The Passion of Joan of Arc with Live Musical Score

This special showing of the 1928 French historical film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” will be accompanied by live musical scoring from Fort Collins-based musicians Logan Farmer and maysayer.
“The Passion of Joan of Arc” has gained wide acclaim from film communities for its unconventional use of close-up shots, its vivid retelling of the British trial of Joan of Arc and its controversial history with multiple government entities.

Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renee Maria Jeanne Falconetti, the film’s original cut was lost for decades following a fire at a Berlin film studio, until a negative copy of the film’s second version was later discovered in the vaults of a French film studio in 1951. Three decades later in 1981, a hospital employee in Asker, Norway discovered film canisters labeled “The Passion of Joan of Arc” in a janitor’s closet, which turned out to include the film’s original cut.

In a 1929 review of the film, New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall wrote, “France can well be proud of that great picture, ‘The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc,’ for while Carl Dreyer, a Dane, is responsible for the conspicuously fine and imaginative use of the camera, it is the gifted performance of Maria Falconetti as the Maid of Orleans that rises above everything in this artistic achievement.”