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One of the Monkey's favorite fixtures on the Washington Post op-ed page is Alexandra Petri, who is, by turns, amusing, thoughtful, insightful and deep but always non-ax-grinding, which is why the non-ax-grinding Monkey likes to read her.
Today, Ms. Petri suggests that the Academy Awards ceremony would improve with "better categories than Best Actor and Best Actress." Categories such as "Best Performance in an Arty Movie No One Saw" and "Best Appearance in Movie Where the Dog Dies." It's a funny column and you can read it for yourself here.
But, of course, I couldn't help but start wondering who in movie history might actually deserve to win these awards. Here are my suggestions. Feel free to offer up your own in the comments section below.
Although there are 34 categories in the online edition, I'm strictly a read-the-paper-over-breakfast-print-man, so I'm going with the Sunday edition's 26 (assuming I counted correctly). This is going to take the rest of the week.
Best Performance by Someone Old Who Deserves to Win Something
There have been many such Oscars handed out over the years, some deserved, some not (Don Ameche's win for Cocoon being perhaps the most egregious—to quote my late mother: "Don Ameche?! He never could act!"). The best such Oscar-winning performance was probably by Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful. Did you know she was nominated eight times, winning in her last chance? She died the next year.
Of those who were nominated but didn't win, I'd probably go with Peter O'Toole in Venus—hard to believe the guy has never won anything. But then the Academy has a history of neglecting great actors—not only did Cary Grant never win, Edward G. Robinson was never even nominated! Imagine that.
Best Performance in a Biopic of a Person the Audience Actually Recognizes
Which counts out Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, I'd think. Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc is pushing it—we all know who Joan of Arc was, but would we actually recognize her if we saw her on the street? So I'm going with George C. Scott in Patton.
Best Performance in an Arty Movie No One Saw
Now that would be Maria Falconetti. No one saw The Passion of Joan of Arc upon its release, then the negative was destroyed in a fire and the film was presumed lost for decades. In 1981, it was rediscovered in a janitor's closet in a Norwegian insane asylum. Great movie, great performance.
Least Embarrassing Golden Globes Speech
Honestly, I've never watched the Golden Globes, so I couldn't say, and let's face it, on some level, all awards speeches are embarrassing. Instead, I'll go in the other direction and guess that the most embarrassing Golden Globes speech was when Ving Rhames gave away his award to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon. Actually dragged Lemmon on stage in a moment of enthusiastic self-deprecation and shoved the award into his hands, to Lemmon's mortification. And I say this as a guy who loves both Ving Rhames and Jack Lemmon. Haven't seen nearly enough of ol' Ving since then, by the way.
Best Acting With a Green Screen
Without doing an extensive search, I'm going with Naomi Watts in the remake of King Kong. She made the relationship between her character and the forty-foot CGI monkey not just plausible but touching.
Best Performance for Which You Gained Weight Intentionally
Given that it's one of the best performances by anybody ever anyway, I'm going with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.
Tomorrow: awards for heartstring-tugging children, difficult directors, James Franco and recovering addicts.
Of my nominees for best picture of 1928-29, I've had three of them—Steamboat Bill, Jr.; The Wind; and my eventual choice, The Passion of Joan of Arc—penciled in for the award at one time or another, trying each on for size. Any one of them would have been a good choice and I'll bet if you looked at enough Alternate Oscar-type lists, you'd find all three of these as somebody's choice for the top prize.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. was 1928's best comedy and one of the best features Buster Keaton ever made. The Wind was the capstone of Lillian Gish's long and justly-celebrated silent film career. But it was something Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert said the other day in his blog that tipped the balance in favor of Carl Dreyer's film of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc.
Ebert was writing about how he tries to keep an open mind when approaching a new movie and had this to say about Pauline Kael's own philosophy of watching movies: "Take everything you are, and all the films you've seen, into the theater. See the film, and decide if anything has changed." That's what I find I have done with my first three best picture winners, The General (best of the silent era), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927-28) and now The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928-29): each has changed the way I feel about some aspect of movies and, on a good day, of life itself.
The General, aside from being a great comedy, probably did more to inspire this sudden mad interest in silent movies I've been riding for three months now than any other movie. For Katie-Bar-The-Door, too. Our trip down to the Kennedy Center to see The General presented with a live orchestra did more to make her an enthusiastic champion of this blog than did even the irresistible clarity of my sparkling prose. And Sunrise, a touching story of marital discord and reconciliation, showed me that my pre-conceived notions about film history—that Orson Welles singlehandedly invented modern movies—were flat out wrong.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being.
More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way.
Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Writer-director Carl Dreyer was all set to film a conventional telling of Joan of Arc's story when he ran across the transcripts of her trial in an archive in Paris . Reading the transcript prompted Dreyer to throw out his first screenplay and focus strictly on the trial and subsequent execution.
Now I've read a lot of trial tran- scripts in my time, first as a judicial clerk for a here- unnamed state's Court of Criminal Appeals then later as an appellate litigator for the federal government, and I can tell you, that while it's often difficult to discover justice in the cold written record of a trial, it's almost impossible not to discern the caliber of the trial's participants—their prejudices, their passions, their (very) occasional brilliance, their (much) more common incompetence. What I'm sure came across in startling clarity to Dreyer as he read the transcripts of Joan's trial was that her judges were motivated not by a search for the truth but by, first, cold calculations of national interest (Joan was the leader of France's military rebellion against an English occupation), and then, more interestingly, by the unsettling fear that Joan might be exactly what she purported to be, a saint working at the behest of God.
Dreyer dispenses with the usual exposition, stories of Charles VII, Henry VI and the last decade of the Hundred Years' War, and begins instead with the prisoner being led in chains through a makeshift courtroom into the witness dock. After the swearing in and some preliminary verbal fencing, the judges get down to it: "You claim to be sent by God?" a notion that elicits their scorn and amusement.
The nineteen year old peasant girl is seemingly no match for a roomful of learned scholars, but as the inquisition fails to trap Joan into a fatal misstatement or contradiction, the judges' derision gradually turns to frustration, anger, and eventually fury. They hammer at her relentlessly on the issue of whether she expects some sort of reward from God for her sacrifice—a sacrifice, Dreyer implies, the judges themselves would not have dreamed of making without assurances of more earthly rewards.
But this all for show. The presence of heavily-armed soldiers makes clear, both to the audience and to the judges, that the verdict is pre-ordained. As the troop's commander puts it, "Not for anything in the world do I want her to die a natural death."
Unless you skipped your high school history altogether, you know how this is going to end.
Finally, to move the proceedings along, the unyielding Joan is led to the torture chamber and given the option of renouncing her claim to being "a daughter of God" or suffering the excruciating consequences.
If Dreyer had filmed this sequence in 2008, I would say it was a fairly obvious commentary on Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, military tribunals and the like. But he filmed it in 1928 based on the transcripts of a fifteenth century trial, and it serves as a simple statement of fact, that torture is designed not to find the truth but to extract compliance, conformity and an affirmation of a narrative the torturer already has convinced himself of. I doubt it even occurred to Dreyer that anyone in the civilized world had a different opinion of the matter.
As a general rule, I'm quite tolerant of a filmmaker's point of view (political and otherwise) regardless of what it is—unless we're talking about, say, Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Nazi propaganda—as long as (1) said filmmaker is as hard on his own beliefs as the beliefs he's attacking and (2) the politics are well-integrated into the story. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn't. For example, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I were in D.C. this weekend watching a production of King Lear at the Shakespeare Theater—Stacy Keach as Lear—and the director managed to shoe-horn in some action that was clearly a comment on our current wars in the Middle East. Quite frankly, it felt about as organic to Lear as a coconut does to a bowl of chili and we both left after the final curtain more than a little annoyed. But here, Dreyer let the action speak for itself without seeing any need to gild the lily, and the truths emerge on their own quite effectively.
When you sit down to watch this movie (if you sit down to watch this movie), how you choose to watch it may affect your reaction to it. At the time the original film was discovered in 1981, Richard Einhorn wrote a choral and orchestral accompaniment that gives the film an elegiac feel, spiritual, meditative, like praying in a cathedral as the shadows lengthen on a late-autumn day.
Dreyer himself though preferred the movie to be shown completely silent; and watching it that way, the feel is much more like the intense white light of an operating theater, with everything on the line and nowhere to hide. Without the accompanying choral score, the film is no longer a prayerful meditation on saintly virtue but an uncompromising look at the naked exercise of power and the ability of the state to pervert justice and destroy an individual for its own ends.
The DVD from the Criterion Collection gives you the option of watching it either with the score or without, and I've watched it both ways. Dreyer's choice may not be as pleasant but it's a lot closer to the truth.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here.]
So who was the best actress of 1928-29, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Lillian Gish in The Wind?
As I was saying yesterday, movies are such a collaborative process that trying to figure out where one person's contribution ends and another's begins is as difficult as trying to separate out the ingredients of a cake once it's been in the oven. We look at what we think we see on the screen, we read (often self-serving) anecdotes from the set and we make some guesses.
In close cases like this, it helps (to my mind) to look at the actor's work in other movies, with other crews and directors, a process of triangulation if you will, and if you keep seeing great work from an actor regardless of the director, script, editor, etc., then maybe you're looking at a great actor. So while it is certainly true, for example, that the director and editor had a great deal to say about what work of Brando's showed up in On The Waterfront, I'm comfortable in saying based on the whole of his career that Brando was a great actor (at least when he wasn't phoning it in, that is).
When I read behind the scenes stories of The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Wind and I look at the careers of Maria Falconetti and Lillian Gish, this is what I see:
Maria Falconetti's work on The Passion of Joan of Arc, while great, was the only significant film appearance of her career and was collaborative only in the sense that director Carl Dreyer said, "Give me tears," and she gave him tears or said, "Be a saint," and she was a saint. While the character works brilliantly, it was Dreyer calling the shots and it was Dreyer who assembled the performance in the editing room out the raw footage. Falconetti made no speeches (obviously), appeared in no long scenes that revealed shifts in character, had limited interactions with her fellow actors. She may well have been a brilliant actress but she had no real opportunity to prove it here and since she made no other feature-length movies, it's impossible to draw any inferences about her talent.
Gish, on the other hand, who turned in more great performances in more great movies during the Silent Era than anybody else, and then after her return to the big screen in the 1940s, continued to give great performances until her retirement in 1987, gave the best performance of her career in The Wind.
The Wind rests on Gish's shoulders in a way that The Passion of Joan of Arc never rests on Falconetti's. While legendary writer Frances Marion laid out the psychological components of the story in her screenplay, without Gish on screen to convey that psychology with a single look—for example, a glance that reveals her desperation, knowing she's not welcome in the house of a childhood friend when the only other choices are a loveless marriage or death in the desert—the story as it plays out would make no sense.
I don't have to draw inferences about her talent—her talent is an established fact.
Gish was also stretching herself as an actress in The Wind. She commissioned the project in part to play with her established screen image. For years, as D.W. Griffith's favorite actress, Gish played the passive victim of any variety of men looking to relieve her of her treasured virginity. In The Wind, perhaps the single biggest threat to Gish's virginity is her own desire, a marked departure from her established screen image. And to see Gish—not just the character she plays, but the artist and the actress—choose to take up a gun and kill an attacker after all those years of playing the long-suffering, passive victim is liberating in a way Thelma and Louise only pretended to be.
The auteur theory holds that it is the director who is the author of a movie. It's a popular theory that has shaped film criticism for decades now, but it's one of those theories that is more normative than descriptive (i.e., recommending what should be rather than describing what is), for in motion picture history, movies have in fact born the stamp of any number of people involved in their creation—producers (David O. Selznick), writers (Paddy Chayefsky), actors (Fred Astaire) and yes, directors (Alfred Hitchcock).
In the case of The Wind, the driving force behind the movie and the hand controlling every aspect of its production was clearly Lillian Gish. Gish alone picked the director, the stars and the story. She alone decided to take her screen image and play with it and deepen it. And she alone was the one who signed off on the final product and paid the price with her career when The Wind failed at the box office despite its creative brilliance.
Frances Marion later said of Lillian Gish, "She might look fragile, but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."
Am I giving Gish credit as an actress because of her role as a producer? Probably, but why not? Her choices as producer help reveal the choices she made as an actress—that process of triangulation again, trying to separate the sugar from the flour of the baked cake.
So my choice for best actress of 1928-29 is Lillian Gish in The Wind. For me, I would rather reward Gish for the most complete performance of a long career than Falconetti for what is in fact a one-hit wonder, no matter how great that one hit was.
Note: As I have said, despite its brilliance, The Wind was a box office flop. This was no doubt due in large part to the arrival of sound movies. But silent era actress turned film historian Louise Brooks also believed there was a concerted Hollywood effort to destroy Lillian Gish's reputation and box-office appeal and that a box office was exactly what the studio was hoping for. It was a simple matter of economics, says Brooks. Gish was making $400,000 a year and had complete creative control of her career. Emerging star Greta Garbo was making $16,000 and wholly dependent on the studio to solve the visa problems that would allow her to work. Brooks lays out evidence of the studio's manipulation and then posits the studio was tired of paying big money to an actress with the power to map her own career when it could pay a younger actress a lot less money to do exactly what it wanted.
Ironically, the studio eventually did to Garbo what it had done to Gish—undercut her career when cheaper actresses came along.
Of the three nominees for best actress of 1928-29, one of them, Marion Davies, is pretty much here just to round out the field. Which is not to say Davies didn't deserve the nomination. While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for no-talent opera singer Susan Alexander in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane—a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her—Davies was actually a very talented comic actress and it shows in the silent comedy, Show People, for which I've nominated her. But the fact is, no matter how good Davies was, 1928-29 boils down to a race between two actresses, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lillian Gish in The Wind, who between them deliver not just the two best performances of the year, but two of the best performances of any year.
By now if you've been following this blog (a big "if," I'll grant you), you've heard of both Lillian Gish and Maria Falconetti. Gish, as you may recall, was my choice for the best actress of the Silent Era. She was D.W. Griffith's go-to actress for every great movie he ever made and then after his career faded, she carried on for another decade making nothing but top-notch films. The Wind is probably the finest performance of her award-winning career.
Falconetti, on the other hand, only made one movie of significance, The Passion of Joan of Arc, but, boy, what a movie. Pauline Kael, the influential albeit erratic critic for New Yorker magazine, said after Carl Dreyer's masterpiece was rediscovered in 1981 that Falconetti's performance "may be the finest performance ever recorded on film." Premiere magazine ranked it as the twenty-sixth best performance of all time in a list of the 100 greatest performances in film history, making it the highest ranked silent performance.
Choosing between them involves not so much a matter of knowing good from bad as knowing what it is in a performance that you value. And this is where I run into a problem: as a woman I once knew said to me twenty-five years ago, "You don't have any values."
True. But she of the Katie Awards, Katie- Bar-The- Door, and Mister Muleboy of the blog The Mouth O' The Mule are positively silly with values and fortunately for me, often have strongly held opinions even on issues they have no opinion about. They both agree that Lillian Gish was a great actress; where they disagree is on the issue of whether Maria Falconetti was an actress at all.
Two events in movie history permanently scarred Katie, Ali McGraw's Oscar nomination for Love Story and Anna Paquin's win for The Piano. Subsequent work firmly established in Katie's mind that neither can act a lick and that honors were bestowed on them in anticipation that they might one day prove to have talent and in recognition of the work of other people. In reaction, she's adopted an informal rule: "Never give someone an Oscar for their first performance."
Here, Maria Falconetti wasn't technically appearing in her first movie—the Internet Movie Database lists small roles in a pair of 1917 shorts—but she might as well have been. And while Katie agrees that The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the greatest movies ever made and that Maria Falconetti is effective in it, she's convinced Falconetti's performance is a product not of any particular skill but of director Carl Dreyer's relentless bullying, Rudolph Maté's excellent camera work and Dreyer's and Marguerite Beaugé's patient work in the editing room.
Roger Ebert describes the effort that produced the performance this way: "Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face—so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression."
Katie-Bar-the-Door thinks that given to what degree Dreyer hectored and humiliated her, and worked her to the point of exhaustion, it's no surprise that Falconetti convincingly comes across as hectored, humiliated and exhausted.
Consider too that since this is a silent film we're talking about, there are no line readings, which greatly complicate the actor's task, and because Dreyer shot the whole thing in a series of close-ups, there's very little need for Falconetti to play off the other actors. Dreyer simply put the camera on Falconetti and recorded everything and then assembled a character out of the footage.
Katie says that's not acting, it's something else—maybe a perfect face and a lot of film. I mean, if you put a stovepipe hat on your dog and took a hundred pictures of him, in one shot he's bound to look like Abraham Lincoln. But that doesn't make your dog the 16th president of the United States. (And no this is not my dog, who actually bears an uncanny resemblance to Woodrow Wilson.)
On the other hand, Mister Muleboy who is actually a trained actor in addition to being a highly intuitive blogger, points out that's "presumably the case in every feature film," that most screen performances consist of "a director badgering, sucking, pleading, or manipulating a 'performance' out of the actor. Usually manipulating it at the editing table. Crafting that 'great scene' from the (potentially nonsensical) multiple takes that, when combined, gave rise to that 'perfectly modulated, brilliant' performance. And that, in this director's/editor's medium, the idea of one acting performance that is in the control of the actor is—at best—only conjecture."
In fact, this is true of every per- formance, he says, even Marlon Brando in On The Water- front. Trying to identify where the work of the director and editor and cinematographer leave off and the work of the actor begins is like trying to identify the individual ingredients in a baked cake and then hand out an award to the sugar and the butter.
Hmm. So who's right?
Oh, wait. Katie-Bar-The-Door just reminded me that I'm married to her which pretty much means that even if she's wrong, she's right. But I don't think she's wrong. You know?
Also she says it's recycling day and can I please put out the newspapers? Gotta go.
To read Part Two, click here.
When we celebrate great directors—Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Ford—we are actually often celebrating wildly different qualities. Sometimes it's the gift of an Ingmar Bergman (remember a chess-playing grim reaper in The Seventh Seal?) to translate a deeply personal vision into an unforgettable image. At other times it's the knack of a William Wyler (who directed the most Oscar-winning performances in history) for coaxing award-winning performances from his actors. And at yet other times, it's the sheer determination of a Marcel Carné (who directed Children of Paradise during the Nazi occupation of France) to conjure a masterpiece from nothing under the most difficult of circumstances.
To turn a personal obsession into one of the greatest movies of all time, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer had to become a combination of all three.
Dreyer was already slated to direct a movie about Joan of Arc when he discovered in a Paris library the complete transcript of the trial that led to her execution. Poring over the court's meticulous notes, Dreyer became obsessed with the Joan revealed in the give and take of the trial. Dreyer threw out Joseph Delteil's screenplay, which was a more traditional account of Joan's life, and instead wrote his own screenplay focusing the story solely on the interrogation.
The result, as the opening titles put it, is a portrait of Joan "not in armor, but simple and human." It's also one of the best movies ever made about the collision of religious faith and worldly cynicism.
Dreyer subscribed to what Ernest Hemingway later called the iceberg theory of storytelling, that if you focus on the core of the story and get the details right, then like the seventh-eights of the iceberg that's underwater, the audience will intuitively sense the parts of the story that you've left out. In directing The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer stripped away everything—subplots, politics, and especially showy, kabuki-style acting—that distracted from the emotional core of his story.
He even went so far as to bar the cast from wearing make-up, unprecedented in the Silent Era.
The brutal demands Dreyer made on his star, Maria Fal- conetti, were legendary. To get the performance he wanted from Falconetti, a stage actress known for light comedy, Dreyer had her kneel on the stone floor of the set for weeks on end, blank all emotion from her face and do take after endless take. In addition to cropping her long hair, Dreyer insisted over Falconetti's objection that in a key scene where the judges cut her hair in preparation for her execution, her head be shaved for real. And when a doctor is brought in to bleed the ailing Joan, Dreyer took a knife to Falconetti's arm and opened a vein.
Reportedly, the suffering etched in every line of her face was genuine, the tears well-earned.
Dreyer was as demanding of every performer in the movie, from his star to the extras. For the duration of shooting which ran from May to November 1927, he required that his performers stay in character as much as possible and keep their heads shaved in monkish tonsure-style haircuts. As Gary Morris pointed out in an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, this included even those actors whose characters wore caps that entirely covered their heads.
Likewise Dreyer built an elaborate, three- dim- ensional set and then never showed it, shooting nearly the entire movie in a series of close-ups, possibly using more close-ups than any other movie in history. Yet following the iceberg principle again, the reality is there in the background so that without drawing attention to the set or stopping to pat himself on the back for the effort, you never question that what you're seeing is real.
Can you image a director now who would blow a substantial chunk of his budget to create such an elaborate set and then not shove it in your face every minute to the detriment of the final product?
Because it stripped away every ex- traneous detail, Dreyer's version of the Joan story doesn't delve into the political or military conflict that drove the trial, nor does it directly answer the question of whether Joan was a saint (the Catholic church declared her to be so in 1920; my own religious background makes no allowance for such a possibility). Dreyer made clear, however, where his sympathies lay. As Roger Ebert noted in his review of the movie, the judges are photographed in a harsh white light that exposes every wrinkle and blemish that "seem to reflect a diseased inner life. Falconetti, by contrast, is shot in softer grays." Joan looks like a saint, bedeviled by corrupt, venal men with a worldly axe to grind.
In many ways, The Passion of Joan of Arc is the opposite of what I usually I like in a silent movie. It's a heavy drama, laden with dialogue (which of course must be read on intertitle cards that appear between scenes). Except at the end, it features little of the visual lyricism that can eliminate the need for pages of exposition. And yet, Dreyer, who along with Marguerite Beaugé edited the movie, found an effective rhythm as he cut between close-ups of Joan, her inquisitors and the intertitle cards, a rhythm that steadily increases the tension until it explodes, like screwing a lid tightly onto a pot of boiling water.
Dreyer's approach to filmmaking was idiosyncratic, wholly at odds with, say, F.W. Murnau's, who was aiming to make movies a purely visual experience. And yet because he did make it work, Dreyer managed a nearly unique achievement, a movie so modern in its look and its pared-down approach to storytelling, that if I didn't know better, I would have assumed it was made forty years later.
That we can see this movie at all almost qualifies as a miracle in itself. Censors went to work on the movie soon after Dreyer completed it and then the film was lost to fire—twice. The negative was destroyed soon after its premiere and Dreyer cobbled together another print out of scraps from the cutting room floor only to see that print destroyed in a fire too. Dreyer died in 1968 believing that his finest achievement was lost forever.
Then in 1981, while cleaning out a janitor's closet in an insane asylum in Oslo of all places, workers discovered a complete copy of the original print, apparently ordered by a forgotten doctor to show to his patients fifty years before. Often these rediscovered lost films prove to be a disappointment that cannot live up to idealized memories; The Passion of Joan of Arc proved to be even better. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece, a word too casually tossed around, but for once they were right.Of my three nominees for best director, Luis Buñuel made the most influential movie, the sixteen-minute surrealist experiment Un Chien Andalou, possibly the best example of experimental film ever created. Victor Sjöström (credited here as Victor Seastrom) is better known now for his performance as an aging professor in Ingmar Bergman's classic Wild Strawberries, but in his native Sweden he is remembered as the father of Swedish cinema and he directed fifty-five movies in his career. Hand-picked by star Lillian Gish for The Wind, he directed a near textbook example of a silent movie that sheds the need for dialogue and he did it under grueling conditions in the Mojave Desert.
In other years, either of these nominees would have been an excellent choice for a Katie Award.
In the case of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer made neither an influential movie nor a textbook example of anything. He simply made the best movie of the year and without his determination, it wouldn't have been made at all.
Dreyer followed The Passion of Joan of Arc with an atmospheric foray into the horror genre, Vampyr. Although some now believe it rivals Murnau's Nosferatu as the best vampire movie ever made, Vampyr flopped so miserably at its premiere in Berlin that Dreyer fell into a deep depression and didn't direct another movie for ten years.
In his career, Dreyer directed a total of twenty-three movies, including Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955); he wrote forty-nine others. He directed his last movie in 1964, just four years before his death at the age of 79.
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