[Dreyer's aim in The Passion of Joan of Arc is close] to that of the early Flemish painters whose painstaking realism is as full of compassion as it is unrelenting in its mirroring of nature. One thinks of Breughel's stubble-chinned "Old Shepherd," or the brutally unmistakable humanity of Bosch's "Crowning with Thorns" …; like theirs, Dreyer's art stems from a conviction, both disillusioned and confident, that whatever coarseness or cruelty may characterize them, men are what matter in this world; now you, the spectator, are the dead center of that world, involved in mankind with a painful, inescapable, and somehow ennobling intensity.

One scene in Joan of Arc underlines this with curious power. The court has decided that Joan is ill (else how could she defy the Church and claim to have seen naked angels?) and may possibly be cured if she is bled. No detail of the bleeding...