Disembodied

A reworking of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc using fragments of film frames stripped of every trace of the human body.

The removal of the body from this particular film—paradoxically often described as a “symphony of close-ups”—reveals an interest in the final out-of-focus shot, the off-screen space, and what has been discarded. The image is enlarged beyond its limits until the grain between objects, or the space that is never truly empty, becomes visible.

The original film itself tells the story of Joan of Arc’s gradual abandonment of the body through suffering. Preserving the original linear sequence of scenes, the narrative is reconstructed from absence as a place. Empty space emerges as the subject that bears the pain of the missing flesh. The surgical removal of the body from each shot raises an implicit question: what is, and what is not, a body? Where do its traces end?

Disembodied was edited between November 2012 and March 2013, coinciding with my mother Carmen’s own process of leaving her body.
It is dedicated to her.