Catalogo Giornate del Cinema Muto 2012 - La Cineteca del Friuli

Renée Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gaumont, 1928. (Musée Gaumont Collection)
Billancourt, which had already housed Napoléon, and two vehicles for
émigré star Ivan Mosjoukine, Michel Strogoff and Casanova. German
designer Hermann Warm and French artist Jean Hugo (grandson of
Victor Hugo) created a massive exterior set covering five acres of
land in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart, complete with city walls and
moats, four guard towers, a church, and streets. The cost of the sets
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alone was 1.3 million francs. Little of this is even glimpsed in the final
film, whose overall impression is of close-ups filmed against sparse
white sets, their walls, doors, and windows showing the unmistakable
influence of German Expressionism.
An early plan to cast Lillian Gish as Jeanne was abandoned: there were
already enough chauvinist murmurs at the notion of entrusting Jeanne
to a foreign director. A more serious threat was a rival production
announced by an up-and-coming movie mogul, Bernard Natan, who
was readying La Merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc, to star former child
actress Simone Genevois under Marco de Gastyne’s direction. It was
everything Dreyer’s film was not – audience-friendly and flamboyantly
spectacular – and for decades it was accused of being responsible
for the commercial demise of Dreyer’s more avant-garde Jeanne – a
nonsensical claim, as La Passion had all but completed its first run by
the time its rival was released.
The actress finally chosen, Renée Falconetti (1892-1944), had
played supporting roles in two minor films a decade before she was
discovered, by this time a stage actor specializing in social comedy,
by Dreyer. Dreyer is said to have spotted her in a performance of La
Garçonne, and subsequently, seeing her without make-up, recognized
the qualities he was seeking for Jeanne – though Falconetti was already
35, while Jeanne died at 19. Falconetti, though she normally enjoyed a
frenetic social life, seems totally to have dedicated herself to the role;
and the technicians are said to have wept with her in the head-shaving
scene. SGF administrators must have wept too: the haircut cost them
100,000 francs. But Dreyer declared, “In Falconetti … I found what
I might, with very bold expression, allow myself to call ‘the martyr’s
reincarnation.’” Her performance is still generally reckoned as one of
the greatest in all cinema.
The shooting lasted from May through November 1927, during which
time the great Hungarian-born cameraman Rudolph Maté and his
Czech assistant Gösta Kottula printed some 200,000 metres of film.
Shooting proceeded in sequence, to help Falconetti build her role.
Dreyer seems to have been a quiet tyrant, demanding all the actors on
set and costumed every day, their tonsures ready for inspection by the
director himself, even though they might find themselves un-needed
for a week or more. (Among them was debutant Michel Simon, who
in the end had only a single close-up!) Dreyer’s frequent requirement
that holes be dug for the camera to secure the low angle close-up he
demanded from his cameramen earned him the nickname of “Carl
Gruyère”.
The style of editing is unique to the film, and unlike anything else
in Dreyer’s or anyone else’s cinema. There are no establishing shots
and few conventional shot relationships of any kind. Yet the film
unfailingly conveys what Roger Ebert has called the “fearful intimacy”
between Joan and her tormentors: “To modern audiences, raised on
films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by
faces, a film like La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is an unsettling experience
– so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire.
Our sympathy is engaged so powerfully with Joan that Dreyer’s visual
methods – his angles, his cutting, his close-ups – don’t play like stylistic
choices, but like the fragments of Joan’s experience. Exhausted,
starving, cold, in constant fear, only 19 when she died, she lives in
a nightmare where the faces of her tormentors rise up like spectral
demons.” Cocteau saw it as being like “a historical document from a
time when the cinema did not exist”.
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La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc suffered a calamitous history. Before its
Paris opening, and again on the day before its Copenhagen premiere
on 21 April 1928, a number of scenes were cut by the censors.
(Though these certainly did not include, as myth has it, what would
have been historically inaccurate scenes of Jeanne undergoing torture.)
In December 1928 the negative was destroyed in a fire at Ufa, Berlin
– the only European laboratory then equipped to process the new
panchromatic film, which had enabled Dreyer to dispense with makeup
for his actors. With the help of his editor, Marguerite Beaugé
(Gance’s long-time editor), Dreyer collated a new negative from
outtakes, but this too was soon after destroyed in a laboratory fire. In
1952, a dupe negative mysteriously turned up in the Gaumont vaults –
it led critic Lo Duca to issue a new version of the film complete with
a potpourri musical track which outraged Dreyer.
In 1981, however, an original, uncut print, with Danish intertitles,
was found in a closet in a mental hospital outside Oslo, still in its
original postal packing and complete with its censorship visa from
1928, addressed to the director of the Dikemark Sygehaus, Dr.
Harald Arnesen. It was passed to the Danish Film Institute, and the
original French titles were reconstituted by Maurice Drouzy for the
Cinémathèque française. This version, certainly the closest to the precensorship
1928 original, is the one being shown at the 2012 Giornate
del Cinema Muto. – LENNY BORGER
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PROSTOI SLUCHAI (Rasskaz o prostom sluchaye / Ochen’ khorosho
zhiviotsa) [Un caso semplice; Storia di un caso semplice; Si vive proprio
bene / A Simple Case; The Tale of a Simple Case; Life Is Beautiful]
(Mezhrabpomfilm, USSR 1932)
Regia/dir: Vsevolod Pudovkin; co-regia/co-dir: Mikhail Doller; scen:
Aleksandr Rzheshevskii, da un articolo di/based on a newspaper
article by Mikhail Koltsov; f./ph: Grigorii Kabalov, Georgii Bobrov;
aiuto f./asst. ph: Sergei Strunnikov; mont./ed: Maria Usoltseva; scg./
des: Sergei Kozlovskii; aiuto regia/asst. dir: Yakov Kuper; aiuto /asst:
Aleksandr Zhutayev, S. Larionov; cast: Aleksandr Baturin (Langovoi),
Yevgenia Rogulina (Mashenka), Maria Belousova (la ragazza/the girl),
Andrei Gorchilin (lavoratore nel prologo; worker in the Prologue),
Anna Chekulayeva (sua moglie/his wife), Mikhail Kashtelian (suo figlio/
his son), Ivan Novoseltsev (Vasya), Aleksandr Chistiakov (zio/Uncle
Sasha), V. Kuzmich [Vladimir Trofimov] (Zheltikov), Afanasii Belov
(Grisha), Ivan Yudin (amico di/friend of Langovoi), Vladimir Uralskii
(soldato ferito/wounded soldier), Dmitri Kipiani (ufficiale bianco/
White officer), F. Novozhilov (soldato morente/dying soldier); riprese/
filmed: 1930; data uscita/rel: 12.1932; orig. l: 2633 m.; 35mm, 2172 m.,
78' (24 fps); fonte copia/print source: Gosfilmofond of Russia.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
È questo uno dei film meno conosciuti di Vsevolod Pudovkin e il
più difficilmente reperibile tra i suoi lavori muti. Pur essendo stato
studiato dai critici e storici, soprattutto come il faux-pas di un regista
CANONE RIVISITATO
CANON REVISITED