From method acting to intense rehearsals, all actors and directors take measures to evoke a strong performance in their work. However, it is a one in a million performance that causes the audience to wonder if the actor has perhaps transcended acting and become the person they are portraying. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Renée Falconetti conveys themes of sacrifice and suffering through her expressive face and movements. Yet while Falconetti embodies the holiness and devotion of Joan, the power of her haunting performance covers up the disturbing narrative of Dreyer’s treatment of her on set.
In the transition from acting on stage to on screen, Falconetti also went from acting with her whole body to essentially acting with a third of it. For most of the film, her face either fills the frame or we only see her from the shoulders up. A key example of this is the scene where the Bishop comes to Joan’s bedside for the sacrament (43:06). From the time the Bishop enters to when they carry Joan out on a stretcher, we only see Joan’s face in the right corner of the frame and in a close-up. This greatly limits what Falconetti can do in the space, however rather than hinder her performance this boundary adds to it. Her face is excruciatingly expressive, and although the film is silent, the slight inclination of her neck and slow movements of her lips give us the feeling that she is struggling to get her words out. In the moments that follow as she refuses the sacrament, the audience feels her torment as Falconetti quickens her breath and tenses up. She brings her hands to her face in agony in one of the three moments that we see her hands in this scene. Her hands become a recurring motif – each time they appear, the audience feels that Joan is trying to conceal herself from her fate playing out before her. Similarly, Falconetti brings her hands to her face towards the end of the scene and appears to tremble. In a limited space, Falconetti is conveying to us that Joan is asking herself how her faith can have brought her to this pain.
More specifically, in the aforementioned scene we see Falconetti express extreme torment solely through her eyes. She at first keeps her eyes barely open, as if even that requires too much strength. Her eyes appear to be unable to focus on the Bishop. Later in the scene, her eyes are painfully wide. The audience is never completely certain what Joan is seeing – she could be looking up at the Bishop, towards God, or within herself. Falconetti appears to be looking past the camera and into a world unable to be seen or understood by the audience. Falconetti rarely blinks, subtly symbolic of Joan’s sacrifice as she forgoes even this small human need for the sake of her faith. Her wide eyes allow the audience to feel the depth of her pain. As Joan begins to accept her inevitable fate, her eyes slightly begin to shut. When she later realizes her temptation, her eyes widen once again as Falconetti displays the intensity of Joan’s sudden epiphany. These small movements continue throughout the film.
Along with her eyes, Falconetti expresses the magnitude of Joan’s spiritual struggle through her tears. In the sacrament scene, Falconetti both holds them back and allows them to run down her face uninterrupted. Both actions hold equal weight and meaning. Holding back her tears expresses the strength that this young martyr is trying to muster while allowing them to fall undisturbed shows her simultaneous sense of helplessness. While Joan of Arc is remembered as a great heroine, it is important to remember that Falconetti is portraying a young girl with a fate she never asked for. This duality in the use of tears aids Falconetti in depicting this aspect of Joan’s character. Similarly, in the scene when they cut Joan’s hair up until they lead her to her execution (58:30-1:10:18), Joan continues to never wipe away her years. Their glistening trails frame the sides of Falconetti’s face. Similar to her lack of blinking, Falconetti is not letting Joan’s physical response to this situation distract from her torment and suffering by wiping them away.
Falconetti’s performance is consistent throughout the film, mirroring Joan’s (for the most part) consistency in her faith. However, consistency does not make Falconetti’s performance any less profound. In the haircutting scene, there is an especially intense moment where Joan retracts her confession. While other scenes are full of quick cuts, here Dreyer holds on Falconetti’s face for close to fifteen seconds (beginning at 1:00:23). Falconetti’s performance becomes abruptly frantic: all the elements of her portrayal of Joan come together. Her eyes are wide, staring at nothing and everything. She keeps her mouth slightly open, her lips trembling. Tears hang at the bottoms of her eyelids. She is slightly shaking her head, conveying Joan’s shock that she had almost stepped away from her faith. She brings her fingers up to her mouth – in remorse, but also in dreaded anticipation of what she knows taking back her confession means for her. We see the theme of sacrifice personified through Falconetti’s actions here as this is the moment when Joan fully realizes that her fate lies in her death. The fast pace of Falconetti’s performance in this scene both mirrors and expresses to the audience the sudden flood of emotions that come with Joan’s sudden realization of her ultimate fate.
Later in this scene, Falconetti slows her frantic portrayal as Joan accepts what must come to pass. Falconetti literally exhales (1:03:37), showing her audience that while this young girl may not be at peace with her fate, she is at peace with her devotion to God. As her fate is finalized, the pace of her performance slows. When a priest tells Joan they have come to prepare her for death, she stares at him, barely moving, before speaking. The stillness in Falconetti is haunting. When they tell her how she is to die, she remains almost expressionless. Her only reaction is a slight trembling in her right cheek and a subtle twitch of her eye. Even when she exclaims “Death!” her face remains unchanged – Falconetti is expressing how physically and emotionally exhausted Joan is from the trials and torture she has been through. She only desires to meet her fate and be with God.
Throughout the film, the audience cannot help but wonder if the line somewhere blurs between performance and real life. It never completely seems like she is acting. Did Falconetti become the saint she portrayed? Much has been speculated about the relationship between Falconetti and Dreyer. There are countless horror stories from the set, and it has only become more and more difficult to discern which are true as time goes on. Did the director want Falconetti to go through what Joan experienced in the process of making the film? The film critic Roger Ebert writes “…legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face – so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain.” There are moments in the film where we sense that Falconetti is experiencing actual pain – one example occurs in the scene when her hair is cut. She notably never made a film after her experiences with Dreyer, leaving modern viewers to surmise that a line was crossed by Dreyer to achieve the intensity of Falconetti’s portrayal of Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc was Renée Falconetti’s first starring role in a film, making the strength of her performance all the more shocking. As the central character, her acting ability was essential to conveying the story’s themes of suffering and sacrifice. Through her powerful employment of facial expression and conscious use of movement even when limited by space, Renée Falconetti conveys Joan of Arc’s torment and devotion with haunting truth. She was not used to performing in front of a camera – arguably no one was, with film still in its beginning. This level of performance is one that we may never see again: in today’s world, there are cameras everywhere we look. Through new forms of taking video such as mobile phones and social media, even children are used to being recorded. We are hyperconscious of being on camera in ways that Falconetti and other early film actors were not. The newness of the medium allowed Falconetti to achieve a level of realism in her performance virtually unattainable by the actors of today. Yet while her performance is unforgettable, its strength is tarnished by the similarly unforgettable stories of Carl Theodor Dreyer. As the film comes to a close, the audience can only help but wonder what damage was done for the sake of performance.