With my other hobbies and commitments, I have not watched many movies these past few months. I had a stack of DVDs from Netflix sitting here since January and finally got through a few of them. Anyway, I've been steadily watching more movies lately, so time to fire this back up.
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)
English: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Directed By: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring: Maria Falconetti, Eugene Silvain
Length: 110 minutes
Genre: Drama
One of the highest rated silent movies to come from France, I thought it was quite boring.
The first half of the movie is the trial of Joan of Arc (Maria Falconetti) and the second half is her confessing, taking back her confession and then being executed. I was so sick of seeing her cry for nearly two hours, I was happy to see her burn.
Ok, I'm being a bit harsh. Considering the time and place, the movie was pretty controversial. The clerigy grilled Joan to try to get he to conform to what the church said and to confess to her crimes, but Joan constantly replied with blasphemis statements. Maria Falconetti's performance is acclaimed, even today.
My biggest problem with the movie is that just about the entire film is done with close ups of the actors. Close up of a judge, close up of Joan, close up of another judge, close up of Joan. Close up of judge asking a question, close up of Joan crying and answering, close up of judge being shocked, close up of another judge being shocked, close up of Joan crying, close up of Judge asking another question, close up of Joan crying and answering, close up of shocked judge, over and over and over again for the first 30-40 minutes. And the movie takes 1-2 minute per question and response. Ask the question, show Joan crying for a good 10 seconds before answering, and then show shocked judges for 20-30 seconds, and then take 30 more seconds to ask another question. It was just so incredbily slow.
It started to pick up half way through when the trial finally ended, but by then I was so fatigued I just couldn't get into it. I absolutely hated the increibly slow pace of this film, and I'm apparently in the small minority here.
My Rating: 4/10
IMDB User Rating: 8.1/10 (8,853 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (26)
As you can see, I'm way off on this one. I'm changing the way I do ratings. Before, I rated purely on how entertained I was by the film and then tried to rate it on historical importance, the quality for its time period, etc. I figure why do that when other sources basically do that for me. So "My Rating" will just be how much I enjoyed the film and I'll throw in a few other ratings from other sources as comparison.