Review of Dreyor's Joan of Arc

Dreyor was clearly a master of the Cinema. I came across this film while I was watching The Story of Film. I watched it on Hulu.com. I really like Hulu.com, it has so many famous films, so many criterion collection films. It is truly a new instrument through which to view films. It has expanded the breadth and depth of my film knowledge. Whereas before I had to go to Barnes and Noble to buy any Criterion collection movies or to Amazon.com because Barnes and Noble was too expensive, now I can go, most of the time to Hulu.com and it doesn't cost too much.

Anyway the film is a silent film made in the last era of Silent film in the 1920s. Dreyor, correct me if I'm wrong, is Danish. He made numerous films of which Joan of Arc may be his most famous. I would also like to view Abel Gance's Napoleon which was made at around the same time as Joan of Arc. But I digress.

The film has a serious tone to it and it moves with an energy that keeps the audience interested. But it doesn't pander to the audience it reaches for high Cinematic artistic expression and it achieves it's goal. In an era of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Dreyor certainly could be classified with the likes of D.W. Griffith and Gance. He takes on a subject wrought with political and historical ovetrtones that still resinate to this day. Dreyor shows the Church bureaucracy as men who are all too willing to condemn Joan of Arc and send her to the stake.

Without sound or dialogue the film makes use of facial expressions and camera angles. Joan's face is almost always in a state of tension. Her eyes are big and full of fear. She is, for the most part, shown looking up. Clearly in a position of inferiority. The priests are always depicted at eye level or elevated. They usually have stern looks. The head priest has a very long nose, wrinkled skin, and a stern disposition on his face.

There is effective cross cutting used in the film. Firstly, in the scenes where Joan is being asked to repent, the camera cuts from her face to the priests. This continues throughout the film until she is burned at the stake. The cuts get quicker as the tension rises. Then, the camera cuts from Joan on the stake to the military guards and priests, to the village people who revolt as Joan is burned, only to be violently suppressed by the soldiers. The sequence is similar to Griffith's Birth of a Nation sequence where the KKK rides in to save the family from the carpet baggers. And, both scenes are pulled off with a cinematic flourish that is the high point of Silent cinema.

Dreyor is clearly an example that Scandinavian Cinema has produced some of the best films, not only in European, but also in World Cinema history. Dreyor in the Silent era, Ingmar Bergman in the post-war era, and Lars von Trier in the present. I'm sure there are many other filmmakers from Scandinavia who have made excellent films. In fact I'm going to show Vinterburg's the Celebration in a film course called Cinema and Digital Technology. I'm showing it because it is, perhaps, the first film to use digital cameras in a film totally and to a high standard.