(cross-posted from my LJ - yes, I'm repetative)
This is a hands down recommendation. Whatever you're doing, drop it right now and go watch this movie. It is expensive to buy, but it is available on Netflix; I checked. But I suppose no one will watch it thanks to the narrow minded prejudice against silent movies. It will ultimately be your loss, because this is one of the most spiritually moving films I have ever seen. It brought tears to my eyes.
It's hard to describe the experience of watching this film accurately. It makes more use of close-ups than Sergio Leone, it's editing is dynamic; it seldom lingers on a shot, and French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti (sometimes credited as Maria Falconetti), arguably gives one of cinema's best performances (it's nigh impossible to actually give a good performance in a silent movie, yet she succeeds). All these things are true, yet all these points fail to do the film justice. Just simply describing scenes and deconstructing them wont do. Other reviewers have had the same problem.
Catholic reviewer Steven D Greydanus observed the following: [source]
Greydanus wrote:"To witness Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is to glimpse the soul of a saint in her hour of trial. The film is more than a dramatization, more than a biopic, more than a documentary: It is a spiritual portrait, almost a mystical portrait, of a Christ-like soul sharing in the sufferings of Christ.
The experience of watching this film brings me closer to Good Friday than any filmed depiction of the actual trials and sufferings of Christ to date. I know of movies more theologically profound or more pious, but none more evocative of what it means to share the sufferings of Christ."
Roger Ebert chose it very early in his fortnightly "Great Movies" column and probably describes the experience the best: [Source]
Ebert wrote:To modern audiences, raised on films where emotion is conveyed by dialogue and action more than by faces, a film like ``The Passion of Joan of Arc'' is an unsettling experience--so intimate we fear we will discover more secrets than we desire. Our sympathy is engaged so powerfully with Joan that Dreyer's visual methods--his angles, his cutting, his closeups--don't play like stylistic choices, but like the fragments of Joan's experience. Exhausted, starving, cold, in constant fear, only 19 when she died, she lives in a nightmare where the faces of her tormentors rise up like spectral demons.
The film centers on her trial alone, and truncates the long procedure. Historically it was an incessant series of trials where she was found guilty of heresy only to be cleared and only to be trailled for it again. No one considers it a fair trial]The Passion of the Christ[/I] (though not as violent). The intertitles were taken from the surviving trial records of Joan of Arc and the movie constructed around it. At times the editing gives the film a hypnotic feel. And at times its excruciating to watch; at one time Joan is sickly and dying and the judges come to give her a personal Mass, but refuses to give it to her until she signs the confession that her visions were not inspired by God but by Satan, even tempting her by standing above her with the Communion Wafers. When she refuses to sign the confesion they taunt her by saying "Do you deny the body of Christ?"
An added dimension to the film is the music selected for the DVD, which is among the best I've heard. The music is by Richard Einhorn, a modern composer who in the 1980s saw a print of the movie in the New York Museum of Modern Art and was inspired to write an oratorio that could not only stand on its own as a piece of music, but also as a score for the film, which the director preferred to play with no background music. The finished oratorio, called Voices of Light, is made up from text from the Bible as well as writings by medieval female mystics; personally I found the music incredible and it certainly compliments the film to no end.
Renée Jeanne Falconetti is an incredible actress, yet this is her only starring film roll (sometimes credited as her only film role, but actually she only acted in about two in her life and mostly focused on stage roles and light comedies). At first I thought of she played the role a little bit bug-eyed (much like Milla Jovovich in whatever Luc Besson's 1999 Joan of Arc movie is called) but by the end it became clear that she's an incredible actress. She may be a little too old for the role in real life, but ultimately it does not matter. She has left her mark on film history by breathing life into one of Catholicism's most fascinating saints.
:)
