The Passion of Joan of Arc

 

‘A documentary of faces showing nothing but big close-ups of heads' (1952: 74): such were the words used by the Hungarian film critic, and theorist, Béla Baláz, to describe Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of silent cinema, The Passion of Joan of Arc. In a way, he was right: after all, Dreyer’s camera did seem almost obsessively fixated on the visages of the protagonists that lingered – as heads and faces alone – in and around the austere mise-en-scène of his film, with Maria Falconetti, playing Joan, at the centre, providing what has gone down as a legendary performance in the history of cinema.

But actually, further examination of that Dreyer’s film reveals that it does much more than just presenting us with ‘a documentary of faces’ to stare or gawp at. Nowhere in this film, for example, do we find the type of ‘mindless faces’ that we see in narrative from the early years of cinema, swallowing, sneezing, exploding. Instead, what Dreyer does, though Falconetti, is showcase the explosive potential of what has been termed micro-physiognomic expressions – the minute twitching of an eye, the infinitesimal curvature of the mouth, a single tear that edges down a soft cheek – as a way of conveying an equally nuanced catalogue of thoughts, feelings or affects, significantly without the type of editing used in Kuleshov's experiment or Hitchcock’s Sabotage. A ‘documentary of faces’ – yes, but also a documentary of emotions: Dreyer’s work was, and remains, a revelation.

Want to know more?

Read more about the film here.

Watch a clip from the film here.

Watch a videoessay on the psychology of the film here.

Read about emotional contagion (see videoessay) here.