silver nitrate notes

Falconetti's Face

8 nov 2014

Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is built almost entirely out of close-ups. The decision was not commercial. Silent audiences expected establishing shots, decorative interiors, romantic backgrounds. Dreyer gave them a face.

Renée Jeanne Falconetti (1892-1946) was a stage actress in Paris when Dreyer cast her. She had made one film before, a comedy almost no one has seen. Joan of Arc was her second and last. She did not act on screen again.

The screenplay drew on the surviving trial transcripts, condensing the eighteen months of Joan's interrogation into what plays as a single day. Dreyer and his cinematographer Rudolph Maté (1898-1964) photographed Falconetti and her interrogators at unusually close range. Maté used a panchromatic stock that registered the fine grain of skin. Falconetti wore no makeup. Her hair was cropped during the shoot, on camera, in a sequence that retains its violence almost a century later.

What is unusual is not just the closeness of the camera but the angles. Dreyer placed the camera below the eye line of the judges, looking up, and at or above Joan, looking down. The result is a courtroom that feels architecturally hostile. The judges loom. Joan is pressed into the bottom of the frame. When Maté does cut to a wider view, the geography of the room is deliberately incoherent. We never know how far apart the speakers are. Distance is psychological, not measurable.

Falconetti's performance is what makes the film work, and writing about it is hard. Pauline Kael called film acting a question of the camera finding the right face, and Falconetti has the right face. Tears appear and recede. The eyes flicker between exhaustion and focus. There is a long-running anecdote that Dreyer kept her on her knees on stone floors between takes to keep her tired and afraid. The truth of this is unclear, but the exhaustion is on screen either way.

The film was released in 1928 to immediate critical praise and commercial trouble. The original negative was destroyed in a fire at the UFA labs in Berlin. Dreyer assembled a second version from outtakes. That version was also lost in a fire. For decades the only available prints were reconstructions made from surviving fragments. Then, in 1981, a film archivist in Norway opened a closet in the staff area of an Oslo psychiatric hospital and found a near-complete print, in good condition, of Dreyer's original cut. No one knows how it got there. The Criterion edition uses this print.

Gilberto Perez wrote about Joan at length in The Material Ghost (1998). David Bordwell's The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (1981) is the standard study. Both are worth reading. But the film does not really need a guide. Watch it on a clean transfer, ideally without the Einhorn score the Criterion edition pairs it with. Watch the face.

[ « prev: The Wind · next: Bride of Frankenstein » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Bordwell, David. The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer. University of California Press, 1981.
[2] Perez, Gilberto. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
[3] Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press, 1972.
[4] Criterion Collection essay by Mark Le Fanu, 1999.