Filming the Invisible: Faith in Dreyer, Love in Borzage
To screen La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, and 7th Heaven (1927), directed by Frank Borzage, is to return to a defining moment in film history: the final years of silent cinema, when the filmic medium had reached a remarkable level of expressive power and could sustain works of great emotional and human intensity through images, faces, light, editing, and live music. Both films belong to this moment of maturity and are now widely regarded as masterpieces of cinema.
Although at first glance they may seem very different — one tells the story of the trial and martyrdom of a saint; the other, the love story of two humble people in Paris during the First World War — the two films share something essential: both works attempt to film the invisible. Dreyer films faith. Borzage films love. At heart, in these films, faith and love appear as the same inner force, capable of sustaining people in the face of suffering, injustice, and war.
In both films, the true drama unfolds not so much in external events as in the inner lives of the characters, and those inner lives are reflected in faces. Dreyer pushes the close-up to an unprecedented extreme: Renée Falconetti’s face fills the screen like a landscape. The actress, who at 35 played a nineteen-year-old Joan, gave what many consider one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema; remarkably, she never appeared in another film. We do not simply watch a woman being judged; we feel her fear, her solitude, her resistance, and her firmness in every look and gesture. Dreyer’s film is based closely on the original records of the 1431 trial of Joan of Arc, and it condenses months of interrogation into a single dramatic day of intense confrontation between Joan’s unshakeable faith and the institutional power that judges her for heresy. Over time, the film has become a landmark in the history of cinema, and Falconetti’s face one of film history’s most enduring images.
Borzage does something similar to Dreyer, though in a more luminous and apparently simpler way. In 7th Heaven, the faces of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell are filmed with extraordinary delicacy. The small attic where the two protagonists live, reached by an endless staircase, becomes their “seventh heaven”: a place outside the world, suspended above misery, violence, and later, war. Borzage does not present love as a simple romantic feeling, but rather as a force capable of protecting, saving, and keeping people together even when everything seems to separate them. The film was one of the great critical and commercial successes of its time and received several of the first Academy Awards: Janet Gaynor received the first-ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in 7th Heaven, together with F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and Street Angel (1928, also directed by Frank Borzage), and Borzage himself received the Academy Award for Best Director.
Both La Passion and 7th Heaven, at heart, are about suffering and elevation. Joan of Arc is humiliated, interrogated, condemned, and finally executed, yet the more she suffers, the firmer and more serene she becomes. Chico and Diane, who form the couple in 7th Heaven, live in poverty; the war separates them, everything conspires against them, yet their love keeps them above their fate. In both films, faith and love appear as forces capable of helping human beings transcend pain.
To see these films today, almost one hundred years after their releases, and to experience them with live piano accompaniment, allows us to approach them in a way very close to how they were originally shown. In the years of silent cinema, music was an essential part of a screening and accompanied the film from beginning to end, marking the rhythm and underscoring the emotion and atmosphere of the images. On this occasion, the pianist and composer Filipe Raposo, a leading European specialist in silent film accompaniment, once again provides live musical performance, as he has done in past editions of Play-Doc.
The Church of Santo Domingo, declared a National Monument in 1931 and today listed as a Site of Cultural Interest, is one of the most emblematic historic spaces in the city of Tui. Its history, its architecture, and its singular acoustic qualities make this place an especially meaningful setting for a screening of this kind. In this environment, live music and the images of silent cinema find a space different from that of a conventional theatre, and the screening acquires a special dimension that keeps with the tone of these films, one in which suffering, faith, love, and hope are presented as experiences of transformation and human elevation.
This event marks a truly extraordinary and unrepeatable occasion to rediscover these two masterworks of silent cinema.
Filipe Raposo is a pianist, composer, and arranger. Trained in Lisbon and Stockholm, he has worked with international orchestras and performed on renowned stages such as Bozar, São Paulo, and the Gulbenkian Foundation. His work for film, theatre, and opera has earned him numerous accolades, including the Sophia Award for Best Original Song and Best Original Score at the Coimbra Film Festival for Refrigerantes e Canções de Amor, and more recently, the Best Original Score Award at the Málaga Film Festival for Lo que queda de ti.
Among his most recent recordings are The Art of Song Vol. 2: Between Sacred and Profane (2023), O Primo Basílio(2024), and Variações do Brancø Vol. 3 (2025).
7th Heaven – FRIDAY, MAY 1 – 22:30h
The Passion of Joan of Arc – SUNDAY, MAY 3 – 22:30h