The Passion of Joan of Arc
Short description
The Passion of Joan of Arc dramatizes the final day in the life of the fifteenth-century French peasant who led troops against the English during the Hundred Years' War and was captured at Compiègne. Held in Rouen, she stands before an ecclesiastical court on charges of heresy and sorcery, questioned by clerics who press her to admit that her visions and her claim to a divine mission were false. The interrogation moves toward a choice between submission and death at the stake, and she refuses to abandon what she holds to be true.
Carl Theodor Dreyer directed and co-wrote the film with Joseph Delteil, following his 1924 feature Michael. Maria Falconetti plays the title role, with Eugène Silvain as Bishop Pierre Cauchon, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud and Michel Simon among the twenty-three credited performers; the film runs eighty-one minutes. It was made in France by Société générale des films.
Critical and public regard for the film is exceptionally high and unusually close: critics rate it 9.4 out of 10 across sixty-three reviews, while on IMDb it holds 8.1 from roughly sixty-eight thousand votes and on TMDB 8 out of 10 from about eleven hundred.
What's left behind the scenes
- The original film negative was lost in a fire, and Dreyer re-edited a new version from takes that he had previously rejected.
- Around 1950, French film scholar Lo Duca discovered fragments of the film in the Gaumont studio archives and created his own edit of the film with subtitles and music by Vivaldi, Albinoni, and other Baroque composers as accompaniment. This version provoked strong protests from Dreyer, who stated that Lo Duca's edit had nothing to do with the original editing of his film.
- In 1985, the French Cinémathèque released a restored version of the film, fully preserving the editing of the copy found in Oslo, with subtitles translated from Danish to French. For this version, composer Richard Einhorn wrote a musical accompaniment – the oratorio “Visions of Light” – in 1994.
- The film was banned from screening in the United Kingdom because English soldiers are depicted in it as sadists, tormenting Joan.
- According to the director's vision, the film should be shown without sound accompaniment, in complete silence.
- For half a century, the original version of the film was considered lost; however, in 1981, a remarkably well-preserved, nearly complete copy of the original film with Danish subtitles was discovered in a storage room of a psychiatric clinic in Oslo, which became the basis for the restored version that exists today.
- Work on the film lasted about a year and a half.
- During filming, none of the actors wore makeup, which was completely unprecedented at the time.
- For the film, Carl Theodor Dreyer designed special sets with movable walls, which consumed the majority of the allocated budget. However, the sets are only visible in fragments in the footage, as the main focus is on close-ups of the characters.
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