The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
I am not a religious man, despite being raised Catholic. That’s not to say, though, that I’ve never suffered from crises of faith — faith in the world around me, faith in my political or philosophical beliefs. Faith in myself. Faith refuses to exist only in the narrow religious definitions we might assign it. It is characteristic of our whole existence, our belief in life as a total sum. Perhaps this is why we see through the eyes of Falconetti’s Joan, into her soul.
The experience of Passion is otherworldly, almost dreamlike, a quality lent it partly by the film’s age — almost a century. Would the film have the same mystique if it were in technicolour? Would it, if it were a talkie, and we could hear Joan’s weeping consume it? The silence deafens us. It is consecrated. Catholicism’s fetish for noiselessness and chaste simplicity drowns out what technological advance could have given Passion. This is not a film that could be made now, not for any silly reason of a time when films were Great, but simply for its timelessness. It is not of now nor then.
Where does it exist, then, if not anywhere or any when? Our hearts and souls reach out to Joan as we watch her, bearing witness to her torture. We understand her, not because we all have been interrogated and abused by some cruel jury, unless that jury is ourselves — but because we have all suffered our own crises of faith that we witness in Joan. We see her be human. And her humanity is furious. The close-up long-takes of her face exact a certain terror on the screen at the depth of human pain and beauty there. One need not feel Joan’s love for God to feel the power of her faith. To love one’s god is to love one’s self, after all.
The institutions will never recognise that. If Christ came in to the House of God and asked for food and shelter, don’t you think he would be turned away, lunatic and mad? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps Joan is messianic; perhaps she is not. The camera wonders about this. We can almost feel it as it beatifies her. As it displays the raw ugliness of a clergy who would burn the child of God to death. We are all the children of God, so they say. But this is nothing new.
This is not a holy film. It is not a film about gods and demons, invoked as often as they are. It is about a woman and her trial. Her faith and her truth. Her passion in her Passion. It is human. Humanity in the dredges of despair. Don’t forget her eyes when the pyre burns and the screen flicks back to black. They hold the heart of a star, a faith so rigid it consumes you.
