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HISTORY AND FANTASY 79
pened this way. And his admiration is bound to mingle with a feeling of constraint provoked by his implicit awareness that all that he sees— the clouds of dust, the crowds, and the lights and shadows— has been deliberately inserted and that the margin of the pictures once and for all marks the edge of the world before his eyes. As compared with the miraculous documentary which suggests infinite reality, this supposedly perfect historical film reveals itself to be no more than a lively reconstruction which, as such, lacks cinematic life.
But can a historical film really be as perfect as that? What obstructs complete authenticity is the near-impossibility of making present-day actors fit into the costumes they wear. Conditioned by long-term environmental influences, their more subtle facial expressions and gestures are all but unadaptable. The costumes fully belong to the past, while the actors are still half in the present. This inevitably leads to conventions hardly compatible with a medium which gravitates toward the veracious representation of the external world.
Compromises
Like films with contemporary subjects, historical films may narrate stories which do not lend themselves to being related in cinematic terms and therefore oblige the sensitive film maker to try as best he can to adjust, somehow, his narrative to the screen. A conspicuous story type in this vein will be treated in chapter 12; and so will the adjustments to which it gives rise. For the present, only such compromises claim attention as tend to mitigate the inherently uncinematic character of films that resuscitate the past.
SHIFT TO CAMERA-REALITY
One way out is to shift the emphasis from history proper to camerareality. The most resolute attempt at a solution along these lines is Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film which has been called an "exploration of the human face" in documentary fashion.4 [Illus. 20] Dreyer narrates, or tries to narrate, the life story of Joan through an unending series of densely interwoven close-ups of faces, thus largely eliminating the effects of staginess and finiteness which as a rule are inseparable from historical films. Of course, he cannot completely avoid ensemble scenes, and whenever they are inserted it is inevitable that the marked contrast between these scenes with their stylized accessories and the live texture of close-ups should make them appear all the more as lifeless constructions. Yet this is beside the point. The cinematic quality of the physiognomic documentary