Flames of Passion

Happy New Year!

Your Pathe-Natan film of the week. Raymond Bernard, who made the truly great PN films WOODEN CROSSES and LES MISERABLES, started his career at the company with FAUBOURG-MONTMARTRE, which somewhat defeated my benshi translator David Wingrove since the copy I’d obtained had pretty cruddy sound. Add to that the vagaries of early thirties recording and early thirties French slang, and you have a film that’s pretty hard to understand — and it might be hard to understand even if you had perfect audio and spoke 1930s French like a native.

The romantic plot inexplicably yields sway to a riotous fire festival in a small town, in which the lovers are burned in effigy by no less a figure than Antonin Artaud — if you’re going to have a burning at the stake in your movie, qua THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, Artaud will turn up, it seems. I suspect his toothsome shade mingled among the crowds attending Edward Woodward’s immolation in THE WICKER MAN, perhaps pausing to pinch Britt Ekland’s bum.

Bernard flings himself into the festivities, concocting an expressionistic frenzy that ends with an anthropomorphic building like something from a Fleischer brothers cartoon. Then the film goes back to normal, the villagers say they didn’t mean any harm, and shortly afterwards the film just kind of stops. Was the director wrong to build this sequence up so much that it ruptures the surrounding movie? Perhaps not, since the surrounding movie is kind of dull by comparison, and this sequence is AMAZING.

Arc Light

For my thoughts on Dreyer’s PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, read this old piece. But for a review of the OTHER 1920s Joan film, the one contemporary audiences flocked to in preference, see this week’s edition of The Forgotten, the first in a short series celebrating the productions of Pathe-Natan, a short-lived incarnation of the French film company Pathe…

Can you treat a production company as an auteur? Certainly, if you give any credence to the genius of the system. (And, sure, the system can be idiotic at times, but so can the most respected geniuses.)

While on the subject of Joan of Arc and idiocy, I feel it’s not too late to say that Luc Besson’s JOAN OF ARC is an awful, awful piece of work, so putrid that it’s a source of wonder to me that people to this day do not point, and laugh, and hurl tiny stinging pellets of owl-shit at Besson when he appears in public. The reason for my distaste is not the director’s girlfriend, Milla Jojobabitch, who I think is perfectly adequate given the kind of Joan she’s been asked to play. My dislike is based on one scene – one of the foulest messes ever splashed upon a screen.

Besson invents for Joan a sister murdered by the English, in best BRAVEHEART manner (OK, it wasn’t William Wallace’s sister, but you get my drift — apparently a movie hero needs to be motivated by a thirst for personal revenge, not patriotism or religion). Said sister is not only murdered but raped, and in that order. And Besson sees fit to throw in a bit of comedy relief at the same time.

Said sister is actually skewered by a broadsword, nailed to a wall behind which Joan is hiding (so Besson can shoot the bloody blade emerging inches from Joan’s horrified face, of course). Then the murderer has his way with the corpse. Then he turns to two companions, resting at the kitchen table, and says something along the lines of “Who wants to go next?”

And the two guys turn to each other in a synchronized double-take, eyebrows raised. The comedy style is out of John Landis, and to say it sits somewhat awkwardly in the overall tone of the scene is a bit like saying a fart gag during the Auschwitz shower scene in SCHINDLER’S LIST might have seemed a bit out-of-keeping. I was really annoyed by the double-takes in THE EXTRAORDINARILY PROTRACTED TITLE OF ADELE BLANC-SEC, mainly because they always tried to force a laugh from the audience when nothing funny had actually happened, but possibly because the acrid tang of his JOAN was still in my mental nostrils.

So I dunno. If you live anywhere near Besson, or find yourself in Cannes when he’s got a film playing, maybe you need to make sure you have some owl pellets in your side pocket or purse. I’m just saying.

Fortunately, nothing as bad as the Besson atrocity happens in Marco de Gastyne’s LA VIE MERVEILLEUSE DE JEANNE D’ARC. Although, ouch:

“Non, je ne regrette rien…”

In Your Face!

“It’s a wonderful tour de force but it’ll get cinema nowhere. It’s too individual a style of expression. It has pathological interest as a study of hysteria.”

That was Ernst Lubitsch on Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC — he’s wrong, of course. Maybe being Jewish was a barrier, but then I don’t think the film’s fundamentally about religion — it’s about integrity, which is a more fundamental impulse. Ran this for students, and for myself — it’s one of those film classics I’d “seen” but so long ago and under such dim circumstances that I really couldn’t say I’ve seen it at all.

Scott Eyman, from whose Lubitsch book the above quote comes, duly uses the word “austere” to describe Dreyer’s film, a word well suited to later CTD films maybe, but one that requires some qualification here. The film’s sets are certainly austere — designed by Jean Hugo (no other credits) and Hermann Warm (CALIGARI and much more besides), they’re not only sparsely furnished, cold and stony, they’re overwhelmingly WHITE. White tends to be avoided in production design, for the normally excellent reason that in close-ups, where the background goes out of focus, it turns into a glaring void, whereas with greyish or coloured surfaces, some detail or texture always comes through to anchor the face in reality.

Of course in TPOJOA, close-ups dominate overwhelmingly, and the background is positively encouraged to recede, allowing skin textures to prevail, every pore, mole, liver spot and wrinkle lovingly lingered over. If Dreyer is guilty of any silent-movie over-simplification, it’s in the film’s apparent equation of physical aging with spiritual corruption. Integrity and purity need not belong solely to the young — but it’s OK to make that the case for the sake of argument in this film.

Antonin Artaud’s character is a more complex case than at first appears — he’s genuinely sympathetic to Joan, unlike the judges who are always claiming they are — but he’s a bigger threat to her integrity in his way, because he still wants her to sign a confession and be saved. He’s also Captain Obvious: the guys who says things like “Careful! That’s a dangerous answer!” so the dumber folks in the audience can keep up.

All this relishing of dermatological detail is rather lush and intense, but is it austere? And the film is far from slow — though there are relatively few scenes, and they’re relatively long, Dreyer’s filming is dynamic in a way that prefigures today’s “intensified continuity” — faces pop up, loom in, are tracked into, making for a very impactful mise-en-scene indeed. Far from being a cinematic blind alley, Dreyer’s experiment was an early clue to the new direction. I just wish modern filmmakers who jump in close early, and stay there, had as many visual resources for keeping the approach fresh as Dreyer evinces here.

(When David Fincher shaved Sigourney Weaver’s head for ALIENS³, critics knocked him for shooting everything in close-up: “These pop promo guys don’t know how to direct.” But obviously Fincher was copying Dreyer — just not skillfully enough, or in a suitable context, to make it work.)

Films I was reminded of — Erle C. Kenton’s GUILTY AS HELL, with its leering ugly faces thrust at the camera like so many animatronic penises; THE DEVILS, obviously — Mad Ken kept the whiteness, and much of the structure, including the emphasis on head-shaving — I was unsure just how deep the influence went until Dreyer’s maggoty skull sprang up — THE DEVILS is the pop-art porno version of TPOJOA, with 57 times the violence and 90,000,000 times the tits; Welles — the effect of these sharply focused kissers, the canted angles and rushing figures, suggests Welles must have known this movie, although it’s possible his ideas grew up independently, or both Dreyer and Welles were looking at Eisenstein (both MACBETH and OTHELLO strongly suggest this).

For a film banned in England at the time for its portrayal of the English as, effectively, blasphemous Christ-killers, the multi-national production has one distracting feature — many of the evil English characters resemble British character actors of later years.

Patrick Magee!

Cyril Cusack!

Peter Bull!

And finally, I always wonder at the circumstances that lead to the film being rediscovered in the janitor’s cupboard of an Oslo mental hospital. Screening this film for the inmates might not be advisable — surely any poor schizophrenic patient would be bound to identify with Joan and see her persecutors mirrored by the medical staff? Still, if this lead to the film being retired from the screenings roster, it may be precisely why the film survived in such comparatively good condition to be appreciated today.