Her EYES....

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 2011)

I haven't seen many silent films, they always seemed remote & dull, unable to muster the kind of sensory battering 21st Century Schizoid Men like us are used to. I've begun to see hyper kinetic visuals as lazy and impoverished in their own way, though. Mellower efforts from bygone eras offer much on their own terms. Not so much boring & old as...different. Like reading a book a silent film lets more of your own imagination fill in the blanks; there's more participation. I think that's key to helping people feel less numbed-out by all the excess stimulation now but that's for another rant.
A filmed interpretation of the final days of Joan of Arc, this movie just *has* to come up in a lot of feminist classes. The whole thing is the prolonged torture of an innocent maiden, her refinement & beautification through pain lovingly administered by the Man.It just wouldn't work as a modern movie either,the dreamy disconnect of all silent flicks is essential in maintaining the strange religious hysteria without the stark repugnance of the situation overwhelming it.The spot-on music & Maria Falconetti's mesmerizing features evoke real intensity; who knew silent films could be so moving? (Then again,I thought that once then saw ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT).
So little actually happens just the camera lingering on the agonized reactions of our heroine with haunting choral music plugging away in the background. It gets at something pure few movies today would.So intimate, so epic. There's an undeniable awe, all from lingering shots of near-demonic patriarch faces, doe-like Joan receiving the officially approved Galgothan experience.
You can see why the central performance is still regarded as one of the best. The saintly Joan's wretched pain & stark terror, broadcast loud as day over her elfin face is etched into our heads by the movie's end. She glows brighter the worse it gets,humiliatingly shorn of hair, abused and at last- martyred.The horror is foremost but also gut wrenching sadness,the torment of a lamb abandoned by her Shepard to a den of wolves in sheep's clothing. Especially in the scene between her and the sympathetic priest Artaud (the only other person here that commands a fraction of the same magnetism)does the utter brokenness of Joan and her hopeless situation hit deep.I can't think of many actresses who looked more ethereally beautiful over the course of a movie in direct proportion to how much awfulness is dredged on them.The whole experience is Maria Falconetti's agony & ecstasy; her sad,wasted, haunted face.