The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Carl Theodor Dreyer · a film · 1928 · silent, about 82 minutes at 24 frames per second · scored on the Oslo print of the first cut, without any later score · written with Joseph Delteil
Mode
Trial drama built of faces; a Passion play cut from the record of a heresy trial
Mythos
The Passion: trial by priests under a foreign power, the mocking, the false friend, the denial wept over, the last sacrament and the death before the people; beneath it, the maiden against the elders
Phase
One day at Rouen in 1431, compressed from the sessions of months: the court, the cell, the torture chamber, the cell again, the cemetery, the shorn head and the recantation, the last sacrament, the fire and the square
Presentation
Silent feature film in black and white, about 82 minutes at 24 frames per second, judged in the Oslo print of the first cut; Rudolph Maté’s close-ups against white sets by Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo
Register
Dread held at one pitch, from a girl asked to say the Lord’s Prayer to the spiked wheel and the fire, eased only by small mercies: one pitying face, water, the sacrament
Scale
One girl, a room of judges, and at the end a city
Governing Proposition
A girl of nineteen is questioned by a room of churchmen at Rouen, worked on by question, forged letter, mockery, the wheel, the threat of dying without the sacrament and the open grave, signs an abjuration from fear, takes it back, and is burned before a city that rises. The wager of the film is that a trial can be made of faces alone, so that the viewer, denied space as she is denied counsel, can only watch a conscience that cannot prove itself, and sees that an institution which claims to save a soul destroys a person through the forms of care.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a document. Before any face is seen, the pages of the record of the trial of 1431 are turned, and what follows offers itself as that record brought back into sight. The trial ran over months of sessions. The film compresses it into what plays as a single day at Rouen, ending in fire, and in doing so takes away nearly everything a story of Joan would be expected to carry. There are no witnesses, no journey, no battle and no king. There is a girl of nineteen, a room of churchmen, the English soldiers who hold her, and a short run of places: the court, the cell, the torture chamber, the cell again, the cemetery, and the square.
Rudolph Maté photographs almost all of it in close-up and medium close-up against the bare white walls of Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo’s sets. There is no establishing view of the court. The viewer never learns how the room is laid out or where anyone stands in it. The judges are seen from below, against white, leaning in; Joan is seen from above. Eye lines do not meet where they should, and heads are cut by the edge of the frame. The viewer is given what the prisoner is given: faces, close, and no room in which to stand apart and weigh them.
Renée Falconetti plays Joan. Eugène Silvain is Cauchon, heavy and patient; Maurice Schutz is Loyseleur, who will come to her as a friend; Antonin Artaud is Massieu, the one judge whose face shows pity; Michel Simon sits among the assessors. The film is silent, and the silence is part of its knowledge: her voice is never heard. What she says reaches the viewer in intertitles, which interrupt the face. What she is reaches the viewer only in the face, which no one in the room can cross-examine and no one outside it can prove.
Movement II
The interrogation comes first, and it is long. The judges press close, smile, offer counsel and ask again. Some are kind in manner, and some are drawn as grotesques. Asked to say the Lord’s Prayer, she says it. The camera moves seldom, and when it does it means something: a slow track along the line of judges shows the institution as one long face. Joan’s eyes go up, past the frame, toward something the film never shows. Tears gather and fall. The questions return to the same ground, and the pressure is in the returning.
In the cell the instruments change. Loyseleur, who poses as a friend, reads her a letter from Charles, her king, and the letter is forged: a trap made of the one loyalty she has left. The leaded frame of the window throws a cross of shadow on the floor. A soldier takes her ring. The English soldiers mock her and press a crown of straw on her head, so that the film’s title is enacted before it is explained. Each scene leaves her a little further down than the last.
None of this is violence yet, and that is the film’s first discovery. The weapons of the institution are its procedure, its patience and its friendship. Every approach is made in the language of care: she is told that the judges want to save her soul, and their faces say so. The viewer, kept as close to them as she is, has no vantage from which to tell counsel from snare. The film does not argue that the judges are lying. It shows what their help does to the person it is offered to.
Movement III
Then she is taken to the torture chamber. The instruments are shown to her, and the spiked wheel turns, filmed close, in motion, as the faces have been filmed. The showing is the instrument: she faints. The scene is plain and frightening, because it shows that the court has always had this room beside it, and that the questions in the court were asked by men who knew it was there.
Back in the cell she is ill, and she is bled. The judges come again, now with the sacrament. They will give it to her if she submits; if she does not, she will die without it. This instrument is the cruellest, and the film treats it with the same closeness as the wheel. For a girl whose whole claim is that God has spoken to her, the threat is not death but death cut off from God, pronounced by the men who say they speak for Him.
Through all of it Falconetti’s face carries the film without a gesture spent. Exhaustion, terror, faith and a child’s bewilderment pass across it, often at once. The face is the only testimony the film admits, and it testifies to suffering, not to truth: it cannot show whether the voices were real. That is the knot the film ties and never cuts. Massieu’s face, among the judges, is the one that registers what is being done.
Movement IV
The cemetery is staged as mercy. She is brought out among the graves before the people and offered her life for a signature. A gravedigger works nearby, and his spade turns up a skull. The open grave is the last instrument, the one that speaks without words, and it is placed beside the offer so that she can see both together.
She signs. She cannot write her name, and a hand guides hers across the page. The abjuration is made from fear, and the film does not hide that fear or make it noble. It is the denial in the Passion, Peter’s, transferred to the one who would otherwise stand in Christ’s place, and like Peter’s it will be wept over.
Afterward her head is shaved. The film looks at the shorn head as it has looked at everything, close and for a long time, and the face, stripped now of everything, is at its most exposed. The crown of straw the soldiers made is swept out with her hair, and she takes back what she signed. The order is exact: the recantation could not happen without the shaving. She chooses the death she had fled.
Movement V
Massieu comes to her before the end. Her answers to him, given in paraphrase, are the film’s statement of what it has shown: her victory is her martyrdom, and her deliverance is death. She receives the last sacrament, the meal withheld from her as a lever and now given freely. The gentle passages come late and are few: the sacrament, water given to her before the fire. They obey the same closeness as the cruelties, and they are no less exact.
The burning is cut against what surrounds it. Birds wheel over the church. A mother in the crowd nurses her child. The smoke rises. A cry from the crowd that a saint has been burned turns the people of Rouen, who came as spectators, into witnesses, and the death that took place before them becomes their charge.
The riot follows, a crowd broken by soldiers with maces, and the film keeps the same grammar for it that it kept for the interrogation: faces, fragments, bodies pressed. What the court did to one girl, the soldiers now do to a city. The film began with a record turned page by page, the account of an institution. It ends with what that institution’s procedure produced: a person destroyed through the forms of care, and a city that saw it done.
Act III · The Twelve
The trial ran over months in 1431; the film compresses it into what plays as one day, and the compression removes almost everything a trial film would carry: no witnesses, no journey, no battle, no king. What is left is a sequence in which each step is a new instrument of pressure: the question, the forged letter read by the false friend, the crown of straw, the wheel, the threat of dying without the sacrament, the open grave. Each turns the screw one notch. The abjuration is impossible without all of them, and the recantation impossible without the shorn head. What is charged: in the long interrogation some exchanges do the same work twice, and the riot after the burning runs a little past what it needs to show.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure is carried by image as fully as by words, and it can be stated and holds: an institution that claims to save a soul can destroy a person through the forms of care, and its most dangerous weapons are its kindness and its procedure, not its fire. The judges lean close, smile and offer counsel; Loyseleur plays the friend; the sacrament is withheld as a lever; the cemetery is staged as mercy. Against them the film shows a conscience that cannot prove itself, whose only evidence is a face, which breaks under fear and then recovers itself by choosing the death it had fled. Held below the top because the disclosure is single, and because the judges, drawn partly as grotesques, are seen more as faces of menace than as men who believe what they do.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is constant, repeated and mostly dreadful. The face carries it from the first close-up: Falconetti’s eyes raised past the frame, tears held and falling, the mouth slack with exhaustion. The summits are many. The leaded window throws a cross of shadow on the cell floor. The straw crown pressed on her head by the soldiers returns, after the shaving, swept out with her hair. The spikes of the wheel turn. A gravedigger’s spade turns up a skull as she signs. The shorn head leaves the face naked of everything. The burning is cut against birds wheeling over the church, a mother nursing, the smoke rising. Height and frequency are both high. Held from the very top only because the long interrogation keeps the film at one pitch for a stretch before the cell gives it a first release.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The myth is built, and the title names it. The structure of the Passion bears the load: trial by priests before a foreign power, with Warwick and the English soldiers standing where Rome stood; the mocking by soldiers with a crown and a reed; the false friend; the denial, here Joan’s own abjuration, made from fear and wept over as Peter wept; the sacrament as the last meal; the death outside, before the people, and the cry from the crowd that a saint has been burned. Beneath it lies the older pattern of the maiden against the elders. The particular stays particular: a girl of nineteen who cannot sign her name unless her hand is guided, whose ring a soldier takes. Held just short of the top because the pattern is the Gospel’s, carried by imitation rather than newly built.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance was the historical spectacle of the 1920s, costume, crowd and battle, and the pageant of popular French piety around the Maid, canonised in 1920. Dreyer turned from all of it: a costume picture almost without costume, a film made of faces, with no establishing geography, eye lines that do not match, figures cut off at the frame edge, and low angles that set the judges against bare white. The stake was real: a large French production under a foreign director, a Church that pressed the censor, a commercial failure, and a director who did not command such means again. Held below the top because the means were not all new: the close-up was Griffith’s, the Kammerspiel and the Soviet montage of the middle of the decade had prepared the cutting, and Dreyer’s own chamber films had begun the turn.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The close-up against white is the interrogation itself: the viewer is denied space as Joan is denied counsel, sees only the face being questioned and the faces questioning, and cannot step back to judge. The mismatched eye lines unsettle where anyone stands, which is the condition of a prisoner who cannot tell friend from enemy. Silence bears weight: her voice is never heard, so the face is the only testimony, and it is testimony that cannot be cross-examined. Set the same trial in a wide, legible courtroom and it becomes a debate the viewer can score; this form makes it a suffering the viewer must share. The cost is in the intertitles, which break the face’s continuity and are a container, not an instrument.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Ninety-eight years of return, with a gap: the film as released was out of sight for half a century, and still the literature grew. David Bordwell’s monograph on the film and his book on Dreyer, Paul Schrader’s chapter on Dreyer in Transcendental Style in Film and a long line of writing on Falconetti’s performance and on the film’s space are the evidence. The readings conflict: a work of transcendental stillness; a formal system that breaks classical space; a Catholic film; an anticlerical one; a study of the face as such; a girl judged by a room of men. It yields on return in both kinds: the spatial puzzles of the cutting can be studied without end, and each viewing finds another judge’s face to watch. Held below the top by span and by the narrowness of its matter: one trial, one face.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1928, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Murnau, Lang, Eisenstein, Gance, Chaplin and Keaton. The intrinsic force is very high: the film showed that cinema could be built from the human face alone and could carry inner life without the stage’s voice, and it is one of the few films of its decade that changed what a performance on film could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fire, the censor and the commercial failure narrowed the reach, and the film’s grammar was rarely followed whole. It came through particular heirs: Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962), an answer to it; Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), in which Nana weeps watching it; Bergman’s faces, Persona above all. The field was moved more by Eisenstein and Murnau than by this film.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The original negative burned at UFA in Berlin in December 1928, but the film as released survives whole in the Oslo print, a copy of the first cut found in 1981 at the Dikemark psychiatric hospital near Oslo, so the fire has in the end taken almost nothing of what makes the work; the restorations since are repair. The charge falls on presence. For about fifty-three years the film as released was not seen: what circulated were Dreyer’s second assembly, cut and retitled copies, and Lo Duca’s version with Baroque music. Since 1981 its standing near the top of the critics’ polls has held. The surface does not date: no fashion, no technology, almost no décor. The broken presence would hold it at the lower edge for its age, and even there the evidence carries more than the medium allows. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Falconetti’s performance, her one great film role, is the making’s centre: exhaustion, terror, faith and a child’s bewilderment carried in the face without a gesture wasted. Maté’s camera works in close-up and in tilted and low framings, and its few movements, a slow track along the line of judges among them, each carry a meaning. Warm and Hugo’s white sets give the faces no ground. The assessors are cast by face: Silvain’s heavy patience as Cauchon, Artaud’s Massieu, the one judge whose face shows pity. The cutting builds a space no viewer can map and keeps it consistent in its disorientation. The costs: the intertitles are many and break the rhythm, some of the assessors are played as caricature, and the riot, cut fast, is the least controlled passage.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the first close interrogation, a single face in a white field, and the riot in the square at the end, a crowd broken by soldiers with maces. One law governs both: power presses on whoever it can reach, and the camera stays close enough to the bodies under it that no viewer can stand outside. The riot does to the people of Rouen what the interrogation did to Joan, in the same grammar of faces and fragments. The gentle passages obey it too, the last sacrament and the water given before the fire. The range is real, from a closed room to a city, from cunning to brutality, from fear to calm. The strain lies in the judges, drawn at times in a register of grotesque that the film’s otherwise exact physics does not need.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders held: individual consciousness, at the centre and held to the bottom; the sacred, as faith, sacrament and the claim of revelation against the claim of an institution; the Church, its law, its procedure and its politics; the state and war, in the English occupation and Warwick’s interest in a verdict; the body, in hunger, bleeding, the shorn head and the fire; and at the end the people, a city that sees what has been done. One trial and one face integrate them. What keeps the axis lowest: family, labour and nature are absent, history is present only as the occupation behind the trial, and Joan’s own past, her voices, her campaign and her king, is held only in what is said of it. The narrowness of the form is the source of its depth and the limit of its scope.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.3 and The Sublime at 9.2, then The Archetypal Deep, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.1. A form in which the close-up against white is the interrogation itself and the silent face is the only testimony, an elevation that rises again and again from the cross of shadow to the fire, the Passion built step by step into a trial at Rouen, a making centred on one performance and a cutting that builds a space no viewer can map, and one law of power pressing on bodies from the first question to the riot.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the sacred, the Church, the state at war, the body and the city are held through one trial and one face, but family, labour and nature are absent, history is the occupation behind the trial, and Joan’s past is held only in what is said of it. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, a force that changed what a performance on film could be with a reach narrowed by the fire, the censor and the box office, and then The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.8, held by exchanges that do the same work twice, by judges drawn as grotesques, and by a presence broken for fifty-three years in a medium with no centuries behind it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clears it by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.9 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc as released in 1928, first in Copenhagen in April and then in Paris in October, carried by the Oslo print: a copy of Dreyer’s first cut with Danish intertitles, found in 1981 at the Dikemark psychiatric hospital near Oslo and restored in the 1980s and since. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer for the Société Générale des Films, from a screenplay by Dreyer and Joseph Delteil, photographed by Rudolph Maté, with sets by Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo. The print runs about 82 minutes at 24 frames per second; the film is judged at any projection speed, which changes the pace of the faces and not the structure. The film is the work, and it is judged silent, as made: no later score is part of it, Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light (1994) among them, and neither the second version Dreyer assembled from other takes after the negative burned nor Lo Duca’s sound version of 1952 is judged. The Paris release was cut by the censor under pressure from the Church; the extent of those cuts is not known here, and the cut prints are not the object. No print, script or list of intertitles was consulted. No intertitle is held to the word, so none is quoted: what is said in the film is given as paraphrase, without quotation marks, and every axis is judged on the film rather than on the wording of any title. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the shot count, the number and length of the intertitles, the length of each sequence, the running time at slower speeds, the day and cinema of the Copenhagen opening, the cost of the sets, the use of make-up and the film’s exact place in any poll, are not given.