Kritiken

Jeanne d’Arc seamlessly blended the stylistic traits of the great artistic film movements of the 1920s, German Expressionism, French Impressionism, and Soviet Montage and made something new and unique of them.

Not only is it the crowning work of an a auteur who operated nearly as defiantly as his title character, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" signals that the nature of the ruling order, itself willing to commit horrendous acts in the interest of maintaining power, hasn’t changed all that much.

"The Passion of Joan of Arc" remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.

[The] movie is an operatic portrayal of what I would call mental anguish, or certainly emotional trauma, and I feel a little ridiculous pointing out how versatile Maria Falconetti’s face is in the film, how open she appears, so that we sense not merely Joan’s pain but the pain of the world.

The intensity of Falconetti's performance is all but unparalleled. (The only equivalent in silent cinema that comes to mind are Lillian Gish's solo scenes in Victor Sjostrom's 1928 melodrama "The Wind.") Cast wildly against type (Falconetti had been known for light romantic roles), she embodies a spiritual anguish worthy of a medieval Pietà. Eyes widened and miraculously capable of dropping a single tear, her Joan is dazed yet resolute.

With almost every camera mounted on tracks, topsy-turvy pans that glide like guillotine blades, and a montage accelerated by a spinning torture wheel, Dreyer's arsenal of visual abstractions . . . in large part places the movie on a continuum with Léger and Murphy's landmark film, with Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant (1926), and with the early masterpieces by Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein. The Passion of Joan of Arc is, finally, a storm, an ordeal that relentlessly tests a martyr's devotion.

Dreyer's most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made... [a film] less moulded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving.

Watched it (again) with the "Voices of Light" soundtrack on the Criterion DVD, and at some point I realised I was responding more to the music than I was to the movie. Tends to repeat its effects, and certainly repeats the central dynamic viz. that Joan is challenged on her devotion to the Church and deflects it by talking about her devotion to God. Didn't blow my mind, for some reason; still an experience, obviously.

This is a proudly silent movie, one that integrates the intertitle into its rhythm better and more comprehensively than any other example I can name. (Astonishingly, rather than interrupting the flow of Dreyer's breakneck montage, the titles actually serve as graphic punctuation.) It's also a perverse one—stripped down to essentials, focusing on faces even though Dreyer's investors paid for enormous and authentic sets barely glimpsed in the finished film.

The film is far from slow — though there are relatively few scenes, and they're relatively long, Dreyer's filming is dynamic in a way that prefigures today's "intensified continuity" — faces pop up, loom in, are tracked into, making for a very impactful mise-en-scene indeed. Far from being a cinematic blind alley, Dreyer's experiment was an early clue to the new direction.

Maria Falconetti's portrayal of Joan is somehow in a class of its own, outside the realms of acting. Just her agonised expression is enough to move viewers to tears – no words or actions are needed. Quite how Falconetti and Dreyer achieved this is a mystery, but it is still often regarded as the single greatest performance in the history of cinema.

"The Passion of Joan of Arc" cuts to the quick of what it is to be human; what, exactly, we have in common with Joan, despite the fact that her experiences are incommunicable.