Sheldon Mirowitz: Dreyer’s The Passion Joan of Arc—Everything is infinitely meaningful, miraculous, and beautiful
Sheldon Mirowitz , Berklee Professor of Film Scoring, is the prime composer of the new score for Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) premiered by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra June 6, 2019 at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Professor Mirowitz developed and directs the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra.
Below are remarks he delivered at the world premiere of the score.
Like all great pieces of art, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is about everything. Religion and Authority, Power and its abuse, Belief and its costs, Truth and Lies, Women and Men, Innocence and Experience, and the responsibilities of action and human choice – this is the subject matter of the film. And all of this is particularly resonant now, when all of these issues are playing out in our own time.
But before we watch I want to think about a single, small thing. I want to think about framing – in particular the way that Dreyer frames his shots in the film. In many ways, art is fundamentally about framing. In fact, if you put a frame around any thing, if you hang a frame around any space on the wall, we will think that the thing inside the frame is a work of art. Because, of course, it is.
The first thing that you will notice in the film is how austere the frame is in general, how empty it is of things, how EMPTY it is. This is essential to Dreyer’s attempt to move us OUT, out of our world, out of THE world, and into a different sphere. The world he is conjuring is a world which is not anywhere, or that is everywhere. It is world in which everything is very very particular, and therefore very universal, so that the film seems very stylized, while at the same time being very “realistic”. This is quite tricky, and it was essential to our understanding of the film and how to score it.
The most interesting thing is how in many shots the characters are at the very bottom of the frame – at first I thought that this was some cameraman mistake. But of course it is no mistake – it is the point. We think that the story is about the characters, the priests; but that is not true. The story is about the space above the characters, about the Above itself. What Dreyer is showing in the framing is that empty space above, searching, as it were, for something else, something above them. Something that is missing. The shots point UP, away from the characters, and towards God, towards where God might be. In an essential way, this is what all art does – it aims us above, to the Above, to what is up, and just beyond us.
Another framing issue is the close up. JOAN is famous for Dreyer’s use of the close up. It transformed filmmaking grammar, and it transformed the goals and processes of acting. In many ways Joan is the first modern movie, since it has the firm modern acting performance, a performance made possible by the close up. The close up is interesting because it radically limits what we see, or our FRAME. But by doing that it actually explodes our VIEW. It shows us everything that passes over and through Joan’s face. It shows all of the almosts, and maybes, and nots. It shows us everything by showing us just one thing. By zooming in, we move out, we see more. That is the miracle of film, and the miracle of art.
Art explodes the world. In art we try to show one thing fully. In all of its dense and contradictory particulars. True art shows us everything in every thing. By radically limiting our frame art allows us to linger over the small things to see into them and through them to everything else.
What do we see? We see that everything is infinitely meaningful, miraculous, and beautiful. The world is miraculous and beautiful even when it is brutal and unjust. Art is the field of vision in which we are able to see things that oppose one another at the same time, to hold the contradiction, to feel the gulf, the gap, the distance, and the connection. This is how Art opens us up, and the world with it.
How is everything revealed in every thing? By pointing. Things point. Things point to other things. Things are, they exist for us, only insofar as they indicate other things. And the things they point to only exist insofar as they indicate other things. Which means that each thing eventually indicates every other thing. Anything that doesn’t indicate something else cannot actually appear to us at all – like a black hole, it reflects nothing, and in so doing it disappears from our universe.
This exposure of the thing, this revelation, is accomplished through the connecting of things with each other. This connection is an act of agreement. Things agree. We agree. The massiveness of our agreements dwarfs our disagreements. The disagreements only are possible inside of the framework and connectedness of our agreements. The word itself shows this – dis-agreement is a modification of agreement. Conflict, which is the positive form of disagreement, is of course everywhere – but it is secondary, necessarily secondary.
Our understanding, our implicit tactile acknowledgement of our fundamental agreement is what throws us into the turmoil and sheer emotional overload that we feel as the film concludes. So awful (full of awe), and so beautiful, the film overwhelms us with knowledge and doubt, with love and repulsion, with a need for judgement and the inability to do so, teetering over the gulf that lies before us under a cold and empty sky.
Like every story, JOAN is a story of conflict. And of brutality, and of injustice. And of Beauty, and of Truth, and of the necessary contradictions that sit inside of both.