-Devdutt Trivedi
Carl Dreyer’s Passion De Jeanne D’Arc has the unique position of reinventing cinema completely in 1928. Although Dreyer was influenced by Eisenstein’s Battleship Pottemkin (1925) which he saw before attempting this film, the film, as important as Eisenstein’s masterwork, creates a very different aesthetic from that of Russian montage. The film is important primarily for its use of close-up as the classic example of Deleuzean affection image so that Dreyer could ‘shake up the audience so that they feel the characters on their own skin.’
The film is closer to the French impressionist masterworks of the 1920s particularly the work of Abel Gance whose masterworks La Roue (The Wheel,1923) and Napoleon (1927) influenced Dreyer in his ability to free action from the subjectivity of the characters. In this way through affection image Dreyer proceeds to create a temporal cinema about the life of ‘the soul’ through the duration of cinema’s spatial domain. Dreyer used the noted cameraman Rudolf Maté (also known as Rudolf Mayer), who had assisted the cinematographer used by the great silent film master Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau, Karl Freund, and was responsible for the Expressionistic Hollywood genre which came to be known as Film Noir. He also borrowed the Expressionist painter, Hermann Warm from the German expressionists, who opposed Eisenstein’s dictum of the ‘people at work’ to the dictum of ‘soul at work’ to capture the disturbed psyche of the German masses after the First World War. The set design is only influenced by Expressionism in the way in which it uses disproportionate backgrounds to highlight the affect of the close-ups. In this way the film was a combination of French Impressionism, German Expressionism and Russian montage.
The film defied the axis rule as it did not establish the center point between speaker and respondent, between shot and counter-shot and instead fragmented the space in a way reminiscent of the Cubists. Although Eisenstein rejected the film and called it ‘a set of beautiful photographs’ that did not according to Eisenstein create cinema, the film influenced film makers including Jean-Luc Godard who did away with the axis rule in his first masterpiece Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live,1962). In an emblematic sequence in Godard’s film, his then wife Anna Karina who plays the prostitute Nana, watches the last sequences of Dreyer’s film with Maria Falconneti as Chem talking to Jean Massieu played by the creator of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, Antonin Artaud. Godard cuts to a close-up of Anna Karina as she sheds a tear, a homage to Dreyer’s use of close-ups.
The film completed on a budget between 7 to 9 million francs, gave Dreyer tremendous satisfaction as he later said ‘I was given a free hand’ and was based on the five act structure of the classical Greek and Roman text. The phases include the first phase of confict, the second consisting of psychological background to the conflict forming a knot, the third being the torture chamber where Jeanne is confronted by the French Papacy, the surprising turn, where Jeanne shocks the Clergy with her discourse on her relationship with divination and the last being the resolution. Unlike Bresson, who Schrader clubbed alongside Ozu and Dreyer in his book Transcendental Style in Film (1972), Dreyer preferred professional actors as opposed to non-actors as they were able to give an ‘artistic expression to the soul.’ The lead performer, Falconetti was a comedian in the
Paris theatre circuit. Dreyer preferred actors to capture the ‘spirit of the people they portrayed’ without make-up but compromised with heavy lighting to not lose out on the quality of the image. Amongst the actors was Michel Simon, who would later become a great comedian, but was only an extra on Dreyer’s production. Simon, according to Caspar Tybjerg, described Dreyer as a ‘certifiable lunatic.’ Dreyer was able to do this through the pan-chromatic film stock released by Agfa. However Dreyer did subject the violence of reality, in the shoot between May to November 1927, to the professional actors, indicated by his insistence of cutting Jeanne-Falconetti’s hair, even after facing severe resistance to the act from the actress.
The film was made as a symbol of French nationalism, as the French claimed Jeanne as their own in the aftermath of events in 1920’s France. The film faced tremendous opposition as it was directed by a non-French director and had cast, at the time, Griffith’s actress, the American Lillian Gish who was also not French. The film was followed up by the Nationalist, La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d'Arc, directed by Marco De Gastyne in 1929. Dreyer was influenced by the writings of his scriptwriter Joseph Deltail as well as the writings of Anne Fontaine on ‘Jeanne D’Arc.’
The film was premiered in Paris on April 21, 1928 before it was released in Dreyer’s home country, Denmark. The film was summed up by the poet and film maker Jean Cocteau who said ‘Battleship Pottemkin imitated a documentary but Jean D’Arc created documentation when none existed.’ The film was described by Dreyer in 1939 as his best film without make-up. Lis Jacobson who was present at the Paris premier eulogized the film saying that it was able to ‘rip the skin of the human being to show us the naked soul.’ Although Dreyer insisted that it was meant for general audiences, the film soon got the reputation because of its exaggerated form of being fit for sophisticated audiences as an avant-garde film.
Reference
Caspar Tybjerg