Rebecca Mead, at the New Yorker Magazine Website, has posted a beautifully written essay comparing the performance art speech our own Emma Gonzalez gave at The March for Our Lives, its six minutes and twenty seconds of silence punctuated by the tears of Emma’s grief, and the evocative portrayal of the martyrdom of Ste. Joan of Arc by Renée Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film of 1928, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”
Ms. Mead, in her first paragraph, honors some of the other prominent speakers at the event; the fiery and eloquent David Hogg imploring young people to register to vote, the nauseous but ultimately triumphant Samantha Fuentes who lost her breakfast but fed us a stem-winder, the preternaturally mature 11 year old Naomi Wadler who reminded that women of color bear much more than their share of the horror inflicted by gun violence, and the ebullient and inspiring young grand daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Yolanda Renee King who convincingly and emphatically proclaimed that hers was going to be “a great generation”.
Amen.
Her essay needs to be read in it’s entirety to be fully appreciated, but it is in her third para that Mead addresses her central thought.
“In its restraint, its symbolism, and its palpable emotion, González’s silence was a remarkable piece of political expression. Her appearance also offered an uncanny echo of one of the most indelible performances in the history of cinema: that of Renée Maria Falconetti, who starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film from 1928, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Based upon the transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial, in 1431, Dreyer’s film shows Joan as an otherworldly young woman—she is nineteen, to the best of her limited knowledge—who, in the face of a barrage of questioning by hostile, older, powerful clerics, is simultaneously self-contained and brimming over with emotion. Falconetti, who never made another movie, gives an extraordinary performance, her face registering at different moments rapture, fear, defiance, and transcendence. Joan’s defense in the face of her inquisitors is largely mute: when she is asked to describe Saint Michael—who, she blasphemously claims, has appeared to her—she mostly refrains from verbal response, her silence bespeaking holy understanding greater than theirs. In the final phase of her life, when Joan knows that she is to be martyred, Dreyer’s camera lingers on closeups of Falconetti, with her brutally close-cropped hair, her rough garments, and her anguished silence. Her extraordinary image in that sequence could be intercut almost seamlessly with footage from Saturday’s rally.
Joan was but a teenager when she was called to lead the French Armies against the English in the Hundred Years War but her youth imbued her with faith and confidence unclouded by the failures and compromises which adversity foists on us in the process of so called maturity.
If Joan and her young male counterpart, Alexander the Great, have something to teach us it could be that it is the audacity and courage of the young rather than the encumbering accumulation of disappointing experience that can turn the tide in battle.
This is what we hope the Parkland teens can help us to do.
In an aside, Mead points out that behaviors erroneously attributed to children are not child like at all, but rather the pathologies of a life ill lived.
“Trump’s habitual petulance, small-mindedness, aggression, self-involvement, entitlement, mendaciousness, and vanity are not the behaviors of a child. Rather, they more closely resemble the characteristics of an elderly autocratic monarch of a feudal realm—King Lear without the poetry. The speakers on Saturday were, on the other hand, genuinely childlike, in the best sense of the term: uncompromising, passionate, forward-looking, fearless.”
Mead Concludes:
“In the iconography of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Joan has authority not because she is wise but because she is innocent. She has the privileged knowledge of the inspired, not the earned knowledge of the experienced. The young people of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have already experienced more than their elders would wish upon them; their innocence is lost. Yet, like all young people, they’ve retained faith in their generation’s unique ability to challenge and rectify the failures of their elders. “Maybe the adults have gotten used to saying, ‘It is what it is,’ but if us students have learned anything, it’s that if you don’t study you will fail. And in this case, if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it’s time to start doing something,” González said in her speech in Fort Lauderdale, in February. “We’re going to be the kids you read about in textbooks.” If they muster in sufficient numbers in November, 2018, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that, unlike most young people, they may be correct in this assessment. In the meantime, our urgent need for the illumination that they seem to offer—for the blunt, righteous conviction they uphold—is another indication, were it needed, that a new kind of medievalism is upon us. Our potential saviors gleam all the more brightly against the pervasive political and civic darkness of the moment.”