About eight years after she was canonized, in 1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer made a film on Joan of Arc. It was called The Passion of Joan of Arc. While the English government banned it, the Catholic Church called for alterations to be made. Both were uneasy with the very raw portrayal of the trial of Joan of Arc. While they were keen to canonize her, they were clearly weary of artists attempting to continuously rediscover the truth about her and the manner in which she was tried and executed. Such was the irony. Soon enough, the original copy of the film went missing. Some say it was destroyed by fire. Dreyer made several attempts to reassemble a version of it from the outtakes and surviving prints, but it was unsuccessful and the man died believing that his film was lost forever.
But, as it is often the case, ghosts from the past have a way of emerging from the most unexpected places at the most unexpected times. So it was with this film. In 1981, while cleaning a janitor’s closet in a mental institution in Oslo, Norway, a complete print of the original version of the film was discovered. It was digitized and widely circulated, and later, came to be acknowledged as one of the finest films in twentieth century.
In contrast to the extravagance and glamour of contemporary films, this film is silent, although accompanied by a few haunting orchestral pieces from beginning to end; this film is in black and white; this film was mostly shot in a studio; this film has no special effects; and most importantly, the heroine of this film have no make-up on, rather all she has are unmanicured fingers, a wrinkled face and an exhausted yet determined body. It is raw. It is matter-of-fact. For today’s audience, this film belongs to an aesthetic world that is uninviting and less stimulating.
Unlike the Hollywood film on Joan of Arc, produced in 1999, where the court room that tried Joan was filled with men, women and children, in this film, the court room was filled only with men; not just any men, but men of high ranking in church and state, who seemed to take a certain sadistic pleasure in taunting and harassing the sole woman in their midst, Joan (a role beautifully played by Renee Jeanne Falconetti). Their repressed male selfs appear to be fearful and anxious of who Joan is. Her determination to put on visible markers of masculinity, her exceptional boldness and her claims to divine visitation are beyond what their patriarchal fantasies and imaginations can hold. After all, how could she cross dress like a man? How could she talk back to men? And more importantly, how could she claim to have communicated with God? Is a woman ever capable of such feat? Her inquisitors are perturbed by who she is and hence, they feel the urge to discipline and control her – something the film effectively portrays.
Besides the more direct and visible intimidation techniques, for these high ranking men, religion and sacrament become effective tools of discipline and control. They take advantage of their captive’s vulnerability, and employ religion and sacrament to confuse her rationality, to convict her, and to even force a confession out her, which she later retracts. It is worth noting that Joan is a deeply devout woman, and this is a characteristic that, on the one hand, allows the religious elite to manipulate her, and on the other, becomes a source of immense courage for her to be herself. In other words, as a devout Catholic living in the middle ages, she is a prisoner of the dominant religious discourse of the time which insisted on the necessity of priesthood and sacraments for personal redemption. This is the reason why, in the film, she insists on receiving the holy communion, as she foresees her death, from the same church fathers that are taunting her. Of course, the church fathers take advantage of this situation and use the sacrament of holy communion as a bargaining chip for extracting a confession out of her. If it is her faith that entraps her, it is also her faith that eventually empowers her to not succumb to the pressures of her inquisitors, and therein, retract her confession. She realises that the intermediaries between human beings and God, who she had been taught to value and respect, are actually people sent by the devil “to make me suffer”. She begins to previlege her own direct encounter with God rather than the structures of organized faith that do not recognize who she is and keeps her a prisoner. Ultimately, as she retracts her confession and gets ready for her execution, she realises that although the stake awaits her, she has been set free by her faith.
This old film, which had been banned and almost censored, which had been lost and found, continues to be relevant today. If this was a film that had a popular market today, the guardians of institutionalized religion, who have always taken a liking to censorship and bans would have been quick to silence it since the various questions that it raises regarding gender and spirituality continue to remain unresolved and uncomfortable.