Retrospective: The Passion of Joan of Arc (Patreon)

Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc has no grand visions of heaven. God himself does not appear to comfort Joan as she is systematically tortured and murdered by the Catholic Church of France. We do not witness Joan's heyday as a leader of France or her victories in battle. We only see her at the end, tormented by the leadership for her politically inconvenient faith and fortitude.

Dreyer's film is a French nationalist fable directed by a Dane who was punished by his country of employment for deigning himself fit to tell their story. There's a trace of autobiography in Joan's tribulations as she faces down one truculent Frenchman after another. She has no comfort, no external assurance that she's right; the audience knows she is right not primarily because of history but because her integrity shows that she must be telling the truth.

The film consists mostly of closeups on actors with no makeup; we see tears, blemishes, dirt on the faces of the actors, including (of all people) Antonin Artaud. It's realism and fable at once. Dreyer takes history and plays it in the register of Biblical myth. As the world recovered from the war to end all wars, in the time that most justified being an atheist, these Danish and French filmmakers made a triumphant argument for belief. Cinema may have peaked with Dreyer's Joan of Arc.