The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
A classic of the silent age, this film tells the story of the doomed but ultimately canonized 15th-century teenage warrior. On trial for claiming she'd spoken to God, Jeanne d'Arc is subjected to inhumane treatment and scare tactics at the hands of church court officials. Initially bullied into changing her story, Jeanne eventually opts for what she sees as the truth. Her punishment, a famously brutal execution, earns her perpetual martyrdom.
19 connections found
View:
19 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Passion of Joan of Arc to
She’s like Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, going to a place of private craziness and communion beyond pain, to the point that Patsey begs Solomon to take her down to the river and drown her.
With inspiration from films such as Willow , The Dark Crystal , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , The Green Knight is a slow-burning, character study.
Lowery has cited multiple films that influenced him over the years as he worked to bring The Green Knight to life onscreen: Willow , Bram Stoker's Dracula , The Dark Crystal , Marie Antoinette , and The Passion of Joan of Arc , a 1928 French silent film by Carl Dreyer.
Oliver even takes his hip girlfriend to a screening of “The Passion of Joan of Arc” while trying to impress her with copies of “King Lear,” the works of Nietzsche, and a dog-eared copy of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
While Crash is a starting point, Ducournau’s fresh take on body horror leads into Under the Skin (2013) territory, and frames the growing divinity of Rousselle as a face reminiscent of Falconetti’s anguish in Dreyer’s 1928 landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc (significantly in her final sequences with Lindon).
Advertisement
Von Trier/Jekyll is a serious artist who, much of the time, at least, aspires to be Carl Dreyer, his great Dane antecedent whose most celebrated film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is arguably the most galvanic testament to female martyrdom ever seen on the screen.
What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past; the means were multifarious and new"--for The Passion of Joan of Arc, von Trier, an Americana buff, intermixes motifs in Dogville, arriving at a sort of Cubist period piece.
Following the story of three composite girls (mother out of wedlock Rose (Dorothy Duffy); too-flirtatious Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone); and Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), raped by a cousin at a wedding), the picture is something of a boot camp drama--complete with dressings-down and sadistic drilling--grafted to a concentration camp melodrama culminating in an involuntary shearing that finds Mullan indulging in a distracting nod to Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
No one is ever going to confuse Steven R. Monroe's remake of I Spit on Your Grave with The Passion of Joan of Arc, but this ostensibly silly horror quickie possesses a formal sophistication that would make Carl Theodor Dreyer sit up and take notice.
After all, the big influence here, as always, is Carl Theodor Dreyer, that other tyrannical Dane whose tuxedo von Trier once wore to the Cannes Film Festival. 1 Nearly all of Dreyer’s films from The Passion of Joan of Arc onwards involve the disjunction between men and women played out – sometimes violently – as a struggle of reason against nature, mind against body, language and intellectual order against gesture and emotional chaos.
Advertisement
(I look forward to what she does next, but even if she does nothing, she'll have this one extraordinary moment, much like Maria Falconetti's great, single performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc .)
The last movie I saw with this many close-ups was The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and it was supposed to be suffocating.