The Passion of Joan of Arc

A French silent film released in 1928, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is Carl Dreyer's supposedly lost masterpiece. The original negative burned, but a well preserved copy was discovered in 1985 and restored. While it is a silent film, there is the option of viewing the DVD with Richard Einhorn’s stunning "Voices of Light" musical soundtrack, which I would recommend.

The film itself is shot almost exclusively in close-ups with an almost photographer's obsession for composition in what the director has described as documentary style film. All of the dialogue is taken from the original transcript of her trial. It appears to me to push the envelope of early film making with it's extraordinary camera angles and it's distillation of the emotional anguish that Joan must have felt. It is admittedly highly stylized, but that is what I enjoyed the most about it. It was as though I were watching a Giotto painting or Man Ray photograph come to life.