Sarah Gabriel // voice
Mark Lockheart // saxophones and electronics
Joanna MacGregor // piano and organ
Jon Scott // percussion
Matthew Fairclough // sound projection
From the Dartington Festival brochure…
Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer created an unforgettably powerful masterpiece, changing film language forever. Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s portrayal of Joan is in a class of its own – outside the realms of acting – and is still regarded as the single greatest performance in the history of cinema.
‘It is the face that everyone remembers: that unstinting close-up of the tear-riven visage of French actress Falconetti, maintaining agonised composure as her Joan of Arc is consumed by flames before a braying mob. Echoed countless times on camera – not least in Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing compares 2u - it’s a scene that rewrote how faces could be explored and exploited on screen.
The last silent film by Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, it largely eschewed traditional master shots for a dazzling range of expressive, character-probing close-ups: no historical biopic has ever felt quite so unnervingly intimate.’ Guy Lodge