What All the Fuss Is About Today
The montage is still right in there: How, without it, is any true cinéaste going to go on to deal with, say, Godard? An even bigger come-on: the fact that this exciting, dynamic, idealistic, ideological, brave era of Soviet moviemaking didn’t last; that Eisenstein and his colleagues would, within five years, be branded formalists and decadents by Stalin and company and that Soviet film would take a nosedive into banality. (Of course, the same thing was taking place in Germany under Hitler, but at least the Germans—producers, directors, actors, screenwriters, cameramen, and, for all we know, hair and makeup people—got to relocate to LA.) Finally, there’s the sheer power of it all. Even if the story seems a little cartoonish, the idea of Eisenstein defining an art form, seizing the moment, defying hubris and Hollywood is very Promethean. For those who prefer the statistical angle: With Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu and Welles’ Citizen Kane, Potemkin is one of the three movies guaranteed to show up, decade after decade, on every international critic’s all-time ten-best list. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
(French, 1928)
Director
Carl-Theodor Dreyer, a Dane then working in Paris. And that’s not alclass="underline" The set designer was a German (Hermann Warm, from Caligari days), the cameraman a Pole, and the star, Maria Falconetti, an Italian, but the picture, from subject matter to aesthetics, is strictly French. Spoken of in the same hushed tones as Griffith, Eisenstein, and Renoir, but for most of us, even harder to get down with. Three possible ins: the supernatural angle (Dreyer’s obsessed with witches and vampires, even if he does see them as all-too-human martyrs), the Bergman connection (having learned to tolerate one Scandinavian’s bottomless guilt and pain, you shouldn’t have too much trouble plugging into another’s), and the old sympathy ploy (Dreyer, unappreciated in his own lifetime, could pursue his art only by dint of the money he made as manager of a Copenhagen movie theater, never got to make a movie about the life of Christ, never got to work in Hollywood like his mentor Griffith, etc., etc.). Other vintage Dreyer: Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), and Ordet (1955).
Story
Based on actual trial records that, in 1928, had just come to light: A series of five grueling cross-examinations, culminating in the execution, at the stake, of Joan (Falconetti), but not before giant close-ups have told us everything we ever wanted to know about Joan and her accusers (among them Antonin Artaud, pre- “Theater of Cruelty,” as the only compassionate one). But plot isn’t the point here. Go instead for the passion, in this case almost equal parts eroticism and religious persecution.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
The camerawork, especially as it fixed on faces (not to mention Joan’s dirty fingernails) rather than action and events, faces that fill the screen and come complete with sweat, tears, wrinkles, warts, and spittle, and are thrown into even higher relief by the starkness of the sets and the dead whiteness of the sky. And, equally, Falconetti’s performance as Joan: the way she managed to emanate sainthood, sorrow, and suffering, all without benefit of makeup—or, for that matter, much in the way of hair. (As one of Dreyer’s assistants remarked later, “It was a film made on the knees.”) An enormous success with the critics, who hailed it as the ultimate silent film, the distillation of a decade of creative filmmaking in Europe; the man from the New York Times, for instance, announced that it made “worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams.” Banned in Britain, by the way, for its depiction of English soldiers stealing Joan’s ring and sticking their arrows in her arm.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Ignore the comparisons of Passion to various musical forms (most often an organ fugue); what you really have to grasp is the fact that this, of all the standard masterpieces of world film, is the one that separates the sheep from the goats, the aesthetes from the philistines, the devotees from the hangers-on. The former have largely shut up about Falconetti, who was so drained by this film she never made another. But they still can’t get over those faces. Ditto the wild blend of fleshiness and spirituality. If you must find fault, cite the title cards—so disruptive, so unnecessary, and so emblematic of the silent film’s increasing frustration at not being able to speak. By all means, point out that sound had already arrived in France as Dreyer began Passion, and that, had he succeeded in obtaining financing, the last great work of silent film might have been the first great masterpiece of the sound era. Then finish your espresso and go home. L’AGE D’OR (French, 1930;
English title, THE GOLDEN AGE)
Director
Luis Buñuel. The Spanish maverick who, yoking the outrageous with the matter-of-fact, the blasphemous with the banal, managed to parlay one of the least flashy—and, frankly, least cinematic—of directing styles into a career that, a half century later, was still going strong. In 1930, though, Buñuel was just getting started, having arrived in Paris five years earlier with his friend and fellow surrealist Salvador Dalí. The year before, the two had collaborated on Un Chien Andalou, the seventeen-minute manifesto-on-film, having nothing to do with either dogs or Andalusians, in which a girl’s eye gets slashed with a razor, a man’s hand is shown crawling with ants, and dead burros lie sprawled across two grand pianos. Now they undertook something more ambitious: an hour’s worth of denunciation, obsession, and mania, financed by the famous French “angel,” the Vicomte de Noailles. Dalí, who wasn’t the easiest man in the world to work with (he’d try to convince you, for instance, that his waxed moustache served as an antenna for his muse, then turn around and expect you to buy a painting from him), had gotten that much worse since all the Chien notoriety, and lasted only a day on the L’Age set. Despite the credits (and with the exception of one gag, in which a man walks with a large stone on his head), the film is pure Buñuel.