Article published in Manchester Evening News 20 November 2015

THE silent La Passion De Jeanne D’Arc, made by Robert Dreyer in 1928, is seen today as one of the greatest films ever.

It’s to have a showing at the Royal Northern College of Music on November 24^th with live musical accompaniment by medieval music specialists The Orlando Consort, in a presentation that has been a highlight of music festivals around the country this year.

Dressed all in black, with small earpieces in their ears and the glow of two laptops casting ghostly shadows on their faces, Orlando will look more like Kraftwerk c.1975 than an early-music group.

But they say: “To musicians like ourselves, familiar with repertoire from the medieval period, it was a small imaginative leap to hear the background music to several of the scenes in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc.

“It’s music which Joan herself may have heard, notably in the scene where she is taunted and tempted by the staging of the Catholic service, before it is suddenly terminated. “Dreyer’s parallel between the passions of Christ and Joan immediately suggested texts such as Ave Verum Corpus. At the moment when Joan’s body is bled by the doctors, we are singing (in Latin) the words ‘whose pierced side flowed with water and blood’.

“As an unlikely straw crown is thrust on her head by mocking English soldiers, the audience hears the Agincourt Song, musical triumphalism that celebrates the famous English victory some 16 years earlier.

“And when the crowd riots, the medieval motet – polyrhythmic and polytextual – provides the perfect underscoring of violence and confusion.”

The two 1928 premieres of the film (in Copenhagen and Paris) each had specially composed scores, though Dreyer, like most directors of the time, had no say in what the music was like.

Since then works by a variety of musicians – from Nick Cave to J S Bach – have accompanied screenings, and the score for the Paris premiere is still occasionally performed.

But Orlando Consort’s a-cappella version is the first in which real medieval songs, composed in the saint’s lifetime of c. 1412 to 1431, have accompanied the film.

There is more sacred than secular music to choose from, but, say Orlando, many poignant, heartbreaking secular songs do survive.

“In our soundtrack, these serve as expressions of Joan’s suffering, and underline a frequent parallel in the courtly love tradition between depictions of the Virgin Mary and the perfect object of desire.”