Ingredients for Your Film from the Great Masters (The Passion of Joan of Arc)

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Lesson 1 Hitchcock

Lesson 2 Carl Th. Dreyer

Let us look at Carl Th. Dreyer. and his The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928.

The Passion of Joan of Arc starts by claiming authenticity. It is based on the 'one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of the world, the minutes of the trial of Joan of Arc. It also claims that this is not about 'the Joan in helmet and armour but simple and human.' Yet the ending is anything but authentically historical. There was no revolution upon Joan of Arc's death. There is no equation of Joan of Arc with the Passion of Christ in any records either. This is a blatant lie and a cinematic dance with any recorded 'facts.' It portrays the artistic licence to turn an iconic historical figure of such great French importance into a cinematic whim. After all this is Cinema with a capital C and not a documentary. Dreyer teaches us that even a biopic is a director's statement. 



Dreyer's Editing
The Passion of Joan of Arc opens with a Dolly shot that runs from left to right. The strong light is meant to create Vampyr (1932)- like shadows on the wall, endowing the film with a spectral like quality. Dreyer does not cut sequences in a way that they smoothly fuse into each other. All cuts are jump cuts or cutaways. The dolly opening is rudely interrupted by a zoom in on the Bishop and then again by a reverse shot on the protagonist who slowly starts to occupy the bottom right corner of the frame.



Watch the excerpt below

  • Faces, faces, faces.
  • No Establishing shot.
  • Joan shot in a claustrophobic close-ups
  • Incredible jump cuts rather than clean reverse shots
  • Framing of faces from below to accentuate chins, plump and other unaesthetic features.
  • Dutch angles.
  • A lot of head room that squashes characters to the bottom and out of frame.


The Torture Room
  1. Wheels right out of Metropolis (Fritz Lang) and Maria's frightened face.
  2. Elements of sci-fi
  3. A horror movie.
  4. A Vertov-like camera.
  5. A free swish buckling  Dogme 95 hand-held swipe.

The storytelling in visual form. 
Following Joan admitting and signing that she had been tricked by the devil, Dreyer presents us with a weird overturned image of soldiers reflected in a puddle before dollying into a surreal fair and circus-like entertainment. Someone is enjoying himself on a swing. The dolly is interrupted by static shots of the prison interior where Joan's hair is being shorn off.  The exterior dolly shots of revelry and entertainment are juxtaposed by the more serious and poignant static shots of Joan's cell. Dancers, a man swallowing a bottle, contortionists, a man juggling a wheel on his head and Joan's hair on the floor, Joan's sorrow, the hair swept off the floor ...... Now Dreyer tears us away from the entertainment outside. We are with Joan. A shovel to pick up the hair. The crown that we had seen earlier. A change in Joan's face and One, just one intertitle : Fetch the Judges. The look on the jailor's face and Joan's insistent stare. It is a sequence where the story is told with one line of dialogue.


And this is only scratching the surface.

Watch the Full Movie Here


 

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