Oslo print high-water mark of film

By PETER CALDER

The greatest artists are usually ahead of their time: such was the fate of Carl Theodore Dreyer, whose 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the cinema.

The silent film, which has a single screening on Sunday as part of the Auckland International Film Festival, crops up regularly in critics' "10 best" lists and was accorded a rapturous critical reception on its release. But it was a box-office disaster which severely dented Dreyer's commercial credibility and almost ended his career - he had made nine movies in nine years but would make only five more over the next 46.

The screen version of the trial and death of France's 15th-century warrior-maiden was also derided for political reasons. French nationalists objected to the idea of a Protestant Dane telling the story of France's favourite daughter and censors across the Channel objected to the depiction of English forces.

Like its subject, the film perished by fire: the negative was destroyed in the year of release and another cut, constructed by Dreyer from out-takes, was butchered into a variety of versions (some included uplifting inserts of stained glass windows) which dragged the movie's reputation through the next 50 years.

Then, miraculously, a complete original print was found in a closet in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1984, apparently ordered in for the entertainment of the patients and never returned. This so-called "Oslo print", digitally restored to pristine condition, is the cut on show here.

The smallest excerpt from any version of Dreyer's film makes plain why it remains a high-water mark in the movies 74 years after it was made.

At once expressionistic and hyper-realist, it tells the story of Joan's trial almost entirely in close-up, a technique regarded as shocking at the time but Dreyer defended it as "[exposing], with merciless realism, the callous cynicism of the judges hidden behind hypocritical compassion ...

"On the other hand there had to be equally huge close-ups of [Joan played by Renee Falconetti], whose pure features would reveal that she alone found strength in her faith in God".

French critic Andre Bazin, who founded the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema in 1951, praised Dreyer as "the equal of the great painters of the Italian Renaissance or Flemish school, the only filmmaker whose works equal the dignity, nobility, and powerful elegance found in masterpieces of painting".

The first New Zealand screening of this restored version was at the Festival of the Arts in 1988, when it was accompanied by Wellington composer Dorothy Buchanan's arrangement of the original score.

That score will be heard again at the Civic on Sunday when organist Michael Bell and singers from Viva Voce and the Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus accompany the screening. Buchanan was commissioned by the then director of the New Zealand Film Archive, Jonathan Dennis, to "reconstruct" the score by Frenchmen Leo Pouget and Victor Alix and she says the project was "a huge challenge".

She says the original was "very dated and if I had gone with its original intention it would have been very over the top". Instead she settled on a spare arrangement which was in keeping with the emotional impact of the images.

* The Passion of Joan of Arc screens at the Civic on Sunday at 4pm. The performance is dedicated to Jonathan Dennis, who programmed classic films and retrospectives through more than a dozen film festivals. Dennis died in January, aged 48.