“What are you all standing around for? This is the beginning of the world! Think of it. All of those people goin’ to see the pictures … and a lot of them can’t even talk American! But then they don’t have to because … pictures are a language that everybody understands … it’s like music ... for the eyes … and if you’re good, if you’re really good, then maybe what you’re doin’ is, you’re givin’ ‘em little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

I’ll admit, I’m not big fan of out-and-out slapstick comedy, and when I realised how jam-packed with such stuff this movie was gonna be, I thought I might be in for a rather cringing couple of hours. I’m no expert on silent film comedy – I’ve still not even touched on the work of, say, Buster Keaton let alone Harold Lloyd and who knows who else – but I think Peter Bogdanovich pulls just about every classic/cliché gag there is out of the book in this homage to the beginnings of cinema and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get slightly tiresome once or twice.

However, I really watched it for Tatum O’Neal – I wouldn’t have even heard of the movie were it not for the nice things she said about it in her great autobiography “A Paper Life” (sure, as a member of the cast she’d be biased, lol; but I trusted her comments) – and in that regard I wasn’t disappointed, she’s such a spark it gets me every time. As in Bad News Bears she kind of waits in the wings for a long while at the start of the movie which is good for me as it forces me to get into the other aspects of the story. It’s kind of a like a silent period Bowfinger, the little guys fighting against the Patent company to get a slice of the glorious new form of entertainment, and the small family feel of the thing reminded me very much of the Steve Martin movie, which I love.

As in Noises Off…, I’m awed by how much Bogdanovich is able to juggle at once within the scene – at one point, Tatum O’Neal drives a truck piled high with the cast barely missing a steamtrain over which is flying a hot air balloon, followed by the train (and its passengers) being doused by the contents spraying from a water tower – seriously lol, how much did this thing cost?!; another has the camera pan past a series of period movie sets (within the period of the movie itself lol); all the while people are popping on and off the screen with their own concerns; I’m always astounded by how these kinds of movies get put together, I barely have the patience when I’m trying to just write relatively simple stuff of my own lol.

The movie is shot by Laszlo Kovacs in that long lost way only Seventies period movies were shot. I don’t know why, but to me the costumes and set design, everything, always seems so much more authentic in these productions than even the best of recent times – it always feels more “lived in” or something. Ryan O’Neal, Burt Reynolds, and particularly John Ritter are fantastic fun. It’s certainly as special as Tatum says it is, and I imagine it could grow into a personal favourite of mine sometime. At 2 hours it could frankly be even longer, such is the warm feeling it fills me with. It could even be my long awaited gateway to watching more of the real deal silent stuff, ‘cos it’s that kind of movie that fills you with nostalgia even if you didn’t even witness the stuff you’re feeling nostalgic for. The line I started with above, spoken by Brian Keith (I think?) at the end as the camera tracks in on him is so perfect; again, I’m back to what I said the other day about the Oscars, it’s a celebration of the power of cinema, its importance. I don’t know if this movie would appeal to anyone who isn’t so enamoured of the medium … but it certainly got me.

I wasn’t sure this weekend whether to watch this acknowledged silent classic version of the Joan of Arc story or Luc Besson’s lavish 1999 production first. I might’ve better understood what I wrote about the manic style of Milla Jovovich’s performance in The Messenger had I watched them the other way around – she was clearly trying to bring something of Maria Falconetti’s performance here in, in the same way there are some visual references I noticed like the cut between Jeanne’s burning face and the cross in the sky etc – but certainly watching that English language version first helped me understand the odd bits of the French interstitials here that I couldn’t quite translate (the DVD player’s still having problems with subtitles, lol – I was pretty impressed with myself how well I coped though :))

The difference between Jovovich and Falconetti’s performances is hard to put into words that don’t include, simply, “Falconetti’s is just better” – where Jovovich, like I said, came off mostly as plain crazy, Falconetti’s wide-eyed gazing comes across more like a superhuman degree of conviction obstructed by a mind too young and human to quite comprehend it; ie, simply closer to “the truth”. A sizable portion of the movie consists of simple headshots of her reacting to the men around her. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as compelling and hypnotic as it is … but it really is the greatest performance, male or female, I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it on any number of repeat viewings.

This is before you even touch upon the aspects of the film outside of her performance. Though, like I said, it’s full of a lot of plain headshots, there are some camera moves that perhaps by sheer contrast blew my mind a little, like the rolling move that follows soldiers from an aerial angle to one level with the ground; one that tracks the spikes of a torture device down to the ground; another weird almost queasy motion while Jeanne burns, following maces thrown down to guards from a tower, up and back again, up and back again.

It’s not often I’m so immediately impressed by movies as old as this – though I consider myself to have a wider knowledge of cinema than most, it never really struck me as a given that older productions should necessarily be somehow better than modern stuff by default. Then you get exceptions like this – it is one of those movies, as François Truffaut has said, that simply “vibrates”, in this case sometimes so violently that it threatens to burst out of the screen. It amazes me that there are people who dismiss it so quickly as “just headshots” ... it’s the person who’s in those headshots. For the performance alone it’s a masterpiece. But it’s so much more besides.