The Passion of Joan of Arc

Beautifully made, but that’s it for me. There is enough to like if you have a love for silent films or if you want to study movies in any way. As someone who has neither, this was just not my cup of tea.

Beautiful, moving, startling. I had seen snippets of this before: Renee Falconetti’s face in this movie is such a well-known image (for good reason) and part of me wondered whether the movie would live up to my expectations. Falconetti’s acting is…sparse. (Not to mention the austere production design.) And since Dreyer shoots nearly the whole movie in close-up, there are long stretches where it feels like there’s not much going on. But what I wasn’t expecting was the editing and the camera movement, both of which felt kinetic and almost hyper-modern at times. Together, the movie was really effective at creating a space of heightened tension and subjugation, which began to draw out these really subtle emotional cues from Joan’s expression. And while I’m not religious and the elements of her devotion didn’t resonate with me on a personal level, I found myself reading the film through a feminist lens that connected me to her experience on a universal level. (Also want to shout out to the musical accompaniment on the Criterion release, which apparently was an oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn–it was great.)