The Passion of Joan of Arc

Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) opened in Paris in 1928 as a critical event of the late silent period. The original negative was destroyed in a fire shortly afterwards; a second version, also lost to fire, survived only in an inferior re-edited copy, until a near-perfect first-generation print turned up in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1981. The film has a permanent place near the top of every Sight & Sound critics' poll, and stood at number 21 in the 2022 list.

Dreyer reconstructed the trial of Joan of Arc almost entirely from the surviving Latin court transcripts of 1431, compressing them into a single day. Renée Jeanne Falconetti, in her sole major film role, plays Joan in a sustained extreme close-up, and we would call it the greatest performance in the history of cinema. Dreyer put Falconetti through physical conditions that paralleled Joan's, including having her hair shorn on camera, and the suffering on screen reaches the viewer with almost nothing in between.

Its formal radicalism (no establishing shots, constant variations on the close-up, none of the conventional intertitles) makes it closer to icon-painting than to drama. Falconetti made no other significant films and died in 1946; this single role is the one everyone who follows her has to reckon with. Many modern composers have written scores for the film, and Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light (1994) is the most performed.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest performance ever recorded on film, in service of one of the most formally radical works of silent cinema. Almost a century later, no film about religious suffering has matched its directness.