Shown with live piano accompaniment, The Passion of Joan of Arc is an imperative event. A film of daunting beauty and strangeness, Passion concentrates on the last eight hours in the life of the martyred saint, in which she refuses to sign a confession and is burned at the stake.

The film is famous for, among other things, the script's adherence to the trial records; cinematographer Rudolph Maté's cruel, canted, and cropped compositions of Joan and her tormentors, and the abstract use of space; the shocking topography of flesh, often in intense close-up, and its anointments of blood, tears, and spittle; and, especially, Renée Falconetti's self-obliterating performance as Joan. Little wonder that Passion has been so loved and alluded to by other artists, from Godard in Vivre sa vie to Adrienne Rich in "Cartographies of Silence."

JAMES QUANDT

"One of the greatest of all movies." – Pauline Kael

"Perhaps the most pure and perfect expression of Dreyer's art." – Ib Monty