Essential media about the arts

To the Barbican last night for a screening of Carl Dreyer’s silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Accompanying the film live were the London Symphony Orchestra and Synergy Vocals, but this was far from a standard new scoring for an old film (not, of course, that any such compositions are really ‘standard’). Rather, this was a concert performance of Voices of Light, a large-scale choral work composed in 1993 by Richard Einhorn. Einhorn created the composition in response to Dreyer’s images, but it very much had its own strength and presence – and in a way it was the film that was providing the accompaniment. At key moments, music and film synced together, but the music’s primacy was reinforced as the projection came to an end, when the lights on orchestra and choir came up and, for a minute or two, the band played on.

I found it an engrossing and, at times, moving evening. The music’s mix of serialism and more traditional liturgical lines was impressive, and the singing by Synergy Vocals was glorious. But I have to admit that it was the film that had attracted me. A still from Dreyer’s stark, near-abstract drama features in pretty much every history of world cinema, and extracts are familiar from a host of contexts, but I had never seen the complete feature before. Familiar indeed were the close-up, sharply-angled shots of the expressive face of the French actress known as Falconetti. But I hadn’t realised that Dreyer’s film concludes with Joan’s death at the stake and with the brutal suppression of popular dissent.

What was most striking was the remarkable mix of a convincingly medieval world – the faces, the costumes, the bare dissociated settings – seen through the lens of modernism. Dreyer brings to Joan’s suffering the visual tropes of advanced 1920s photography, including eccentric view-points and abstracted detailing. His editing, too, is fractured and largely unconcerned with the construction of coherent spaces or even developing narratives.

There is currently no UK release of the film on DVD (although the BFI publishes a number of other major Dreyer films). Remarkably, however, should you wish to recreate last night’s concert, it appears that there is a Korean release available on Amazon which includes Voices of Light as one of two alternative soundtracks. Although you have to fiddle around a little to English subtitles for the French caption cards (of which there are relatively few), the disc seems to play perfectly happily on Region 2 machines. There is also a Region 1 release with an immaculate print from The Criterion Collection - and this also features Voices of Light.

For more on Carl Theodor Dreyer, see Acquarello’s contribution to Senses of Cinema. Jonathan Rosenbaum has a good post with some wonderful stills.

Dreyer is also one of the best documented directors online, thanks to the Danish Film Institute’s remarkable web site Carl Th. Dreyer – The Man and his Work. This has extensive documentation in both Danish and English, as well as a host of wonderful stills and streaming files of Dreyer’s short films. The pages about The Passion of Joan of Arc begin here.