Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer was enjoying the success of his 1925 film "Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife" when he was approached by French producers to create an art film for the international market. The teenaged Maid of Orleans who, dressed as a man, led the French to victory against the occupying English forces in the early 15th century had been canonized by the Pope in 1920, and was celebrated in a popular stage play by George Bernard Shaw when Dreyer chose the martyr as his subject for the production. With only one other film to her credit, Renée Jeanne Falconetti was the expressive French stage comedienne Dreyer chose to build his particularly transcendental style for the film around. Focusing his passion play on the 1431 trial, as drawn from historical transcripts, enabled Dreyer to concern himself less with external elements of location, scenery, and costume. He conceived the film as "a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life," with the human face as its mirror. Using panchromatic film stock to capture his actors' faces, without the addition of make-up, Dreyer made brilliant use of extreme close-ups to weigh Joan's spiritual gravity against the sadistic intentionality of her religion-cloaked oppressors. The enormous amount of emotional empathy that Dreyer extracts from his audience is heightened by our involuntary association with Joan's tormented psychological state. Falconetti's shockingly modern performance as the 19-year-old Joan is a thing of irreproachable honesty and ethereal suffering. Banned after its release in Britain for its depiction of inhumane British soldiers, the original film was lost for many years before a copy of the original print was discovered in a "janitor's closet of an Oslo mental institution" in 1981. Several years later, the masterpiece was restored with a soundtrack especially written by Richard Einhorn.
