Horrifying Masterwork.

Rating: 8/10 (23 December 2012)

There's no doubt about Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" being a work of genuine poetry. Nothing like it had been seen before. The performances are nearly perfect, although Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc has few light moments, as you can imagine. Dreyer's direction was all new to the screen, mostly low-angle close ups. The set direction was similarly innovative. All the rooms are spare and brightly lighted. Even the torture chamber is clean and uncluttered -- no pots of oil bubbling over a fire, no hairy greaseballs going grimly about their tasks. We get a hypnotic glimpse of a spool of spikes whirling, and what appears to be some sharp and jagged farm implements hanging on the wall.
I don't know where the Dreyer managed to find such faces. Some of the bishops have warts that look like boils; some have handsome and earnest features. The dwarf-like low-lifes who tug her from place to place caper and giggle with glee at Joan's distress. BOY, does the church want her to sign that paper that will at once save her life and betray her belief in God's message.
But I can't watch it more than once or twice. There's very little in the way of torture -- nothing like today's movies with bath tubs of gore and screams so loud they launch your basilar membranes into a tarantella. Joan is feverish and faints and the good doctors bleed her, as is the custom of the day, and that's it for foreplay.
But when she burns, it seems to take forever, and Falconetti's face goes through one expression after another, like a chameleon changing its pattern. It's too painful.
Am I permitted to add a little note, not directly related to the film. In the last 1960s, the critic Stanley Kaufmann was teaching film appreciation at Columbia. He showed this movie and asked for responses. They ranged all over, comparing it to Preminger's movie about Jean Darc, the actual historical figure from both the French and English perspectives, and so on. It was one of the reasons Kaufmann was prompted to write "The Film Generation," predicting that in the future classical movies would have virtually replaced literature as the principal art form. Within twenty years, he retracted his prediction, having found that in the intervening years the intellectual reach of his students had regressed to the mean, or perhaps dropped below it.
Anyway, you may not want to watch it often either, but you're not likely to forget it.