The Passion of Joan of Arc was completed in 1928 and praised by outlets such as
The New York Times, which hailed stage actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s transcendental performance in the title role (considered today to be one of the greatest film performances ever). The film was not without its detractors, however. Upon release,
the film was banned entirely in Britain due to its negative portrayal of English soldiers, and in France, the theatrical cut was heavily edited to appease both the government and the Church. The original negative was something ironically destroyed in a fire just six weeks after the premiere, and Dreyer painstakingly put together a second version of the film using leftover footage. This cut was also lost in a lab fire less than a year later. Dreyer would go on to sue the Société Générale des Films for breach of contract, a case which he won in 1931. But the studio had already collapsed, with the financial failure of both
The Passion of Joan of Arc and
Napoleon draining them of funds. Dreyer wouldn’t make another critically successful film until 1955 when his masterpiece
Ordet won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
With the only remaining versions of The Passion of Joan of Arc being unauthorized re-edits from copies of the second negative, Dreyer believed up until his death that his intended cut would never see the light of day. But in 1981, a worker cleaning out the janitor’s closet of the Dikemark Hospital, a mental institution in Oslo, Norway, stumbled upon several film canisters and sent them to the Norwegian Film Institute to be examined. The Institute discovered that they contained Dreyer’s original version of the film, which he had sent to Harald Arnesen, then-director of the Dikemark Hospital. The mystery of why he sent it to Arnesen remains unsolved, though historians suspect the two were mutual friends.
The fragile print had somehow remained unharmed despite sitting in a closet for so long, meaning that its restoration was able to proceed without incident. And since the film had been missing for more than 50 years, its re-release drew quite a bit of interest from the film community. Critics such as Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Pauline Kael gave it rave reviews, and star Renée Jeanne Falconetti become an icon of the silent film era despite it being her only notable role. The Passion of Joan of Arc is now widely available on home video, and the story of its recovery sits as a firm reminder that lost media often turns up in the last place anyone would expect.