Film as a Religious Experience

Rating: 10/10 (9 November 2004)

Film is largely a religious experience. So when the narrative of a film itself pertains to a religious experience, it is doubly engrossing and cinematic.
What interests me here is Falconetti's face and how Dreyer uses his camera to paint that face. Faces are purely cinematic, perhaps the most cinematic things that have yet to be experimented with, probably because they are the most human. Falconetti's face is real beauty. Pure expression and conveyance.
The camera. It is static when painting Falconetti. It is moving, sliding, sideward-dollying when painting her persecutors. Falconetti is the fulcrum or the center-point, and the others are painted in a dizzying blur surrounding her that conveys the nature of the experience.
According to my ideas this is pure cinema.