The Overwhelming Power of the Human Face

Rating: 10/10 (15 October 2009)

You will not appreciate the experience of silent film until you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti. In a medium without words, where the filmmakers conceived that the camera seized the heart of characters through their faces, to see Falconetti in Dreyer's landmark is to look into electric, almost extrasensory eyes that will never relinquish you. She also embodies Joan with an unrelenting monastic guilelessness, moving as if in a dream, her body language so slow and meditative. She answers questions in taut earnest.
Dreyer had been given a large budget and a screenplay by his French producers, but he sacked the screenplay and turned in lieu to the archives of Joan's trial. They told the account that has become folklore: of how a rustic provincial girl, dressed as a boy, led the French troops in their triumph over the British occupation forces. How she was captured by French loyal to the British and brought before a church court, where her conviction that she had been emboldened by celestial apparitions led to accusations of blasphemy. There were many cross-examinations, supplemented by torment, before Joan was burned at the stake. Dreyer coalesces them into one trial, in which the judges, their faces wrenched with their alarm at her dauntlessness, hover over her with roars and charges. Men here who think they represent God are the cruelest to her. She remains undeterred. Believing her would compromise their beliefs. So she is punished for the same thing that drives them to punish her: Faith.
There is not one single establishing shot in all of Dreyer's passion play, which is filmed with eccentric, idealistic mystery by Rudolph Mate completely in closeups and medium shots, creating apprehensive proximity between Joan and her oppressors. Nor are there freely interpreted perceptible connections between shots. What does this signify to us? There is a lexicon of shooting and editing that we subliminally presume at the movies. We figure that if two people are talking, the cuts will make it appear that they are facing one another. We expect that if a judge is challenging a defendant, the camera position and editing will make it evident where they stand regarding each other. If we see three people in a room, we presume to be able to say how they are situated and which is nearest to the camera. Almost all such visual expectations are absent from this film, replaced by an all-encompassing disjointed effect.
Alternatively, the placement of cuts shapes the film into a sequence of surprising panchromatic imagery. The prison guards and the ecclesiastics on the court are seen in high contrast, frequently from a low angle, and although there are frequently knifelike structural shapes behind them, we are not certain precisely what the distance is. There is a shot of three priests, likely positioned from front to back, but shot in such a way that their heads appear piled on top of each other. All of the faces of the inquisitors are shot in bright light, without makeup, so that the clefts and blemishes of their skin appear to evince an ailing internal life.
Falconetti, in comparison, is shot in more delicate grays, instead of blacks and whites. Also without makeup, she appears austere and absorbed by internal certainty. Solitude proves her only on-screen companion in the whole film. Note an exchange where a judge asks her whether St. Michael indeed spoke to her. Her serene face looks to propose that whatever happened between Michael and herself was so far outside the compass of the question that no answer is possible.
Why did Dreyer splinter his space, obscure the visual impression and shoot in closeup? He might've wanted to eschew the refined snares of a historical drama. There is no landscape here, save walls and arches. Nothing was put in to look pleasing. You do not leave talking about costumes, granted they are all real. The preeminence of the faces asserts that these very people did what they did. Dreyer dismantles the church court of its ceremony and respectability and reveals its members as obese charlatans in the pay of the British. Their fixed eyes and mercenary mouths violate Joan's asceticism.
To us contemporary audiences, accustomed to films where emotion is reflected by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like this 1928 sequence of expressions is a disconcerting undertaking, so penetrating we worry we will unearth more occult than we wish, although watching with the Visions of Light soundtrack makes a hugely profound difference. It is deeply moving music, and also allows a less demanding experience from a modern audience. It is a testament to the film's power that it also features a performance by Antonin Artaud, who wrote of a need for a "Theatre of Cruelty," by which he meant a fierce, physical grit to eradicate false reality. He believed that text had been a bully over subject and implication, and wanted in its place a theatre comprised of a unique language halfway between concept and action. Our compassion is provoked so vigorously for Joan that Dreyer's visual methods don't even play like aesthetic decisions, but like the remnants of Joan's experience. Depleted, emaciated, frozen, in perpetual despair, merely 19 when she died, she lives in a chimera where the faces of her tyrants surge like savage nightmares.