Ever since my first college screening (and I’ve seen it many times since) it has firmly remained one of my personal top ten favorites. The curators of the 2010 Toronto Film Festival named “The Passion of Joan of Arc” the #1 Most Influential Film of All-Time, the British Film Institute ranks it as 9th best film ever made, and Cahiers du cinéma ranks it as the 64th greatest. Its radical camera movements and angles went beyond any boundaries of storytelling with which I was familiar, opening up a brand-new world of filmic possibilities and leaving me with a deep realization that cinema was indeed an art form. This stark, naked telling of the last days of Saint Joan was like nothing I'd ever seen or experienced before from a film visually or emotionally. Then, my freshman year, a teacher had us screen “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, and instantly everything I believed about cinema was shattered. I’d be perplexed when I’d hear the Silent Era referred to in books or interviews as the greatest period in cinema history, and thought my movie-loving grandmother old-fashioned for thinking silent films were superior. Except for the occasional Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movie, I had little knowledge or interest in silent films, unwittingly thinking they were all primitively made and overacted. When I majored in film directing at college, I brought with me my knowledge and love of the 1970s and 80s cinema on which I grew up, as well as films from the 1930s onward that I’d discovered and devoured on television.
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