Elizabeth Danze
The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA
edanze@utexas.edu
John Blood
The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA
blood@utexas.edu
Fig 1: “Final communion scene” Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is a cinematic act of placemaking, one that transforms cinematic space into a psychological, spiritual, and transcendent experience. The film reframes Joan’s trial not only as an historical event, but as a mythic confrontation staged within a liminal, constructed world. Here, architecture functions less as background and more as active psychological terrain, shaped by shadow, silence, and distortion. Dreyer’s abstract, expressionistic architectural spaces are both oppressive and sacred, evoking the internal world of Joan’s mind and soul. We are brought into her striking internal world through the arresting places captured in the film.
The Passion of Joan of Arc depicts the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, a historical figure who has become a symbol of mythical resonance. Despite the technological limitations of the period, it remains one of the most powerful films ever made. Shot in black and white, the silent format enhances its emotional intensity. Dreyer’s film challenges the mythologized image of Joan of Arc by emphasizing her spiritual and psychological struggle during her trial. Drawing heavily from actual 15th-century trial transcripts, the film explores the well-known myth surrounding Joan’s life and death. Dreyer portrays her as a deeply faithful individual and martyr who suffers for her convictions, rather than emphasizing her role as a military leader or national symbol. We argue that Dreyer constructs a mythic architecture of the psyche—where cinematic space becomes a vessel for archetypal revelation and spiritual transformation.
Dreyer’s innovative visual style combines performance, lighting, framing, editing, and production design in groundbreaking ways. His extensive use of close-ups, intense compositions, stark editorial cuts, and stylized sets was revolutionary, effectively conveying Joan’s emotional state and the isolation she experienced during her trial. This approach immerses the viewer in her inner world and emphasizes her unwavering faith under extreme pressure.
Rooted in Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, Joan of Arc becomes an enduring mythic figure– the hero, the martyr, the oppressed innocent, the spiritual warrior. These archetypes emerge not only through her performance, but through the architecture that surrounds and constrains her. If Joan embodies the archetypes of the Hero, Martyr, and Innocent, Dreyer’s architecture mirrors these archetypes spatially. The set itself becomes an externalized psyche, its walls and voids echoing the forms of spiritual trial and transcendence.
The film’s production and set design by Jean Hugo and Hermann Warm play an important part in the success of the film. The design was influenced as much by historic Rouen as they were by the almost surrealist 14th century travel paintings of Sir John Mandeville. The elaborate set constructed for the 1928 production is never really revealed to us in its entirety. Its depiction of architecture is spare, minimal, fragmented, and suggestive. It deliberately recedes allowing emphasis to reside on the humanity of the characters. The places are depicted realistically enough to be believable, yet there is a quality to them that is stilted and unsettling, reflecting the Joan’s psychological ordeal during the inquisition. Iconic architectural elements are used, isolated and overlapping arches, distorted perspective, symbolic imagery, combined with stark camera angles and lighting, and extreme closeups that contribute to the emotional intensity. The architecture is both present and absent, a witness to the proceedings. What we see is partial, cut by the extreme cinematic and editorial decisions. Iconographic elements are presented to us as expressive, archetypal elements appear in shadows, or as framing elements in the background.
The subtle distortions in the sets recall the work of the German Expressionists who employed this effect to further the emotion content (Hermann Warm was one of the art directors of 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). Yet Dreyer departs from the overt theatricality of Expressionism; his distortions are restrained, ascetic, and imbued with spiritual clarity. Here the effect is applied with more subtlety and combined with a minimalist aesthetic depicting claustrophobic interiors with plain walls which serve to highlight Joan’s isolation. The iconic elements are depicting the courtroom and prison which embody the institutional authority of the state.
Dreyer’s visual language inherits the emotional distortions of German Expressionism yet anticipates the minimalist transcendence of modern sacred architecture. The shift from theatrical distortion to ascetic abstraction parallels Joan’s own journey from worldly suffering to spiritual illumination. The film’s minimalist yet oppressive spatial design functions as a modern reinterpretation of sacred architecture—one that externalizes the tension between institutional authority and the individual’s encounter with the divine. The stark walls, the severe geometry of arches, the looming voids, all serve as psychic markers of inner turmoil and transcendent conviction. In this way, the film constructs a space where the psychological and the architectural converge, giving form to the metaphysical tension between the institutional Church and the individual spirit.
The mise-en-scène dissolves into abstraction through extreme close-ups, fractured perspectives, and chiaroscuro lighting. We are never allowed a full view of the architectural whole; instead, the space is experienced viscerally, as a field of partial revelations. This apparent architectural incompleteness is designed as a deliberate act of spiritual and psychological telling. The absence of ornamental iconography shifts the focus toward atmosphere where light filters through slits; blank walls absorb and reflect suffering; silence becomes spatial. The viewer is drawn into Joan’s inner state, inhabiting a liminal world of divine vision and earthly persecution. Here too, these dimensions of Joan may be understood as latent within the human psyche, as archetypes may express universal structures of thought and affect that are shared across cultures and time.
Similarly, embedded in the architecture are significant and affective archetypes. Dreyer’s treatment of space reflects a proto-modernist sensibility where the minimalist set is both monumental and fragmented. These spare, abstract environments anticipate contemporary architectural strategies that evoke the sacred through atmosphere rather than iconography, engaging the viewer in an experiential encounter with space using light, materiality, and silence. The result is a spatial experience that becomes a vessel for spiritual reflection in a secular age. These choices anticipate contemporary architectural strategies found in the sacred buildings of Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, Kazuyo Sejima, and more recently David Hotson, where space becomes a vessel for contemplation rather than a specific directive or narrative. As with Ando’s Church of Light or Hotson’s Saint Sarkis Armenian Church, Dreyer’s constructed world embodies an emotional and spiritual resonance—an architecture of absence that calls forth presence, where the archetypes within the self, encounter and intermingle with the archetypes embedded in the architecture.
The film rethinks sacred space. The courtroom and prison, models of institutional authority, are stripped of grandeur and laid bare in their violence. But Joan, through her mental and spiritual clarity, reclaims these spaces. Her suffering in a sense, sacralizes the profane. The film becomes an allegory of placemaking in its deepest sense: the transformation of hostile territory into sites of interior transcendence.
By using the cinematic language of light, material, framing as architectural tools, Dreyer creates a mythic landscape in which space and place themselves participates in Joan’s trial. In transforming the courtroom into a site of revelation, Dreyer redefines the sacred as an experiential condition rather than a doctrinal one. In doing so, The Passion of Joan of Arc becomes a meditation on how architecture can externalize belief, how myth is spatially encoded, and how psychology finds its reflection in place. It remains one of cinema’s most profound explorations of the sacred, not through dogma, but through the language of space, myth, and the soul.
Fig. 2: “Renée Falconetti, Interrogation scene” Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
Fig. 3: “Renée Falconetti, Prison cell scene” Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
Fig. 4: “Renée Falconetti, Final communion scene” Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
Fig. 5: “Interrogation scene” Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.
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