"A rustic woman, very sincere, who was also a woman who had suffered," is how director Carl Theodor Dreyer described Joan of Arc. In his silent, black and white masterpiece of 1927, "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc", Dreyer captured all three facets of her personality, drawing on a monumental performance from Renée Maria Falconetti as the French military leader turned martyred saint.
A stark and intense film, "Jeanne d'Arc" is renowned for its sparse shooting style - which focuses in on Falconetti's face with such relentless fascination that everything else (sets, props, secondary characters) disappear from view.
By showing so little interest in extraneous details, Dreyer produces a haunting vision of one woman's suffering, charting her wide-eyed terror as she is confronted by a jury of French ecclesiastics who want simply to burn her to death.
Uninterested in action, Dreyer's plot barely deserves to be called a story in the conventional sense. Opening with Joan's trial, the film is comprised of a series of questions and answers, the threat of torture and, ultimately, her execution. Yet, in the 100 minutes that follow, Dreyer unfolds an emotional, spiritual and psychological drama of epic proportions, taking us into the heart of Joan's terror as she recants her faith, then finds the courage to stand by her conviction that she is appointed by God.
It's a harrowing film, claustrophobic in its use of close-ups that unblinkingly record Joan's emotional and mental state. Each frame becomes a canvas for Dreyer's unflinching portrait of suffering.
While Dreyer could not have known it in 1927, it's also frighteningly prescient. Joan's experience as she's mocked, debased and left shaven-headed waiting for death, offers a terrifying glimpse of state-sanctioned murder that would, a few years later, claim millions of lives in Europe.
Austere and sublime, "Jeanne d'Arc" secured Dreyer's status as one of cinema's most unforgiving artists.
