New score for old face of anguish
Sometimes, miracles do happen. “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece, remains one of the most intense films ever made, with a one-ofa-kind central performance by Maria Falconetti in her only major film role.
That there’s a revelatory new restoration, with a newly created electronic and acoustic score by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp and Adrian Utley of Portishead, seems, like the visions of Joan, to be some sort of divine intervention.
Consider that the film was virtually lost for half a century, surviving only in tantalizing scraps after the original negative was destroyed, as much nitrate-based film was at the time, in a fire. Then, in 1981, a print of the complete, uncut version was discovered, in all places, the janitor’s closet in a mental institution in Oslo, Norway.
A restoration debuted in 1985, but film preservation techniques have come a long way in the decades since. Now, one can appreciate the groundbreaking vision of Dreyer, Falconetti and cinematographer Rudolph Mate in its full power. The new restoration has played recently at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and last week at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael with an older score, but the print is scheduled to screen with the new score at the Smith Rafael at 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 21, and Dec. 28.
Joan of Arc (1412-31), of course, famously claimed to receive heavenly visions that told her to support the French king Charles VII and resist British occupation of France near the end of the Hundred Years War. Although a teenage girl, Joan fought in the French army and was instrumental in the French victory at the Battle of Orleans, becoming a national hero. But she was captured and put on trial by the British, who challenged her visions as blasphemous and burned her at the stake.
When Dreyer, a Danish director, decided to make a film of Joan of Arc, she was all the rage in popular culture. Cecil B. DeMille made an actionpacked epic about her (“Joan the Woman,” 1916); she was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church in 1920 and soon after was the subject of a popular George Bernard Shaw play.
But Dreyer went a whole other direction. Instead of an action epic, he created an intimate film of closeups, focusing on the trial of Joan of Arc. He based his screenplay on actual trial transcripts, built sparse sets and, unusual in a silent film at the time, dictated that the actors wear no makeup.
“I did not study the clothes of the times and things like that,” Dreyer later wrote. “The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present. I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life. Everything human is expressed in the face, as the face is the mirror of the soul.”
In Falconetti, Dreyer found a face for the ages. She was a successful comedic actress on the French stage at the time, but her big, expressive eyes and strong bone structure were what he was looking for. Mate, later a cinematographer (“Stella Dallas,” “Foreign Correspondent”) and director (“D.O.A.”) in Hollywood, used a special panchromatic film stock that made facial details stand out with a sharp clarity.
Most of the film is an interrogation, where Joan, the only major female character in the film, undergoes some serious gaslighting by her all male inquisitors. Her anguish is heightened not only by close-ups that fill the screen with her face, but also by the juxtaposition against bright white walls in the background and monochromatic skies.
In reality, Dreyer and Mate had the interior sets tinted yellow and the exteriors pink to heighten the look of this black-and-white film. It really is an extraordinary piece of cinema.
But the film belongs to Falconetti. Joan of Arc would later be played by actresses such as Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Milla Jovovich and Gemma Arterton, but no one found the soul of a martyr quite like this extraordinary actress, who never appeared in another film.