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 in the late silent-cinema period. The original negative was destroyed in a fire shortly afterwards; a second version, also destroyed by fire, then survived in an inferior re-edited copy, until a near-perfect first-generation print was discovered in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1981. The film sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound critics' poll — 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 performance that has been called, repeatedly, the greatest in the history of cinema. Dreyer required Falconetti to undergo physical conditions paralleling Joan's — including having her hair shorn on camera — and the resulting performance is one of the most directly transmitted forms of suffering ever recorded.

The film's formal radicalism — the refusal of establishing shots, the constant variations on close-up, the absence of conventional intertitles — produced a film closer to icon-painting than to drama. Falconetti made no other significant films and died in 1946; her single role remains foundational. Multiple modern composers have written scores for the film, with Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light (1994) 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.