Synopsis
The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, 1928) is a French silent film by Carl Theodor Dreyer — watch online on iFILM. The actual trial lasted a year. Dreyer compressed it into a single day and built the entire film from close-ups of human faces.
Maria Falconetti plays Joan without makeup, shot at eye level rather than the imposing low angles fashionable at the time. Her performance has no dialogue to lean on — every shift from defiance to exhaustion happens in the eyes alone. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté helped Dreyer cut the film into something that read less like a period drama than a documentary of a woman being broken by institutions. Church officials pushed back hard during production; the script was drawn directly from trial transcripts.
The original negative burned in a fire. For decades, audiences only saw degraded copies with wrong music. In 1981, an untouched print turned up in the attic of a Norwegian psychiatric hospital — that's the source of every clean version shown today. A film that survived its own destruction. Stream The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) online on iFILM.
Starring
Comments 0