Joan of Arc: The Trial That Became Cinema

There are films you project and films you endure.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is both. Carl Theodor Dreyer made it in 1928, the same year the world was changing at a speed nobody could quite track — the talkies were arriving, the silents were becoming ghosts, and a Danish director went quietly into a Paris library, found the actual transcripts of Joan's 1431 trial, and decided to film them almost verbatim.

No invented dialogue. No dramatic licence beyond the camera's choice of what to look at.

What he found in those transcripts, and what he placed on screen, has not been matched in a century of filmmaking.

Sixty-Seven Sessions

Joan of Arc was nineteen years old when she stood trial at Rouen in the winter and spring of 1431.

The English occupied northern France. The Duke of Bedford needed a political victory. The Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon — a man who owed his position to the English crown — presided over a tribunal of seventy assessors whose conclusion was never really in doubt. What they needed was a confession, or better yet a recantation, that would discredit the French resistance Joan had come to symbolise and prove that the woman who had turned the war with her visions was nothing more than a heretic and a witch.

Sixty-seven sessions of questioning over five months. The tribunal had all the resources of the Church, the law, and the English military behind it. Joan had herself.

She was not educated. She could not read or write. She came from a village in Lorraine where she had heard voices — Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, the Archangel Michael — and the voices had told her to go to war. She had led armies. She had stood in front of men who were afraid and made them move forward. She had been captured at Compiègne, sold to the English, and brought to Rouen to be broken.

They could not break her.

The Director Who Read the Transcripts

Dreyer found the transcripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They had been discovered in Paris in 1841, a copy of the original Latin records kept by the notaries who attended the trial. They were extraordinary: verbatim questions and verbatim answers, the bureaucratic record of an institution trying to destroy one person and being unable to do so cleanly.

He filmed almost directly from the page.

The result is a film structured entirely around faces — specifically around the face of Maria Falconetti, a stage actress who had never made a film before and would never make another. Dreyer shot almost entirely in close-up. The sets exist but are barely seen. What you watch is the human face responding to impossible pressure.

Dreyer shaved Falconetti's head for the role. He asked her to kneel on the stone floor during takes rather than on a pad, so that the physical discomfort would register in her eyes. He shot take after take after take, not from cruelty but because he understood that exhaustion and genuine emotion are indistinguishable on film at sufficient resolution.

What he captured was something the camera does not often get: a performance that does not look like a performance.

A Face on Film

I have thought about Falconetti's face for longer than I have thought about almost anything else in this booth.

It is not beautiful in any conventional sense. It is open in a way that faces are not usually open — as if every defence had been removed, as if the surface had been dissolved and what you were watching was something underneath. Her eyes move. They still. They fill. They dry. The tribunal asks a question and her face processes it in real time, in full view, the way we do not usually allow ourselves to be seen.

Joan is asked: are you in a state of grace?

This is a trap. If she says yes, she is claiming to know the mind of God, which is heresy. If she says no, she confesses to being in sin, which destroys her defence. Either answer destroys her.

She says: If I am not in His grace, may God put me there; if I am in His grace, may God keep me there.

The inquisitors had no answer. The notaries wrote it down. Dreyer filmed it. Falconetti delivered it as if she had known the answer her entire life and was simply, finally, being asked.

It is the most important sentence in the history of film. Not because of what it means theologically but because of what it demonstrates: that a person can be cornered, exhausted, alone, nineteen years old and facing death, and still find the precise words that cannot be used against them.

What the Trial Was Really About

The Church condemned Joan for heresy and witchcraft, but the charge that actually brought her to the stake was simpler and more political: wearing men's clothes.

Joan had dressed as a soldier for practical reasons — armour, riding, the physical demands of a military campaign. The tribunal had her sign a recantation, agreeing to wear women's clothes in exchange for a commuted sentence. She signed. For four days she wore a dress. Then she put the soldier's clothes back on.

She told the tribunal she had done it because it was safer — the male guards were less likely to assault her. She may also have understood that the recantation meant nothing to the English, that she was going to burn regardless, and that she had no intention of dying in a dress.

She was executed on 30 May 1431. She was nineteen years old. The executioner was reportedly so disturbed by what he was required to do that he went to confession repeatedly afterward and said he feared for his soul.

Twenty-five years later, a retrial declared her innocent. Five hundred years later, the Church made her a saint.

The fire kept burning in the picture, long after the smoke had cleared.

The Film That Burned and Came Back

Here is the detail that has stayed with me longest.

The original negative of The Passion of Joan of Arc was destroyed in a fire at the UFA laboratory in 1928 — the same year it was made. A replacement negative was assembled from remaining materials, but it was considered inferior. For decades, film scholars and archivists believed the best version of the film was lost.

Then in 1981, a complete print was discovered in a Norwegian mental institution. It had been sitting in a janitor's closet at the Dikemark Hospital outside Oslo. Nobody knew how it got there. Nobody knew how long it had been there. It was the best surviving copy of the film, matching Dreyer's original cut more closely than anything previously known.

A film about a woman who could not be destroyed, whose original negative was consumed by fire, found in a forgotten room of an institution for the mentally ill — as if Caligari's asylum had been holding it all along.

I have not been able to decide if this is ironic or fitting. Both, perhaps.

The Projectionist's Note

The film is silent, which means I can hear the audience when I run it.

I have never run it to a full house that made much noise. People go still. They watch Falconetti's face for ninety minutes and the stillness is absolute. Not the stillness of boredom — the stillness of people who have forgotten to protect themselves from what they are watching.

The expressionists who made Caligari and Faust built their distress into the architecture — the tilted walls, the painted shadows, the warped geometry of a world gone wrong. Dreyer went in the opposite direction. He took everything away. He left only the face. And the face was enough.

I have run this film for fifty years and I have never found the moment where Falconetti is not completely, unbearably real.

The fire took the negative. The fire took Joan. But they are both still here.

That is what the projector does, in the end. It keeps things that should not still exist.

— The Projectionist