Exiled, not free

Robert Nott | The New Mexican

3/13/2008 - 3/14/08

How do you go on living after you have given your soul to your art?

That's the question facing Corsican actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti — known as Maria — the protagonist of Alfredo Cordal's drama Our Lady of Buenos Aires, presented at Wise Fool Studios by Teatro Paraguas. Falconetti (1892-1946) was a stage actress who worked primarily in light comedies in France and who is best known for playing the title character in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Falconetti never made another film after that one — and perhaps with good reason. The picture, based on transcripts of the 15th-century saint's trial, was shot pretty much in sequence over a period of six or seven months. Falconetti had her head shaved on-camera and reportedly submitted to other hardships under Dreyer's intense direction, including kneeling on stone floors, so she could sympathise with the discomfort and pain of her character. For the final sequence, in which Joan is burned at the stake, Falconetti inhaled smoke from a nearby fire to give the film's conclusion (still shocking to see) a heavy dose of reality.

Falconetti paid a physical and an emotional toll for immersing herself so thoroughly in this character. In an interview included with the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, Falconetti's daughter Hélène notes that, after the film was completed, her mother never spoke to Dreyer again.

In Cordal's play, one day in 1946, Dreyer shows up at Falconetti's house in Argentina, where she lived after fleeing Nazi-occupied France during World War II. By that time, Falconetti's stage career was on the wane, and she was leading theater workshops for drama students, who displayed a cultlike adoration of her. Cordal intimates that Falconetti had somehow summoned Dreyer, who appears in a cloud of smoke as if a magician or shaman. The play suggests that the actress is desperately seeking ceremonial cleansing of some kind to free herself from the ghost of Joan of Arc. To that end, Dreyer urges her to tackle The Passion again.

According to Corinna MacNeice, who plays Falconetti, the actress may have been feeling some guilt for not having taken an active role in the French resistance against the Germans — particularly after putting so much of herself into the character of Joan, who died for her beliefs. MacNeice says that Cordal saw a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc when he was a child in a boarding school in his native Chile. An exile (he now lives in England), Cordal identified with Falconetti.

With Our Lady's surreal setup, director Mary Mier is aware that she has undertaken a considerable task. "I think this is what we call a 'holy theater' script, about the inner transformations that actor, director, and everyone involved has to go through in order to get it up and working — where theater is a lively, active art form that is trying to be understood or explored," she said.

"I think that film totally changed Falconetti's focus," MacNeice said. "And that raises the question of what theater or any art has to do with what's going on in the world. I think Dreyer opened her eyes — beyond her successful stage career at that time in Paris — to the fact that things do happen that are outrageous, that injustice is rampant. She stopped doing comedies after that; she moved to tragedy, basically." Yet, MacNeice added, Falconetti "remained an actress and not a political activist."

Falconetti seemed to have nowhere else to go, creatively or politically. "What do you do after you play Joan of Arc?" Mier asked. "Do you just go back to doing song and dance? I think that posed a big dilemma in her life. It became a crisis of faith."

In 1929, a year after the film's release, Dreyer said that in Falconetti, he had found "the martyr's reincarnation." Joan died at 19; Falconetti died at 54 in December 1946. Cordal and other sources suggest that she slowly went insane.

The original negative of Dryer's film burned. Incomplete, heavily edited versions of the film were screened over the following years, until 1981, when a complete copy of the original was found in a closet in a Norwegian insane asylum. And, perhaps fittingly, after her death, Falconetti was cremated.

Details

Our Lady of Buenos Aires, presented by Teatro Paraguas

8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Wednesday & Thursday, March 14, 15, 19 & 20; through March 22

Wise Fool Studio, 2778 Agua Fría St., Unit D

$10 & $12; Wednesday, March 19, performance pay what you wish; 473-9339

Reincarnating the martyr

For a detailed description of the making of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti as Joan, rent the Criterion Collection DVD, which includes commentary by Dreyer scholar Casper Tybjerg as well as input from Falconetti's daughter Hélène. The DVD also features composer Richard Einhorn's original oratorio, inspired by Dreyer's films and performed by Anonymous 4.

Tom Milne's 1971 book The Cinema of Carl Dreyer remains an excellent study of the filmmaker's work. In his section on The Passion of Joan of Arc, Milne reports that the Danish filmmaker made the movie for the Société Générale de Films with the original intention of basing the script on a novel by Joseph Delteil. Dreyer instead utilized original transcripts of Joan's trial to focus the project on one single, hellish day of inquisition.

Milne quotes Dreyer on Falconetti: "I went to see her one afternoon, and we talked for an hour or two. I had seen her in a play in a little boulevard theatre whose name I have forgotten. She was playing a light modern comedy and she was very elegant in it, a little flighty, but charming. She didn't win me over right away, and I didn't have immediate confidence in her. I simply asked if I could come to see her the following day, and during that visit we talked. It was then that I felt that there was something in her which could be brought out; something she could give, and something, therefore, that I could take. For behind the make-up, behind the pose and that ravishing modern appearance, there was something. There was a soul behind that facade. So I told her I would like to do some tests with her the next day. 'But without make-up,' I added, 'with your face completely naked.' The next day she came, ready and willing. She had removed her make-up, we did the tests, and I found in her face exactly what I wanted for Joan: a country girl, very sincere, but also a woman of suffering." — R.N.