Masterpieces of Silent Cinema: The Passion of Joan of Arc

North Shore Senior Center, Nielsen Campus: 

Reid Schultz, Filmmaker and Columbia College Faculty -Seeing Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc"
from 1928 remains a cinematic revelation. Its approach to storytelling, set design, editing, and cinematography was radical back in the 1920s, and is still strikingly modern decades later. Influenced by both German expressionist film and the French avant-garde, Dreyer's story is both epic in its implications and intimate in its compositions based primarily in extreme close-ups. For all its visual invention, however, Dreyer's film is most devastating in its central performance of Joan by Renee Falconetti, a French stage actress who made her only screen appearance in this film. As film critic Paul Kael proclaimed, "Hers may be the finest performance ever recorded on film." Even without a dialogue track and only sparse inter-titles, the film showed the world that movies could be art.

Wednesday, 11/14, 12:30pm - 3:30pm

$10 member; $12 non-member