The Passion of Joan of Arc

Both of today's films are built around something that cannot be seen.

In The Passion of Joan of Arc it is a voice. Joan says she hears the voice of God. The screenplay is drawn almost entirely from the actual record of her 1431 trial at Rouen, and the single thing that record contains most of is the judges asking her, over and over, the same question: what did you hear? What did the voice say? They want her to hand the voice over, so it can become evidence a court can process.

Dreyer knew the voice could not be photographed. So he photographed a face. He described his aim as a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life — and a soul cannot be put on film. A face can.

In The Spirit of the Beehive it is a monster. In 1940, with the Spanish Civil War just over, a mobile cinema arrives at an isolated village on the Castilian plateau and screens the 1931 American horror film Frankenstein. Ana, six or seven years old, asks her sister afterwards: why did he kill the girl, and why did they kill him? Her sister tells her that everything in a film is a lie, that the monster did not die, that he is like a spirit, and that if she closes her eyes and calls him she can talk to him.

Ana spends the rest of the film looking for him. And Erice never gives her, or us, a single marker to separate what is happening from what she is imagining.

Neither film explains its own mystery. The court asks dozens of times what Joan heard, and her answer is never the one it wants; Ana asks why the monster killed the girl, and nobody answers her. One film rebuilds a trial from a transcript nearly five hundred years old; the other rebuilds a village through a child's eyes. Forty-five years apart — one silent, black and white, in close-up; one in colour, in honey-coloured light, in widescreen.

The second reason is the archive itself.

It now holds 20 films across 18 countries or territories and 10 decades. But Spain is at zero — and The Spirit of the Beehive is, as of 2022, the only film by a Spanish or Latin American director on Sight & Sound's list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Silent cinema is likewise at one film (Metropolis, 1927), and the 1920s at one. Today Spain goes from 0 to 1 and silent cinema from 1 to 2.

The third reason is internal, and it runs along two opposite lines.

The silent line. The 1927 slot already holds Metropolis. Two silent films from the same decade going in completely opposite directions: Lang bets everything on the set, Dreyer bets everything on the face. Metropolis spends its budget on a city; The Passion of Joan of Arc spends seven million francs on an octagonal concrete Rouen castle with ten-centimetre walls — and then the camera refuses to pull back. There is no establishing shot anywhere in the film.

The record line. The archive already holds Close-Up (1990), also a film built on real material — but it has the real people re-enact themselves. The Passion of Joan of Arc takes a trial transcript nearly five hundred years old and sends an actress into it. The same idea from opposite ends: bring the real person back to perform, or walk the performer into the real record.

The Spirit of the Beehive connects to Come and See (1985). The archive already has one film that puts a child into the empty ground left by war — that one is the battlefield in Belarus; this one is Spain five years after, in a village where nothing happens, which is worse. It also pairs with Spring in a Small Town: neither film shows the war. Both show only the silence it left inside a house.

One last reason is a date: in two days, on 8 October, The Spirit of the Beehive marks 53 years since its Spanish release.

故事发生在 1431 年的鲁昂。

贞德在贡比涅附近被俘，落到勃艮第—英格兰联盟手里，随后被带到鲁昂，由一批效忠英格兰的法国神职人员以异端罪名审判。审她的人要的并不是她的命，而是一句话：只要她承认自己听见的「声音」不是来自上帝，她自称的使命就作废，查理七世在兰斯的加冕也就失去依据。

所以她被反复地问同一个问题。她的回答从头到尾没有变。

法庭换了几种办法：一名神父在狱中向不识字的她宣读一封伪造的、声称来自法国国王查理七世的信；带她去看刑具；最后以火刑相威胁。影片就在这几种办法之间推进，直到最后那个结局——那个结局是历史，不是剧透。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film made out of a transcript

The Passion of Joan of Arc (French title La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) is a French silent film of 1928, directed by the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, written by Dreyer with Joseph Delteil.

Its source is not a novel but the actual record of Joan's 1431 trial. Dreyer researched it for more than eighteen months and condensed 29 interrogations spread across 18 months into a single day on screen.

He described his aim in one sentence: "I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life." That sentence explains every formal choice in the film. A soul cannot be photographed, so he aimed the camera at the only place where a soul is visible: the face.

Performance: a stage actress in front of a camera, once

Joan is played by Renée Jeanne Falconetti (1892–1946), then 35 and already a celebrated Paris stage actress working mainly in light comedy and musicals. Dreyer found her in an amateur production of La Garçonne.

It was her second and last film role. After The Passion of Joan of Arc she never returned to a camera.

Dreyer forbade make-up and used the newly developed panchromatic film so that skin would be recorded naturally. He asked Falconetti to strip all expression from her face, so that the audience would have to read what was being held down.

The best-known stories about the shoot — Dreyer making her kneel on stone, shooting the same set-up again and again until she was close to collapse — were repeated by Roger Ebert. But Dreyer's biographers Jean and Dale Drum state that these accounts rest on rumour alone, and that "there is no evidence that Dreyer could be called a sadist." Their witnesses describe something else: Dreyer and Falconetti watching rushes of a single scene seven or eight times together until a few feet of film were exactly right; later she could play a scene from his explanation alone, with no rehearsal.

It is worth remembering that the most famous story about this film is also the one with the weakest evidence.

Camera and set: holding the audience against a face

The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté; editing was by Marguerite Beaugé with Dreyer; the production designers were Hermann Warm (previously a designer on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and Jean Hugo.

The budget of roughly seven million francs went into an enormous octagonal concrete set standing in for medieval Rouen Castle — outer walls, houses, an execution courtyard and a cathedral, with walls ten centimetres thick. The whole set was painted pink, because pink photographed as the right grey in black and white and separated the walls from the white sky.

The film's best-known formal trait is that it almost never uses an establishing shot. It gives the audience no wide view of where we are or who is present; from the first shot it pushes people into close-up. Dreyer also used heavy low angles to make the judges loom and distort — the crew dug holes in the floor for them, which earned him the nickname "Carl Gruyère."

History: a film burned, then found in a closet

The film's distribution history is a story in itself.

• 6 December 1928: a fire at the UFA studios in Berlin destroyed the original negative. Dreyer could only reassemble a version from alternate and unused takes.
• 1933: a 61-minute version appeared, narrated by the radio star David Ross, with no intertitles.
• 1952: Joseph-Marie Lo Duca found material in the Gaumont vaults and reworked it heavily, adding baroque music and replacing intertitles with narration. Dreyer objected to it.
• 1981: a janitor clearing a closet at Dikemark Hospital in Asker, Norway — a mental institution outside Oslo — found three film canisters. They went to the Norwegian Film Institute and sat there for three years before anyone opened them. They turned out to be Dreyer's original cut, made before government and church censorship — still in their original 1928 packaging, addressed to the hospital's then director, Harald Arnesen.

The most complete version of this film came back from a closet in a psychiatric hospital fifty-three years after its premiere.

Music: it has dozens of scores

Silent films have no fixed soundtrack, so the score history of Joan of Arc is nearly as long as its version history. The 1928 Paris score was by Léo Pouget and Victor Alix; Dreyer was never fully satisfied with any score he heard. Later composers include Ole Schmidt (1983), Richard Einhorn (the 1994 oratorio Voices of Light, included on the Criterion Collection release as an optional track) and Cat Power (live accompaniment, 1999).

Where it stands

• Sight & Sound: 7th in 1952 and 1972; 10th (critics) and 6th (directors) in 1992; 9th (critics) in 2012; joint 21st (critics) and joint 30th (directors) in 2022 — tied with Man with a Movie Camera as the highest-ranked silent film on the directors' list.
• 4th on the 1958 Brussels World's Fair "Brussels 12" list.
• Named the greatest silent film ever made by The Guardian in 2010.
• 23rd on the BBC's 2018 list of the 100 greatest foreign-language films; 64th on Cahiers du cinéma's 2008 list of 100 greatest films.
• Added to the Vatican's list of films in 1995, under "Religion."
• Entered the US public domain in 2024 as a 1928 work.
• Rotten Tomatoes: 98% from 63 reviews, average 9.40/10.

Ebert wrote the line that gets quoted most: "You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renée Maria Falconetti." Pauline Kael called her performance "may be the finest performance ever recorded on film."

One note from the time: Variety's review at the premiere called it "a deadly tiresome picture." A film now routinely placed among the greatest ever made was a disaster in the trade press.