[What makes Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc" still an exciting cinema experience] is the directorial enterprise which dared recreate one of the great European stories in terms of the new art. The picture belongs to the last days of the silent era; it was the culmination of the close-up school of direction, the last and most serious attempt to reduce the complex cinema art to the narrowly stylized art of pantomime. Against a blank white background Dreyer casts his heads of priests, soldiers, inquisitors, and by an abstraction of everything but the facial expressions registered by each of them in the course of the situation, seeks to communicate something purer and more essential than could be communicated by words or action…. [The] picture must be considered one of the minor masterpieces of the screen. (p. 364)

William Troy, "Time and Space," in The Nation (copyright 1933 The Nation Associates...