"The Passion of Joan of Arc" and other masterpiece movies I've watched this week

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Polls of all-time greatest films almost invariably annoy me. Cineastes always choose films you’d only sit through if they were part of an exam (i.e. anything directed by Jean-Luc Bleeding Godard), and the American youths who vote in the IMDb-style polls invariably lob in movies you’d only sit through if you’d had a lobotomy (Revenge of the Jerks Fratpack Hooters Gross-Out 6 etc.)

When I saw that the 846 critics, academics and distributors who voted in the British Film Institute’s  Top Fifty Greatest Films of All Time poll (the results were published last week - you can read them here) had Vertigo in the top spot, my heart sank a little: an overwrought 1950s technicolour melodrama starring one of the worst actresses in film history (Kim Novak) and full of clunkingly silly Freudian tosh, it has always been one of my least favourite Hitchcock films.

But then I looked at the rest of the Top Ten and discovered that I hadn’t ever seen five of them, and decided I hadn’t earned to right to criticise. Here’s the list:

1.  Vertigo, Alfred Hitchock, 1958
2.  Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941
3.  Tokyo Story, Ozu Yasujiro, 1953
4.  La Règle du Jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939
5.  Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F.W. Murnau, 1927
6.  2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968
7.  The Searchers, John Ford, 1956
8.  Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929
9.  The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer, 1927
10. 8 ½, Fellini, 1963

So, during the past week, in between bouts of sport-watching, I watched the five films on the list I hadn’t seen – and I’m delighted I did.

Dreyer’s silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc contains the greatest performance by a film actor – male or female - that I’ve ever seen. Almost the whole film is shot in close-up, and the majority of those close-ups are of Maria Falconetti’s face as she is tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. Her remarkable performance was partly bullied out of her by a director who was himself evidently on fire throughout the filming. It’s not hugely long, but so emotionally powerful I had to watch it over two days – I had to take time out when the actress’s hair (already short, to fit with her male clothing) is shaved off to make her look like every picture we’ve ever seen of every political prisoner and concentration camp inmate of the following twenty years. The whole film is available online, with an effective modern soundtrack.

The Passion of Joan of Arc, which opened to enormous critical acclaim and utter commercial failure, deserves its place on any Top Ten list, even if it means losing Revenge of the Jerks Hooters Fratpack Gross-Out 6.

Another film which thoroughly deserves its place is Tokyo Story, a quiet film about very ordinary people in post-war Japan. An old couple decide to visit their children in the city, and find they’re far too distracted by the pressures of modern life to pay any attention to them: they are only shown true kindness by the widow of one of their sons who was killed in the war. It doesn’t, I’ll admit, sound like a compelling must-see – but it’s heart-rending, without ever relying on cheap sentiment. The scene where the father gets royally pissed with two old friends, and the final scene where his constantly-smiling widowed daughter-in-law breaks down and admits how lonely she has been since the death of their far-from-perfect son are brilliantly realised.

One of the fascinating aspects of Tokyo Story is the depiction of everyday Japanese life just eight years after the country had been humiliatingly crushed in a war entirely of its own making – a war in which its people had horrified the world with their bestial cruelty. And yet, here, we’re looking at people like us: selfish, distracted, kind, civilised, petty, noble… leading decent if unspectacular lives. God, we do have an extraordinary capacity to bounce back, don’t we?

Man with a Movie Camera is a documentary filmed in the Black Sea port of Odessa in 1929, which uses every technique available to silent film-makers (slo-mo, superimposition, stop-go animation, split-screen etc). This sort of thing no doubt appeals to critics, but tends to leave me cold. What’s really fascinating is how damned normal everything looks: busy shops, busy streets, fire-engines full of firemen in gleaming Germanic helmets, masses of trams and cars, relaxed, fashionably-dressed people… This was filmed in the year  Stalin devised his programme to collectivise Soviete farming. The increase in Ukrainian grain procurement quotas three years later in 1932 guaranteed that there wasn’t enough left to feed the people – in what was the worst act of genocide in human history to that point, over six million Ukrainians starved to death.

I'm not sure the movie deserves its place in the Top Ten – but it’s hard to judge given that the viewer just wants to shout a warning to all those happy, smiling people on the streets and beaches of this seemingly thriving city that the most inhumanly murderous beast in all history is already slouching towards them... and is slouching towards them.  You can watch the whole film online - in sections - here. Just make sure the "autoplay" near the bottom of the screen is turned on, and it'll move you seamlessly from one segment to the next.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is a 1927 movie made in America by the German director, F. W, Murnau, and is one of the three recognisably Hollywood films on the list. A farmer is goaded by his vampy, citified mistress to murder his cute, faithful wife (Janet Gaynor) so the lovers can sell the farm and run off to the city with the proceeds. He takes his wife out in a rowing boat, intending to toss her overboard – but can’t bring himself to do the deed. Terrified, she runs away when they get to shore. She boards a tram, but he follows her, and they end up spending the day in the city together – and he falls in love with her again. I’m not sure if it’s Top Ten (I’m not that crazy about silent films) – but it’s a good watch.

Finally, Fellini’s 8 ½ (he’d made seven films and a couple of sequences for other films before this one – hence the title). As a middle-aged director prepares to shoot his new film, he has trouble with his wife, his mistress, actresses who are in the film, or want to be, his producer, the Catholic church… well, everyone, really. Apparently, life’s complex for creative artists. (Personally, I’ve observed that life’s complex for most married men who can’t keep their dick in their pants.) It’s one of those sophisticated European comedies where you don’t laugh. I kept watching in the hope that Marcello Mastroianni, in the lead role, would get pistol-whipped or shot for being an utterly self-indulgent tosser, but no such luck. Mind you, I loathed La Dolce Vita as well.

I know you’re all simply gagging to know what my own personal list of Top Ten films is – but I’ll save that for another day.