The Epidermis of Reality'

Film-Philosophy 17.
1 (2013)
Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 445
The Epidermis of Reality: Artaud, the Material Body and
Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc

Ros Murray
1

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze poses the question: was
there in Artaud an affinity with Dreyer? (Deleuze 1989, 170). What
Deleuze is referring to here, following Maurice Blanchot, is the
impossibility of thought, its fundamental powerlessness (Deleuze 1989,
168), that difficulty which has often been identified as the essential force at
play throughout all of Artauds work. Indeed the question of whether or not
one can use the word work to describe Artauds output identifies this very
problem: nothing that Artaud produced was ever complete, nor, as he
declared in The Nerve-Scales, was it necessarily intended to be: dear
friends: what you mistook for my works were merely the waste products of
myself, those scrapings of the soul that the normal man does not welcome
(Artaud 1976, 83). As Susan Sontag writes, Artauds work was doomed to
failure, but it is precisely this failure that so eloquently expresses the
problem at the heart of thought, its very genesis (Sontag 1983, 16). This is
what fascinates Deleuze about Artaud, and provides him with inspiration for
his own explorations of how different art-forms arouse the thinking process,
moving the brain and affecting the body rather than simply reproducing or
representing the world. In Cinema II: The Time-Image Deleuze questions
whether Carl Theodor Dreyer might be seen as an Artaud to whom reason
would have been restored (Deleuze 1989, 170). If Artaud presents us
with nothing but the impossibility of thought, this suggests that Dreyers
films go some way towards responding to this problem. This article
proposes that the comparison between Artauds theories about what cinema
should do and Dreyers practice provides a useful approach to thinking
about non-normative bodily experience in the cinema. It argues that
Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne dArc, Carl
Theodor Dreyer, 1928) might be seen as a film that seeks to put into
question the distinction between symbolic representation and a more
visceral, affective form of expression that is particularly relevant to Artaud.
This will entail an examination of Artauds own ideas about representation
in his theatre and cinema writings, and a discussion of how these can be
read in relation to The Passion of Joan of Arc. Finally, the article provides
an overview of the various critical interpretations of Dreyer's film alongside
the ideological appropriations of Joan of Arc, and it considers how, in true
Artaudian style, the material fate of Dreyer's film echoes that of Joan of Arc

1
Queen Mary, University of London: r.murray@qmul.ac.uk
Film-Philosophy 17.1 (2013)
herself, disrupting the boundaries that distance the represented body from its
corporeal origins.

Artauds Theory of Cinema
Artauds forays into cinema can be divided into three stages: there was his
initial excitement, where cinema seemed to be the perfect new technology
for exploring the inner workings of the mind; the practical stage, with his
acting career, the scenarios, and Germaine Dulacs interpretation of his
scenario The Seashell and The Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman,
Germaine Dulac, 1928); and finally the inevitable disappointment, where he
was unable to sell his scenarios or to get the roles that he wanted. In the
mid-1930s he abandoned the cinema, in part due to his scepticism about the
possibilities offered by the introduction of sound, which he saw as leading
to the subordination of the image to the text. In his initial enthusiasm for the
cinema Artaud describes it as a remarkable excitant and writes that it acts
directly on the grey matter of the brain (Artaud 1970, 74). This was at a
time when all his writing explored the painful impossibility of thought, and
the problems of expression that this entailed. Artaud identifies this difficulty
as a strange illness, which is the subject of three of his early publications:
Correspondence with Jacques Rivire (1927), The Nerve-Scales (1925) and
The Umbilicus of Limbo (1925). This illness results in the inability to
express the inner workings of his own thought as a corporeal rather than a
purely rational force. The protagonist of his first scenario, The Eighteen
Seconds, suffers from the same unidentifiable disease: he has become
incapable of reaching his thoughts; he has retained all his lucidity, but no
matter what thought occurs to him, he can no longer give it an external form,
that is, translate it into appropriate gestures and words (Artaud 1976, 115).
This man, strikingly similar to Artaud himself, is an actor on the verge of
becoming famous, and the spectator is presented with his subjective
experience of time, as eighteen seconds are stretched out over two or three
hours. The film ends with the protagonist looking at his watch and seeing
the discrepancy between his own experience of duration, and the time
counted by the second-hand on his watch, at which point he pulls a revolver
out of his pocket and shoots himself in the head. These eighteen seconds are
filled with images that overwhelm the protagonist, an enormous number of
contradictory images, without very much connection from one to the next
(Artaud 1976, 115).
This scenario displays several important aspects of Artauds initial
approach towards cinema: firstly, the idea that a proliferation of images can
overcome the problem of trying to express thought in words, secondly, that
films should resist total abstraction but not necessarily follow the
chronological or temporal logic of narrative, and thirdly, that they should
follow the inner workings of the mind, and involve an investment from the
actor that exceeds what might usually be expected of him or her. Artaud was
clearly bearing witness to his own experience, as an actor who sought to
embody rather than merely play a role, when he wrote this scenario. One of
his great disappointments was that he did not secure the role of Usher in The
Fall of the House of Usher (La Chute de la maison Usher, Jean Epstein,
1928). In a letter to Abel Gance, who produced the film, requesting the role
of Usher Artaud wrote if I dont have this character under my skin no-one
in the world does (Artaud 1976, 167, translation modified). In other words,
Artaud felt that this was the role for him because he was the living
embodiment of Usher: my life is the life of Usher and of his sinister hovel.
I have the plague in the fibre of my nerves and I suffer from it (Artaud
1976, 168). Again, when Dulac adapted his scenario The Seashell and the
Clergyman, one of the numerous complaints that he directed against her was
to do with the casting, partly because she did not grant his wish to play the
role of the clergyman, instead choosing (perhaps wisely, considering his
attitude towards her adaptation) to film when she knew he would be busy
working on The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The first point is perhaps the most important for Artaud as cinema
seemed, initially, to offer an escape route because it was image-based and
had no need for words. Artaud added a text to the beginning of the scenario
for The Seashell and the Clergyman, entitled Cinema and Reality,
exploring the relationship between internal reality and its projection on
screen:
No matter how deeply we dig into the mind, we find at the bottom of
every emotion, even an intellectual one, an affective sensation of a
nervous order. This sensation involves the recognition, perhaps on
an elementary level, but at least on a tangible one, of something
substantial, of a certain vibration which always recalls states either
known or imagined, that are clothed in one of the myriad forms of
real or imagined nature. (Artaud 1976, 150)
Cinema provided the perfect medium because it could potentially tap into
the multiple possibilities of thought through the use of moving images,
which did not rely solely on text in order to create meaning. Words, for
Artaud, always presented an insurmountable problem, because they did not
directly express states of mind, whereas he believed that images potentially
could. This is why he insisted that films should not be based on text, but
should directly reach that part of the mind where the thinking process had
not yet materialised into concrete thoughts. The purpose of images, he wrote,
was to reveal the very essence of language and to transport the action to a
level where all translation would become useless, and where this action
would operate almost intuitively on the brain (Artaud 1976, 151).
Cinematic images ought to create, therefore, a kind of touching.
Images should produce vibrations in the brain that lead not to concrete
thoughts but physically move the spectator, having direct contact with his or
her nervous system. It is no coincidence that Artaud so frequently uses skin
imagery in his writing; not only does he write about skin, but he often treats
the surface of the page as if it were a skin, scratching and scraping at it,
leaving holes in its surface whilst writing about suffering from severe
eczema.
2
Again we see these skin images in his texts about cinema as he
writes: the human skin of things, the epidermis of reality, that is the
primary raw material of cinema (Artaud 1976, 151). Inhabiting the skin of
the character Usher is perhaps more than just a metaphor. The epidermis of
reality might be understood both in the sense of the material the surface
of things that we touch and in terms of affect, in other words, the ability of
what we experience to touch us directly without what might otherwise be
seen as the distancing mediation of representation.
Like the skin, the nervous system occupies an important place in
Artauds writing. In his theatre writings Artaud writes about communicating
physically with the audience, engaging their bodies through the use of new
sound and lighting technologies, and at one point he even suggests placing
the audience in the middle of the action on revolving chairs. Whilst words
are rejected because they present a barrier that separates the audience from
the physical space of the stage, Artauds aim with the theatre is, through the
use of gestures that resemble hieroglyphic signs, to break through language
to touch life (Artaud 1964, 18). The theatre texts, particularly those such as
The Alchemical Theatre and The Theatre and the Plague, as their titles
suggest, place emphasis on the physical properties of matter, and the way
that this can be radically transformed through the use of wild combinations
of corporeal gestures. In the first manifesto for his Theatre of Cruelty,
Artaud writes about the use of mans nervous magnetism (Artaud 1964,
110), and in the second he calls for a certain vibration and a certain
material agitation (Artaud 1964, 149). Audience members are to be treated
like snakes, perceiving through vibration rather than via the intellect:
Snakes are long, their bodies touch the ground at almost every point,
and the musical vibrations which are communicated to the ground
reach their bodies like a very subtle and profound massage; well, I
propose that we treat the spectators like snakes that are being
charmed. (Artaud 1964, 97)
Artaud was unable to finance any of his film projects, and it was largely for
this reason that he abandoned the cinema as a medium. He also expressed a
marked, and perhaps inevitable, sense of disappointment with the type of
cinema that was dominant in France at the time. He divided what he
perceived to be the current cinematic trends into two categories, pure or
abstract cinema and the cinema of psychological situations (Artaud 1976,

2
In the notes accompanying his 1947 radio piece To have Done with the Judgement of God,
Artaud writes Ive been incessantly tormented by the terrible itching caused by intolerable
eczema (Artaud 1974, 112).
150), both of which he rejected. Abstract cinema, he claimed, was made up
of pure geometrical forms that could not communicate on a visceral level
with the spectator, and psychological dramas simply reproduced the world
of the everyday rather than transforming it. He identified Anglo-Saxon
filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers as those who
managed to engage with the audience physically, shaking their bodies, but it
was only through laughter that Artaud found the realisation of the much
wider potential that he envisaged for cinema.
Artauds ideas about artistic communication, not only those found in
the limited number of texts that he wrote about cinema, but more broadly
speaking the ideas that pervade throughout all of his work, are in many
respects inherently cinematic. The notion that cinema can produce a shock
to thought, re-arranging our experience of our own body and deploying a
kind of visuality that appeals to our sense of touch is one that has
increasingly gained currency in film theory, long after Artauds pioneering
but until recently largely ignored cinematic writings of the 1920s. Although
Artauds film theory can be situated clearly in the context of 1920s French
theoretical writing on film, some of the ideas circulating at the time,
particularly about the affective forces put into play in the cinema, seem
especially pertinent to more recent theories concerned with embodied
spectatorship. In 1921 Jean Epstein wrote, highlighting the importance of
nervous gestures, that the film is nothing but a relay between the source
of nervous energy and the auditorium which breathes its radiance (Epstein
1977, 13). The materiality of the medium and the physical experience of
cinema spectatorship played an important role in such conceptions. Like
Artaud, Epstein saw a direct link between the nervous system and the
cinematic image, and thus understood the great potential of cinema to create
a new experience of the body. The question becomes, then, what kind of a
body is this, and where can it be located?
For many of the French theorists and practitioners writing in the
1920s, including Artaud, spectatorship was by definition a collective
experience, and the cinema appealed to an audience that they conceived as a
crowd, rather than an individual spectator. More recently, scholars writing
about early cinema, such as Rae-Beth Gordon (Gordon 2001), have
analysed how conceptions of spectatorship at the time were influenced by
practices such as hypnotism and magnetism that became popular towards
the end of the Nineteenth century. This continues to be relevant throughout
the 1920s, and, as we have seen, for Artaud the potential of the cinema lay
in its ability to act as a contagious, hypnotic force. This force was conceived
as one that would threaten the boundaries of the individual subject, and for
Artaud, if we consider his proclaimed desire to destroy mans existing
anatomy and create a body without organs (Artaud 1976, 571), the power
of the cinema might be conceived not just in its establishment of a collective
audience, but through its awakening of a latent and dangerous
transcorporeal entity arising from the affective exchange between bodies.

The Affective Body: Artaud, Dreyer and The Passion of Joan of Arc
Since the 1990s, much attention has been paid to the materiality of film and
its relationship to embodiment. Vivian Sobchacks work on
phenomenological approaches to film experience, for example, has been
essential to theories of embodiment in the cinema. We might also think of
Stephen Shaviros The Cinematic Body, following a more explicitly
Deleuzian vein, in which he writes the flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic
apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limit (Shaviro 1993,
255). Shaviros emphasis is on the way that cinema can present a potentially
threatening, multiple and transformative bodily experience, as he writes:
film theory should be less a theory of fantasy (psychoanalytic or otherwise)
than a theory of the affects and transformation of bodies (Shaviro 1993,
256). Laura Marks has also argued for a more specific type of moving
image that appeals to the audiences embodied position by evoking
memories of touch. Haptic visuality, 'more inclined to graze than to gaze'
according to Marks (2000, 162), allows us to experience things that are not
representable purely through language. And more recently, Martine Beugnet,
in Cinema and Sensation, draws explicitly from Artaud's 'third path'
between abstraction and figuration, placing his ideas about cinema at the
beginning of the trajectory of affective cinematic thought that she traces
through Deleuze, Sobchack, Shaviro and Marks (Beugnet 2007, 22).
Yet the problem that we are often faced as readers of Artaud's texts,
or viewers of the strange and fragile material objects that he produced, is
how to conceive this rejection of representative structures as potentially
creative and productive rather than annihilating. Artauds corporeal
experiments were concerned with disrupting the body as an organic,
anatomically-arranged structure in order to create a body that was purely
intensive and expressive. This expression of a body, opposed to a
representation, is what Deleuze and Guattari call the body without organs.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari specifically address the
problem of how to create a positive body without organs without simply
falling back into a negative, destructive or fascist model (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980, 202). It is in Deleuzes notion of the affection-image
(Deleuze 1986, 61) that a positive use for Artauds theories in the cinema
can be located. The affection-image is where we might perceive the
beginnings of that which exceeds narrative, or that which presents us with a
rupture in chronology, and engages our corporeal responses, thus breaking
down the distance between the viewer and the object perceived. This is also
where we might insert Artauds vision of cinema as the epidermis of
reality.
Affection-images are images that trigger an emotional and bodily
response. Within the narrative structure that dominates the movement-image,
the affection-image is followed by action, whereas affection-images in the
cinema of time-image imply an experience of time that serves no narrative
purpose. Affect does not have a logical function, but seeks to move the
viewer, and the affection-image is relevant to Artauds desire to make the
audiences bodies vibrate like snakes, appealing to their nervous systems
rather than their intellect. Deleuze associates the affection-image with the
close-up and with the face, writing: the affection-image is the close-up, and
the close-up is the face (Deleuze 1986, 87). This close-up is often
understood, particularly in 1920s accounts of the cinema, as specifically
cinematic, and as the prime example of how cinema enhanced natural vision.
Epstein writes that the close-up is the soul of cinema, and that through it
we do not simply watch life, we penetrate it, defining cinema as a theatre
of the skin (Epstein 1974, 66). It is through the close-up that we perceive
the skin of things, the surface of matter that Artaud insisted so heavily
upon.
Of the many films that Artaud appeared in, The Passion of Joan of
Arc is surely the most relevant to his notion that cinema should be an
affective medium. Deleuze characterises The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film
comprised almost entirely of close-ups of the face, as the affective film par
excellence (Deleuze 1986, 106). He writes of the relationship between the
close-up and the face: there is no close-up of the face, the face is in itself
close-up, and the close-up is by itself face, and both are affect, affection-
image (Deleuze 1986, 88). Deleuze is certainly not alone in his emphasis
on the affective powers of Dreyers images. Jean Mitry writes that Dreyers
use of the facial close-up is unique because rather than interrupting the
signifying function of images, which is what he sees as the conventional
purpose of the facial close-up, Dreyers facial close-up simultaneously
signifies and expresses: opposed and juxtaposed in a kind of abstract
figuration, the facial close-ups signify as the very sign of what they express
(Mitry 1987, 81). The power to signify what it is expressing points towards
a kind of representation based on presence rather than absence. Mitry
suggests that this new form of expression occurs through the way that facial
close-ups interchange with each other throughout the film, which he
characterises as a confrontation of faces (Mitry 1987, 81). In Dreyers film
the facial close-up does not relate to the presence of one particular body,
which is what it conventionally does when it interrupts the narrative, as
Mitry argues with the sole purpose of emphasizing the actors talents
(Mitry 1987, 81), but instead conveys a totality of expression arising from
the interaction between faces.
Mitrys approach pre-empts theories of embodied spectatorship such
as Sobchacks, Shaviros or Markss by criticising semioticians (principally
Christian Metz) for understanding cinema as a form to be analysed as if it
were a language. He argues that rather than appealing to the intellect, films
are first experienced as sensual, and exceed structural or grammatical
analysis. He writes:
Because nothing in the cinema is intelligible that does not first pass
through the senses (as visual perception recalls all sensations, tactile
and otherwise, relative to the given object), the main problem with
structural semiology [...] is that it only ever understands signification
on the level of the intelligible, completely ignoring the senses.
(Mitry 1987, 79)
It is no coincidence that Mitry reaches this conclusion through a discussion
of the close-up, and specifically Dreyers use of it. Dreyer himself claimed
that he wanted to humanise the tragedy, again emphasising the importance
of affect as that which eliminates the distance between the audience and the
faces they perceive on screen: my intention whilst filming Joan of Arc was,
through the glory of legend, to reveal the human tragedy. I wanted to show
that the heroes of History are also human beings (Drouzy 1982, 241). The
hero/heroine is always an individual, but always unattainable. If Dreyer
claims here that he wants to portray the heroine differently, we might
suggest that to humanise the heroine is to de-individualise her, and to render
the actor a vessel for collective affect. Dreyer also wrote about choosing to
portray all the actors in The Passion of Joan of Arc with no make-up, in
order to get closer to what he perceived to be their human qualities, as if
these were visible on their skin.
Indeed, as in Artauds work, skin seems to occupy a privileged
position for Dreyer. Maurice Drouzy, in his biography Carl Th. Dreyer n
Nilsson, draws attention to the fact that Dreyer suffered from debilitating
eczema, and describes him as being uneasy in his skin [mal dans sa peau]
(Drouzy 1982,149). There are perhaps parallels to be drawn here with
Artaud, who, as we have seen, also wrote about suffering from eczema, and
Dreyer, like Artaud, suffered from a psychological breakdown. Drouzy
claims that as a result of his problematic childhood, Dreyer was incapable of
affection and always had to maintain a distance from others, writing in
opposition to tactile artists, Dreyer is a visual one (Drouzy 1982, 139).
However, there is undoubtedly a danger in reducing Dreyers artistic output
to his biographical circumstances. The claim that Dreyer is a purely visual
artist, for example, is difficult to maintain, as it seems far more apparent,
especially in The Passion of Joan of Arc, that Dreyers films seek to
eliminate distance, particularly given that he himself emphasised the
importance of the affective power of his images. What I want to advance
here is not therefore a psychological interpretation, but rather a theory of
materiality that takes into account the close relationship between the
corporeal body (as opposed to a represented body) and the cinematic image.

Andr Bazin writes that The Passion of Joan of Arc is an exploration of the
interior states of the soul, again emphasising the affective power of Dreyers
images:
The story of Joan, such as Dreyer tells it, is deprived of all anecdotal
incidence, it is the pure combat of souls, but this exclusively
spiritual tragedy, whose movement is interior, is expressed through
the medium of that privileged part of the body, the face (Bazin 1975,
38).
This description emphasises proximity and interiority, as if the invisible
interior spiritual movement can be accessed, or rendered visible, through the
face. Bazin also links this spirituality to the material quality of the negatives,
adding there is perhaps no other film in which the material quality of the
photography has more importance (Bazin 1975, 37). He writes that the
close-up undoes the distinction between actor and character, and that the
actors individual facial characteristics, and the material quality of their
skins, evoke their souls: 'seen in such proximity through the extreme close-
up, the mask of acting begins to crack. Silvains warts, Jean dYds freckles
and Maurice Shutzs wrinkles coincide with their souls, they signify more
than their role' (Bazin 1975, 38, Bazins emphasis). Bazins emphasis of the
verb signify here draws attention to signification as more than what is
accessible though intellectual interpretation, in other words, he suggests that
there is something direct about the way that these facial signs communicate
meaning.
Artaud too placed great emphasis on the physicality of his actors,
suggesting that they should not simply act their characters, but become them,
eliminating the distance between reality and its representation, and those
writing about Artuad often identify his auratic presence in The Passion of
Joan of Arc. Dominique Pani, for example, writes 'no one, except Dreyer,
gave him the opportunity to expose the pestilence in the soul of his nerves',
and that 'the expression on his troubled face denotes a true pity' (Pani 2006,
40). Kimberley Jannarone writes skeptically of how, through a still taken
from the film which has become his most iconic image, reproduced on the
cover of the Selected Works, 'his intense inwardness and charisma situate
him as the noblest sufferer of history' (Jannerone 2010, 8). This recalls the
embodied, mimetic relationship that Artaud projected on to his potential
interpretation of Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher, as he writes to
Gance: There is a quality of nervous suffering which the greatest actor in
the world cannot project on the screen unless he has experienced it himself.
I have experienced it. I think like Usher (Artaud 1976, 168, Artauds
emphasis).
3
Dreyer also wrote about his actors embodying their roles,

3
I am using the term mimesis to designate a specifically non-representative form of
expression. This follows from Borch-Jacobsens notion, in The Freudian Subject, that
mimesis is unspecularizable [], nonreflexive, prereflexive, and is a dangerous, affective
stating he found in Falconetti the reincarnation of the martyr (Dreyer 1983,
36). He theorises, in a similar vein to Artaud, about the importance of
corporeal gesture in silent film as a mimetic form of expression that
communicates more directly than speech, writing that the mimetic [la
mimtique] acts directly upon us and evokes our emotions without the need
for thoughts to intervene, and that the mimetic gesture brings the soul to
the face (Dreyer 1983, 67).
Bazins description of The Passion of Joan of Arc accentuates the
spiritual, which is symptomatic of much writing about this film, including
Dreyers own analysis. Most accounts of Dreyers film display a striking
lack of critical distance. Drouzy attempts to introduce this distance by
pathologising Dreyer, and attributing his artistic choices to his relationship
to his mother. Bazin writes emotively about the actors becoming their
characters. Mitry emphasises the expressive power of the facial close-up
which he distinguishes from its usual function in narrative cinema. Perhaps
the most eccentric is Stan Brakhages interpretation of the film, which
merges Dreyer, Maria Falconetti and Joan together. He writes about the
difficulty Dreyer had in finding an appropriate actress to play Joan, claiming
that Dreyer chose Falconetti because she looked like him: Carl found
himself, thus, in a fashion magazine; and as Theadore, chose himself to play
with himself in the deadliest game of all: the hermaphrodites game
played as always, to tortured end Death itself by fire, for sure! (Brakhage
1972, 67). One question that arises through reading these various
interpretations is the following: who is the protagonist of this film? Is it
Dreyer himself, Falconetti as the individual actor, the inner movements of
the actors souls visible on their faces as a kind of collective entity, or the
close-up and negatives as pro-filmic elements? For on the one hand, Bazin
and Brakhage both seem to suggest that the individual identities of the
actors are important, yet on the other, they imply that the bodys
individuality is exceeded: Falconetti becomes Dreyer, Eugne Silvain, Jean
dYd and Maurice Schutz are identified through small facial features or
qualities that form part of a collective affect. In other words, the distinction
between faces, ordinarily conceived as markers of individuality, becomes
blurred.
The close-up of the face in The Passion of Joan of Arc often depicts
substances and concentrates on small physical movements or sensations. In

force that opposes the unitary subject. Borch-Jacobsen distinguishes mimesis from
representation by arguing that mimesis is to act, whereas representation is to consciously
reflect on that action, thus implying a distancing effect (Borch-Jacobsen 1988, 39).
Mimesis as I am using it here entails a process of becoming, a lack of distinction between
self and other (Borch-Jacobsen 1988, 40) and not simply reflecting. Marks understands
mimesis in comparable terms, writing that in theories of embodied spectatorship, such as
Sobchacks, the relationship between spectator and film is fundamentally mimetic, in that
meaning is not solely communicated through signs but experienced in the body (Marks
2000, 149).
this sense it might also be said to illicit a mimetic response in the viewer,
engaging with haptic forms of visuality. Bodily fluids such as saliva, sweat,
blood, tears and mucous on the surface of skin are all emphasised at
different points in the film. The haptic imagery always evokes not only
touch and vision, but also smell and sound, for example when we see a fly
walking slowly across Joans face twice in the film, or when we see the
close-up of a mouth shouting or spitting, exposing rotten teeth. The
intersensorial impression given off by such images does not work towards
emphasising the individual but rather creating a collective affect, or a
touching between bodies. This de-individualising force occurs via the face,
which becomes the surface on which these transcorporeal interactions occur,
for example through the scene where Massieu dries the tears from Joans
cheeks, or where we see saliva sticking to Joans face, or close-ups of other
characters faces flinching at Joans suffering.
The faces in The Passion of Joan of Arc at times become
indistinguishable, morphing into one another, such as in the shots panning
around the crowd during Joans execution, and the individuality of bodies is
blurred, the distances between them eliminated. Beugnet characterises the
use of the close-up in the French cinema of sensation as a means to do
away with the usual binarisms and blur the frontiers between inside and
outside, masculine and feminine, figurative and abstract, sensory and
conceptual, subjective and objective (Beugnet 2007, 108). The close-up
produces what Beugnet refers to as operations of the formless, after
Batailles informe, and she writes that it is the perfect tool for capturing the
process of metamorphosis of a body passing from form to formlessness,
becoming a deformed and unrecognisable entity from which in turn, form
emerges (Beugnet 2007, 192). The putting into question of gender
distinctions is one way in which this deforming of the body, or the blurring
of its boundaries, occurs in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Joans refusal to
dress as a woman, when her persecutors give her the opportunity of
attending mass if she stops wearing mens clothes and she declines the offer,
is one stage of this. In other ways she occupies an indistinguishable and
contradictory space which confuses the gender binary; she is hysterical (a
supposedly feminine condition) but simultaneously one of the heroes of
History (Drouzy quoting Dreyer, Drouzy 1982, 241); she is both dirty (as
we see in the close-up shots of her dirty fingernails, and the flies buzzing
around her) and clean (her and Massieus smooth and youthful skin place
them in opposition to her persecutors); neither typically feminine (she sports
a butch haircut), nor masculine (she is played by a feminine fashion model).
Gods gender is also put into question, when Joan claims she has spoken to
him through the angel Michael, and Cauchon demands to know how Joan
could identify St Michael, if he appeared as a woman, and whether or not he
was naked. Joans refusal to cooperate might thus be seen as a rejection of
the rules of representation that she is subjected to: if she is to be taken
seriously in court, and therefore be representable, she must adhere to dress
codes, and be able to distinguish between male and female.

Subverting the National Icon: The Material Body
The question of whether a clear distinction can be made between Joan of
Arcs symbolic, representative significance and her potential to become a
vessel for collective affect remains. As we have seen, Artauds ideas about
the importance of moving his audience can be situated in the context of
1920s cinema theory in which spectatorship was understood as a primarily
collective experience, one which put into place dangerous and contagious
forces. Deleuze would later write in The Time-Image that such forces could
be easily appropriated by fascism. He provides the example of Hitlerian
automaton that came out of an appropriation of expressionist cinema,
writing: 'the revolutionary courtship of the movement-image and an art of
the masses become subject was broken off, giving way to the masses
subjected as psychological automaton, and to their leader as great spiritual
automaton' (Deleuze 1989, 264). This is perhaps one reason why by the
1950s and 60s the dominant trends in film theory had largely abandoned the
notion that there was a dangerous, collective force at play in the cinema, and
began to concentrate on the individual spectator.
The problem with theories concentrating on the collective
experience of cinema spectatorship arises when they privilege a particular
kind of body and present it as a valid vehicle for universal identification. In
this light it is perhaps interesting to consider that Joan of Arc is currently
used as a figurehead for the extreme right in France: this is surely an
example of what Deleuze would identify as the fascist appropriation of the
spiritual automaton, and demonstrates a white, French, Catholic collective
body, rather than a non-normative affective entity that seeks to undo the
boundaries between individuals. Joan of Arc thus becomes the embodiment,
rather than the victim, of cultural prejudice. Artaud himself, as one recent
study of his theatre production work has argued (Jannarone 2010), whilst
vehemently rejecting the contemporary European culture and context in
which he wrote, often ended up veering rather closely to the kinds of fascist
discourse that Deleuze warns against. I want to argue, however, that
Dreyers interpretation seems to suggest an altogether different version of
Joan of Arc than the figure appropriated by the extreme right.
It is undeniable that Joan of Arc has a huge symbolic significance;
however, this means that she has been appropriated in a variety of different
contexts in radically different ways. This is also true of Dreyers film.
Charles OBrien points out that it has often been used as an example of a
national French cinema subverting Hollywood tradition. He argues, on the
contrary, that the film escapes the Hollywood/avant-garde binary, and that
what Dreyers version of Joan of Arc subverts is the national film aesthetic
derived from the academic art of the nineteenth century (OBrien 1996, 3).
He quotes from an article on Dreyer published shortly after the release of
the film, in 1928 that places Dreyer within a school of international
directors:
Of Danish nationality and formation but Swedish ancestry, Carl
Dreyer does not derive from the cinematography of any particular
country, but instead belongs to a school of directors who make up a
more generally human cinema, international in its accessibility to all
people, of whatever race, people, class or condition. (OBrien 1996,
7, quoting Jean Arroy)
Critics writing at the time, OBrien demonstrates, were more concerned
with this vision of Dreyer as an international director, implying that
Dreyers Joan of Arc subverts the symbolic weight of the national icon.
Artaud expressed a similar view, arguing that it was a vehemently
anti-establishment film:
Dreyer was determined to show Joan of Arc as a victim of one of the
most painful distortions there are: the distortion of a divine principle
passing into the brains of men, whether they are called the
Government or the Church or by some other name. (Artaud 1976,
183)
We might read this as precisely a declaration against the ideological
appropriation of Joan as a symbolic figure. Dreyers declared intention was
to move the viewers so they would feel in their own flesh the suffering
endured by Joan (OBrien 1996, 21). The scenes from the film that did not
pass the censor were those depicting real bodily discomfort, for example the
scene of Joan bleeding in which Falconetti actually gives blood (Drouzy
1982, 246). If critics at the time described Dreyers film as too cruel for
sensitive viewers (OBrien 1996, 20), it is surely in the sense that Artaud
advocates in his theatre of cruelty, where cruelty is defined as an affective
and threatening force precisely because it moves the spectator and disrupts
the boundaries between self and other.
If Dreyers Joan is to avoid becoming an image of the fascist
automaton, it is as an expression of a transcorporeal, non-normative bodily
experience that threatens a set of given binaries rather than re-enforcing
them. As critics have shown, this occurs through disruption of techniques
associated with a given set of cinematic conventions. For David Bordwell
these are the conventions associated with Hollywood narrative cinema
(Bordwell 1981, 9), for OBrien it is those associated with national cinema
that follows the painterly tradition, and for Richard Abel it is historical
cinema, as he describes The Passion of Joan of Arc as an anti-historical
film (Abel 1984, 198). Following an Artaudian reading, however, I want to
argue that it is in the very materiality of the images that the disruption of
bodily limits occurs.

Artaud writes of the revelatory aspect of matter (Artaud 1970, 57),
opposed to a purely symbolic representation of a body, and the way in
which the bodies interact in The Passion of Joan of Arc takes on a new turn
if we consider the materiality of the negatives. Bazin draws attention to the
quality of the photography in the film, and viewing it now (even with the
widely available digitally-enhanced version) one cannot help but appreciate
the grain of the film, as well as blemishes on its surface, which we might
associate with the haptic. But it is not so much the inevitable aging of the
filmstock that makes this film interesting as a material object, as the history
of its storage. Curiously, the negatives underwent a similar fate to the body
they portray as it is consumed by flames; the original version was destroyed
in a fire in 1928, so Dreyer had to re-edit the entire film using the discarded
footage from the first montage. This second version was yet again destroyed
in a fire at the GM Socit de Tirage in 1929, and thought to be lost. In
1952 the negatives of the second version were rediscovered and the film
was rather clumsily put together with new intertitles and a soundtrack by Lo
Duca. Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc circulated principally in this
form, as what Drouzy calls a mutilated version (Drouzy 1981, 248), until
1981, when what might be called a miraculous discovery was made: a
copy of the original version of the film was found in a Norwegian
psychiatric hospital.
4

There are clearly various parallels to be drawn between Joan of
Arcs fate and the fate of the negatives: both were destroyed by fire, re-
appropriated via various different versions, and miraculously resurrected
(Joan as a Saint, the film as a deluxe, digitally-enhanced Criterion
Collection DVD edition). One might also see a parallel in Drouzys
implication that Joan, like all of Dreyers characters, suffered from a
borderline personality disorder (Drouzy 1982, 149), and the fact that the
negatives were found in a psychiatric institution. All this is to say that in its
very materiality, the body of the negatives has a mimetic relationship to the
body on film, not only because it has an indexical relationship to the body
that was there, but perhaps also because it suffered the same fate.
This seems like a typically Artaudian end. In the preface to The
Theatre and its Double, Artaud wrote, as if referring back to the Joan of
Dreyer's film, 'if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it
is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the
stake, signalling through the flames' (Artaud 1958, 13). Never content with
simply writing about destroying the body, Artaud frequently destroyed the
surface of the page, boring holes in the paper with his pen, or burning it
with cigarettes, but rarely enough for it to be completely annihilated. In The
Passion of Joan of Arc the force of the images lies not in the narrative, but

4
See the notes included in the 1999 Criterion Collection re-issue.
rather in the intensity of affect that undermines the story, and is rendered all
the more visible in the materiality of the film and the bodies that it interacts
with. Deleuze writes that like for Eisenstein, Artauds theory of cinema
proposes that from image to thought, there is shock or vibration, which
must give rise to thought in thought, but what distinguishes Artaud from
Eisenstein is the idea that the cinema advances not the power of thought
but its impower, and thought has never had any other problem (Deleuze
1989, 166). This impower, as an analysis of Dreyers film in relation to
Artauds writing has shown, relies on an emphatically corporeal expression
of the cinematic body, and if Deleuze argues that the brain is the screen
(Deleuze 2003, 264), we can conclude that for Artaud, as for Dreyer, the
film is the body, in a distinctly material sense.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard (1984) French Cinema: The First Wave 1915 1929,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Artaud, Antonin (1958) The Theatre and its Double trans. Mary Caroline
Richards, New York: Grove Press.
Artaud, Antonin (1970) uvres compltes vol. III, Paris: Gallimard.
Artaud, Antonin (1974) uvres compltes vol. XIII, Paris: Gallimard.
Artaud, Antonin (1976) Selected Writings ed. and introduction Susan
Sontag, trans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Berkeley, California:
University of California Press.
Bazin, Andr (1975) Le Cinma de la cruaut, Paris: Flammarion.
Beugnet, Martine (2007) Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of
Transgression, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel (1988) The Freudian Subject trans. Catherine
Porter, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bordwell, David (1981) The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Brakhage, Stan (1972) The Brakhage Lectures, Chicago: Good Lion.
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Athlone.
Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Deux rgimes de fous, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1980) Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit.
Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1983) Rflexions sur mon mtier, Paris: Cahiers du
cinma.
Drouzy, Maurice (1982) Carl Th. Dreyer, n Nilsson, Paris: ditions du
Cerf.
Epstein, Jean (1974) crits sur le cinma I, Paris: Seghers.
Epstein, Jean (1977) Magnetism and Other Writings, translated Stuart
Liebman, October, volume 3, 9 - 25.
Gordon, Rae-Beth (2001) From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation
and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema, in Critical
Inquiry no. 27, vol. 3, 515 549.
Jannarone, Kimberly (2010) Artaud and his Doubles, Ann Arbour:
University of Michigan Press.
Marks, Laura (2000) The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mitry, Jean (1987) La Smiologie en question, Paris: ditions du Cerf.
OBrien, Charles (1996) Rethinking National Cinema: Dreyers La Passion
de Jeanne dArc and the Academic Aesthetic in Cinema Journal vol.
35, number 4.
Shaviro, Stephen (1993) The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota.
Sontag, Susan (1983) Under the Sign of Saturn, London: Writers and
Readers.

Filmography

Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1928) La Passion de Jeanne dArc (France).
Dulac, Germaine (1928) La Coquille et le clergyman (France).

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Film-Philosophy 17.

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