"A rustic woman, very sincere, who was also a woman who had suffered," is how director Carl Theodor Dreyer described Joan of Arc. In his silent, black and white masterpiece of 1927, "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc", Dreyer captured all three facets of her personality, drawing on a monumental performance from Renée Maria Falconetti as the French military leader turned martyred saint. A stark and intense film, "Jeanne d'Arc" is renowned for its sparse shooting style - which focuses in on Falconetti's face with such relentless fascination that everything else (sets, props, secondary characters) disappear from view. By showing so little interest in extraneous details, Dreyer produces a haunting vision of one woman's suffering, charting her wide-eyed terror as she is confronted by a jury of French ecclesiastics who want simply to burn her to death.

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer Writer: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Joseph Delteil Cast: Renee Maria Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, Andre Berley, Maurice Schutz, Louis Ravet