The God Who Wasn't There/The Passion of Joan

I was online the other day, trying to find a reference to a movie, when I noticed one of those ads that pay for all that online content that had, beneath a rendering of Jesus’ face, the words “Jesus Didn’t Exist?” And this being news to me, I clicked on the ad and found that it led to “www.thegodmovie.com,” the website for the film The God Who Wasn’t There. There I found the following: “Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture. Super Size Me did it to fast food. Now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion.” Now, I’m a big fan of both Bowling for Columbine and Super Size Me, so I clicked on the video excerpt they had and what to my wondering eyes should appear but Dr. Robert Stone, “fellow” of the Jesus Seminar. Now, the Jesus Seminar isn’t one of my favorite entities, and hearing what Stone had to say only strengthened that view. He takes well-known anomalies—the lack of historical evidence for the slaughter of the innocents, the unlikelihood that the Sanhedrin would meet the night before Passover, the disagreement of the gospels with the historical record regarding Pilate—and puts them together to suggest that Jesus never actually existed. Couple that with the film’s consultants (atheist-provocateurs Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins), and you begin to get the picture of what the film is all about.

Nevertheless, I’ve placed it in my Netflix queue, but until it gets here, let’s talk about the film I was trying to reference when I ran across that ad. In 1928, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer made The Passion of Joan of Arc, a silent film about the trial and execution of the well-known fifteenth-century martyr. Butchered by censors, banned in Great Britain, the film’s master negative was destroyed in a fire. Dreyer attempted to reconstruct the film from out-takes and existing prints, but for years the original was thought to be lost. Then, in 1981, a nearly pristine print was discovered in a closet at a Norwegian mental institution, of all places, in an incident one critic called “almost miraculous” Now, anyone with $39.95 (or a Netflix account) can see this stunning film in very nearly the way its director intended.

And “stunning” is not too fine a word . . . when I saw it a couple of months ago, I was floored by the power and honesty of Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance as Joan, as well as the downright mesmerizing flow of the film. Dreyer refused to compromise his spiritual vision, and it shows in every frame. Following the actual preserved transcripts of Joan’s trial, it is best viewed as an exploration of personal spiritual resilience and power in the face of a corrupt world. What emerges is a severe indictment of the French Catholic Church, as well as its English collaborators of the time (hence the censorship). But unlike The God Who Wasn’t There, there is not a drop of sensationalism or polemic to be had in the film or anything surrounding it. It is simply a powerful, moving examination of one woman’s faith in the face of tremendous obstacles. As such, I recommend it highly.