. Sayers' Christ-play, "The Man Born to be King", but trying to make a silent movie out of it produces a horribly forced format: the courtroom scenes consist entirely of mouthed dialogue shown on transcribed title cards, followed by incredibly prolonged reaction shots. The (no doubt unintended) impression given was that the reaction shots were only there to break up what would otherwise be an unbroken series of intertitles, rather than being an active artistic choice: certainly Joan must have been an incredibly uncooperative witness if it really took her that long to answer each question. The format just doesn't seem to fit the content: 'talky' silent films are generally a mistake, and this section was nothing *but* talk.
And tears. I've never encountered a Joan who cried so much -- I was left wondering if that was why Falconetti was cast, since she seems to have a decided talent for it. The endless weeping didn't actually seem in character for a girl who produces the sort of smart comebacks quoted in the script, and the director seemed to be wallowing in tormenting both star and audience. I was aware of my neighbours fidgeting.
But it picks up, unsurprisingly, when it shifts into more natural silent territory and actually allows the characters to move. The sets appear to be cardboard in the most literal sense of the term (the painted-on arrow-slits are particularly obvious), but I couldn't tell if that was a deliberate gesture at modernism or simply the result of budgetary limitations; it gave the whole thing a certain stage play air, but when we actually see the soldiers tormenting Joan rather than watching characters mouth words for the camera, the style becomes more fluid.
One technical device I found irritating was the repeated choice to film faces in three-quarter-length, with their foreheads cut off at the eyebrows. This is a mannerism I associate with the misuse of widescreen (which seems to have inherent problems with the fact that humans, unlike landscapes, aren't actually constructed in a letter-box shape), and the 'low-brow' result annoys me just as much coming from 1927 as it does in 2004. But that's just a personal quirk...
More audience reaction as we got to the blood-letting: there were audible groans and ughs, and I couldn't help wondering how this was done! Presumably they didn't *really* stick a scalpel into someone's artery, let alone Miss Falconetti's? I noticed that the whole thing was shot in tight close-up with no glimpse of Joan's face.
The finale, on the other hand, was more than gruesome enough for anybody, and the contrast to the unmoving opening scenes is stark: Dreyer seems to have gone into Mel-Gibson mode with full gore, writhing flames, etc. Perhaps the only common factor with the courtroom sequence is that it goes on and on: there was certainly no fidgeting at this point, or if there was I myself was too horrified and riveted to be aware of it.
But even here there were some consciously arty moments to break the spell: the repeated cut-aways from the bound Joan to free-flying birds were less than subtle, and I can see why the use of the 'pendulum shot' didn't catch on... However, it is certainly convincing, probably too much so to pass for a PG certificate in the modern world: the shots of the charred body slumping into the rising flames are particularly explicit. One is left with the impression of having seen someone burned to death.
I don't think I was impressed by the bits that I was probably intended to be impressed by, and I spent a lot of the trial being haunted by echoes of Bernard Shaw's play "St Joan", written a few years before this film came out: presumably both authors were quoting from the same sources, although it was distracting to recognise the retorts of Shaw's combative peasant girl while simultaneously presented with a visual of Dreyer's tortured saint. On the other hand, I wasn't nearly as bored as I might have expected to be. The experimental features either passed me by or were actively off-putting, but the film didn't lose my interest.