...with spiritual significance to boot!
Yesterday afternoon I watched "The Passion of Joan of Arc," a masterpiece of the silent era, made in France by Carl Theodor Dreyer. About the movie itself, there are many fascinating aspects to speak of, such as the film's nearly miraculous preservation after it was thought to be lost forever due to a fire that burned the original negative. A copy was found 50 years later in a Norwegian mental institution!
The actress, Maria Falconetti, turns in truly one of the all-time great individual performances - I'm not kidding, her acting is amazing - and it's the only movie she ever made (she was primarily a stage actress.) She does so much with her face, in tight close-ups, conveying profound emotions and subtle thoughts that words cannot capture as she goes through the anguish of interrogation by church hierarchs who don't know what to make of her visionary claims. I mean, the entire gamut of heavy feelings is on display here - grief, sorrow, fear, confusion, doubt, resignation - as well as faith, courage, determination and hope. Falconetti has this amazing ability to stare straight ahead into space, hold her gaze and then produce tears with no other stimulus than her inhabitation of the role and make it real for herself. What a breath-taking performance... Even now as I sit here recalling it, I'm get the shivers, I'm so impressed by her achievement as an actor. None of the cast wears any make-up, so each wrinkle, blemish and facial hair is right there in all its monochromatic glory, lending the film a strange air of authenticity despite some abstract looking and stylized sets - it's clearly a movie stage they're on, not an actual medieval French location.
I could rave on about the film but it would only be a pale echo of the experience of watching it. I highly encourage finding a copy and viewing it sometime, provided you are in the mood to be moved and haunted - it is an intense movie, especially considering that it was made in 1928. There's a common tendency to write off films that were made back then as quaint, simplistic, naive. But I venture to say that there are few films made in recent decades that achieve such majestic heights or are as daring as this one.
Joan was burned at the stake for heresy, you know, and the film doesn't really hold back all that much in its portrayal of her suffering there. Of course, in Joan's story there's much food for thought on the nature of religious orthodoxy vs. individual spiritual freedom to follow God as we believe the Spirit leads, and the excruciating dilemmas that life puts us in when we have to choose between conforming to expectations and doing what our conscience demands. Knowledge of the historical context is not all that essential, either. I got this DVD as a Christmas gift and I'm really glad I own it. This is more than a "rental check out," in my esteem anyway.
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