How do you adapt the life of a saint for the silver screen? In 1928 the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer provided an enduring response to that question with The Passion of Joan of Arc, re-released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection earlier this year.
Even in its 90th year, Passion retains its awe-inspiring power. Dreyer’s film is silent (though talking pictures were already in production by 1928) and its intertitles are based on the historic record of Joan’s trial. Renée Falconetti, who plays Joan, has a face unparalleled in its expressive power in all of cinema. To watch her eyes bulge with the fear of either God or death—which is unclear—is surely to bear witness to the making of a saint.
That gerund, making, is doing a lot of heavy lifting at the intersection of cinema and sainthood. Film by its nature isn’t well suited to depicting the life that goes into the making of a saint—or of any person of faith, for that matter. Recall that line of St. Paul’s to his disciple Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” Faith is not static trust or mere assent to a set of ideas about God or religion attained at a distinct moment in time, fired in a kiln once and preserved unchanged forever after. It’s a dynamic process of becoming; it asks work of us in the long haul. But with a movie, you’ve got two hours tops (unless you’re one of the more adventurous Eastern European types, in which case you’ve got maybe seven or eight hours in a single sitting). The options available to filmmakers have traditionally been rather limited. You could condense the timeline of a saint’s life, omitting the everyday minutiae that form the bedrock of faith. Like Dreyer, you could focus on a single, representative episode in the saint’s life, typically a moment in which faith is tested. Or you might try a combination of the two, compiling the greatest hits of stories from the life of the saint in question, as Roberto Rossellini did in The Flowers of St. Francis.
Born in 1412 or thereabouts and burned at the stake in 1431, with several years on the battlefront in between, Joan led a life that was short and exciting enough to warrant multiple film adaptations. Angelic voices, late medieval warfare, an unjust execution—what more could a moviegoer want? And so, besides Dreyer, Otto Preminger made a film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan in 1957; poor Ingrid Bergman was burned at the stake twice, once in 1948 for Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc and again in Italian six years later for Rossellini’s Joan of Arc at the Stake; Robert Bresson, not a fan of Dreyer’s film, made his own edition of The Trial of Joan of Arc in 1962; French New Wave pioneer Jacques Rivette in 1994 put together a two-part saga about Joan that, all together, runs to just under six hours (making it only his second-longest production); and Luc Besson gave Joan the war-epic treatment in 1999’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. Dreyer wasn’t even the first to stake his claim on Joan’s story. Cecil B. DeMille beat him to the punch by a dozen years with Joan the Woman in 1916, which was already 16 years behind Georges Méliès, who had made his own film about Joan, 10 minutes of which survive, at the start of the century. (I will note in passing the existence of a 1935 German film about Joan, which Graham Greene in his capacity as a film critic for the Spectator described as being “of greater interest to students of Nazi psychology than to film-goers.”)
So it isn’t because Dreyer got there first nor because his film was the only one about Joan in circulation but rather because of the combination of his audacious filmmaking and Falconetti’s unforgettable visage that his film has come to be regarded as a cinematic masterpiece.
Watching Passion today is still a remarkable experience. The sufferings of Joan, her unwavering (even, perhaps, overconfident) trust in God’s salvific powers, and the grotesqueness of her persecutors—all painstakingly adorned, sans makeup, in period-accurate dress, right down to the tonsures—puts the viewer vividly in mind of the Passion of Christ. Dreyer cuts between shots with disorienting disregard for visual continuity and an abandon verging at times on hyperactivity. The only peace to be found is that which radiates from Falconetti herself. Whether she’s drawing upon God for this peace or whether we’re merely witnessing total exhaustion is a question Dreyer leaves provocatively unanswered.
Given Joan’s illustrious cinematic legacy, we’ve been due for a new take on her life after the almost 20 years since Besson’s movie. Lo, here comes French director Bruno Dumont with Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a punk-rock musical drawing from the writings of 19th-century French poet Charles Péguy, now playing special engagements around the country. Extrapolating from the chatter I overheard after the screening I attended, most people will hate Jeannette. By all accounts it’s a terrible musical. The music, by French artist Gautier Serre (credited here as Igorrr) seems composed to be forgotten. There are no hooks, no rhymes, no elegantly phrased lyrics. Whenever a character opens his or her mouth to speak, five minutes of autotuned theological disquisitions pour out while discordant percussion and guitars erupt seemingly from behind the sheaves of grass (it’s either that or the sheep) in the sparsely inhabited fields of dust where nearly three-quarters of the film is shot.
I’ve never met a film that was too bizarre to at least attempt to comprehend, and all things considered, Jeannette is rather easy to get a handle on. When the film begins in 1425, Joan is a wee preteen. We see her first as a speck of blue fabric on the horizon of a shallow river, her body forming a bridge between an oversaturated sky and the equally blue earth below. As she draws nearer, we begin to make out her singing: some variation on the Lord’s Prayer, improvised in the way of children with unadulterated imaginations. The closer she comes to the camera the further south her ditty turns; by the time she reaches the foreground (the camera never cutting away in the interim), she stops, staring us straight in the face. Her nursery-rhyme supplication has turned into a full-on death-metal dirge. Everyone in France is dropping dead and still the kingdom of heaven is not at hand.
Though Dumont is an atheist, Jeannette gets right two very important things about Christian life: Prayer at its most sincere is weird and having faith in God does not preclude occasionally wanting to throw sharp objects at Him. The first half of the film sees Jeannette through her period of anger and doubt. She gets a lesson in humility from Madame Gervaise, the village kook who ran away from home to join a convent, inexplicably and wondrously played by two actresses who are always onscreen and in character at the same time (no one ever acknowledges that Madame Gervaise is being played by two people simultaneously; that would break the spell). Les Gervaises upbraid Jeannette for trying to take on a burden that Christ has already shouldered for her: Christ already knew infinite agony when Judas hanged himself and separated himself from God’s eternal love, so “why would you want to save the souls of the damned further than Jesus?” This is all rather heady theological stuff, if you ignore for a moment that it’s accompanied by a knowingly ridiculous punk soundtrack and—yes—a little bit of habit-dropping head-thrashing.
In the second hour, Joan has grown up (she’s in her teens now and played by an older actress) and Dumont has expanded the purview of the film beyond the sheep fields. We visit Joan’s family in one of only two set changes in the whole film. Her uncle dabs his way through all his lines; her mother stands off to the side vigorously plucking a chicken to the beat. By now Joan’s fiery adolescent anger has cooled into a no-less-irritating impatience as she waits for the fulfillment of the promises the angelic voices have been making to her since childhood. When will she get to ride off to war and fulfill her God-ordained destiny? Though Dumont loses some of the magic along with the focus of the film’s stronger first half, he does hit on a third truth about faith: It takes patience, oftentimes more of it than you can muster by yourself. Watching Jeannette receive the fruits of the spirit through much toil and frustration in her youth in Dumont’s film, it’s easier to fathom where the placidity of Falconetti’s Joan might have come from in Dreyer’s.
Whatever else it may do, art that focuses only on the most notable events and deeds in the lives of history’s holiest people runs the risk of misleading us into forgetting that saints were human, too. Joan of Arc is one of our more unusual examples, since for so many modern, non-Christian artists she was more an object of historical or aesthetic fascination or pity than a model of piety and obedience we can still learn from today.
The saints can seem like distant figures—but what if the conditions of sainthood are just as attainable today as ever? What if the transformative grace that made saints of holy men and women in Christian history is still available for us, waiting for input on our end? The instructions for Christians seeking holiness are fairly clear and simple: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Few of us have any difficulty paying lip service to that last part; it’s the prerequisite God stuff that’s scary. Whether it’s God Himself we’re afraid of or whether we’re just frightened of looking ridiculous if we loose our lips to address Him, we could all stand to be a little less self-conscious. At least we, unlike Dumont’s Jeannette, don’t need to worry that our praises and doubts will summon choirs of badly tuned bass guitars to grate on the Almighty’s ears.
