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Passion of Joan of Arc

The Passion of Joan of Arc

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

Carl Theodor Dreyer


  • Country: France
  • Year: 1928
  • Language: Silent
  •  
  • Runtime: 110

The pinnacle of silent cinema—and perhaps of the cinema itself—Carl Theodor Dreyer's account of the trial and martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans finds the path to transcendence through the unvarnished physicality of faces and bodies, a spiritual vision made delicate flesh.

Cinematheque

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"The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present. I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life."—Carl Theodor Dreyer

The pinnacle of silent cinema—and perhaps of the cinema itself—Carl Theodor Dreyer's account of the trial and martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans finds the path to transcendence through the unvarnished physicality of faces and bodies, a spiritual vision made delicate flesh. Finding his Joan in an unknown street performer, Renée Falconetti—whose unforgettable performance was elevated to legend as she never again appeared in another film—Dreyer spent a fortune to recreate the fifteenth-century castle in which the trial was held only to fracture his set (and his actors) into stark, strikingly angular compositions, training his camera in intense close-up on the un-made-up features of Joan and her tormentors as if to penetrate to their very souls. "Like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up" (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Thanks to Sarah Finklea and Fumiko Takagi, Janus Films.

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