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When Julia Holter was asked to compose a new score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, she hadn’t seen it. She agreed based on its reputation alone. Now, although she’s seen it countless times, she never tires of it.
“It’s incredible,” Holter says. “It’s very focused on Joan. It’s not a traditional story with a lot of characters. They did so much just with just lighting and performances. It’s so stark and intense.”
Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The two live score performances of the film, part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, mark an evolution from Holter’s first two iterations of the work, in Los Angeles in 2017 and in the UK in 2022. Next week, the score will be performed by Holter, her three-piece band and the vocal ensemble Consort of Melbourne.
Holter is renowned for her avant-garde pop and experimental soundscapes. As well as composing several films scores, she regularly draws on film and literature as points of inspiration. Her first album, Tragedy, retells Euripides’ play, Hippolytus, and her third, Loud City Song, is inspired by the musical Gigi. For Dreyer’s film, Holter’s music fits the film’s visual energy perfectly: it’s mythic, emotive and dreamlike.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is an early entry in the cinematic canon. Controversial on release, it was banned in Britain for its anti-English sentiment, and was a financial failure. But it was critically acclaimed, and regularly listed as one of the best films of all time to this day.
Holter has barely even heard the film’s numerous existing scores. She played it on mute and immediately started composing. Dreyer was quoted as saying he never heard a score for his masterpiece that he liked. Some accounts say he would have preferred silence over some of the versions he heard. But Dreyer died more than half a century ago. With no director, and no dialogue or diegetic sound to respond to, Holter is essentially left to her own devices. It’s just her and the film.
Musician Julia Holter has created a new soundtrack for a silent film from the 1920s. Credit: Camille Blake
Joan’s trial for heresy, and her execution on being found guilty, was in 1431, but her life didn’t gain renown until centuries later. Jeanne d’Arc was canonised as one of the patron saints of France in 1920. Feminism as a broad social movement was relatively new, and when Dreyer’s film was released in France in 1928, women still didn’t have the vote. Cinema, then a brand-new popular art form, was the ideal way to tell a story freshly in the zeitgeist.
The film is modern, in the 1920s sense: the sets are minimal, angular and stylised. The cast wore no make-up and were filmed in close-up, with rich, silvery tones. Lead actor Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance is intense, and her face (shown in close for a large amount of the film’s duration) is emotive, timeless. Her interrogators look like gargoyles.
“Dreyer might not have liked how I’m interpreting it, what I feel like the music should be doing,” Holter says. “So the film itself is the director. And Renée Falconetti is the director. It’s a different kind of interaction.”
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Holter’s approach melds the medieval and the contemporary. The vocal parts are in English, Latin, French and vocalese, or “babble” as Holter describes it. She sings with a contact microphone at her throat, distorting her voice – we hear tones, but not words. The Consort will perform an adaptation of two medieval chants selected by Holter, Te Deum and Ave Maris Stella, adapted in different ways throughout the film.
Holter is excited about the Consort’s dedication. She says the Consort’s members are going back to the source – the chant’s ‘neumes’ (medieval musical notation) – to work out how best to interpret the pieces.
“I wrote the chant into a re-melodicised version,” Holter says. “I harmonised it and altered it a little. But there are times where it’s just the chant and they’re kind of improvising with it. There’s no direction in the score to go research the neumes. They’re [Consort members] just into doing that.”
The film is nearly 100 years old, and the chants are about 1500 years old. Holter and her performers are giving them a 21st-century dimension.
“It still feels very relevant,” she says. “Relevant to continuing oppression, to anyone that’s dealing with force. Oppression as old as time.”
Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc is at the Melbourne Recital Centre on August 11-12
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