The voice of Joan. On paragone in Carl Th. Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc”

Abstract

The last mute film in Carl Th. Dreyer’s oeuvre, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is often referred to as a film “made of close-ups” and purely cinematic. Dreyer used to stress himself that close-up was the specific cinematic device that asserted film’s position as autonomous art.  He especially insisted on film’s independence from theatre. Thus, it might sound quite surprising that in an interview from 1965, Dreyer draws attention to the underestimated, according to him, role of theatre in Joan of Arc. In my essay I focus on the theatricality in Dreyer’s film, arguing that “the theatrical” and “the cinematic” are two strategies used to present two different worlds of ideas and beliefs: that of the judges, clergymen and inquisitors, which at the same time is the world of males, and that of Joan, an illiterate woman who strives alone for her idea against a group of powerful men. What we observe in the film is a growing presence of ‘the cinematic’, the strategy allied with Joan, who in the final scene triumphs over the judges, just like cinema triumphs over theatricality.