I thought I was a top-of-the-line cinephile, especially when it came to films of the distant past. But a friend of mine taught me I had more to learn. The film my friend insisted I watch may be almost 100 years old, but its story is timeless. Since it is May, and the film’s “star” will be celebrating her feast day at the end of the month, it’s time to pay my friend’s recommendation forward.
I am still unsure how Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” escaped my notice all these years, but I’m glad for my friend’s guidance. It is truly one of the greatest silent films of the era and probably deserves a ranking among any film since.
Dreyer, who was Danish, was commissioned by the French Film Society to make a film about Joan of Arc due to a resurgence in the saint’s popularity. Though wrongfully tried, convicted, and burned at the stake in 1431, it was only in 1920, eight years before the film was made, that Joan was declared a saint by the Church. Dreyer was given the artistic freedom to interpret the “passion” of the saint as he wished. What resulted is a film that still resonates 97 years later.
It was also a film that caused a lot of controversy. Leaders in the Church were not keen on reexamining the trial of St. Joan of Arc and the film underwent many edits against the director’s wishes. Then, in a twist that sounds like a movie in and of itself, the discovery of the original “director’s cut” of the film was found in, of all places, a mental hospital near Oslo.
There are no such plot twists in the 1928 film. There is no backstory, no scenes of a young and happy Joan frolicking in the fields of France and hearing disembodied voices. The film opens like a slap in the face, in a style that, even today, will jolt the most jaded audience. It is a film that unfolds in a series of high-intensity close-ups, crooked camera angles, and a concrete set giving a nightmarish version of a medieval bastion to accompany the nightmare scenario playing out in the life of St. Joan.
The actors wear no makeup. The Italian actress who plays Joan looks like she could have stepped off a medieval tapestry hanging on the wall of a castle. She is strangely detached and stoic as grotesque prosecutors and torturers flit around her like ravenous wolves.
When I was a child and addicted to watching old movies on TV, I remembered the Ingrid Bergman Hollywood production of the life of Joan of Arc. I liked it because it was in color, had sound, and the simple good-versus-evil template was easy for me to comprehend. But I was always confused by seeing Church men putting Joan on trial. When I was a child, I thought they had to be Protestants. When I got a little older and realized there were no Protestants in 1430, I became uneasy with the story of St. Joan of Arc.
How could the Church condemn a woman and then make her a saint? The answer came to me as I got a little wiser. The Church is made up of human beings, and that alone is all you need to have a moral debacle.
But it is that same Church, through God’s grace and patience, that can set things straight. Even though the trial of Joan of Arc was not the Church’s high-water mark, she still preserved the minutes of the trial for the centuries that followed. The words on the title cards of this film (those placards silent movies had to use to show some of the dialogue taking place on screen) were taken directly from the original trial transcripts.
The Church is not always good at transparency, as we all know — the human beings thing again. But in the case of Joan, God seemed to be working as hard to preserve her cause as those politically motivated French bishops serving English masters were working to destroy her.
“The Passion of Joan of Arc” is both a giant artistic accomplishment and a spiritual insight into how God’s miraculous supervision of his Church operates. We may not understand it; we may question how the same Church that condemned Joan elevated her to sainthood. But we can marvel at God’s handiwork, the trial transcript the film so honestly sheds light on, and the knowledge that despite our flaws and our sins, God never abandons his followers, or his Church.
The film is only a little more than an hour long and can be watched for free on YouTube.
It would be a good way to spend the feast day of St. Joan of Arc on May 30.
