The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Berklee Silent Film Orchestra (BSFO) returns to the Coolidge for their fourteenth silent film concert with the Sounds of Silents®.
The award-winning group will perform their original score, live-to-picture, for the groundbreaking and deeply moving silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Joan has been named "the most influential film of all time” by the Toronto International Film Festival. Roger Ebert said “to see Renee Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is to look into eyes that will never leave you.” Deeply topical today, Joan is about a woman who tells her story, is not believed, and is martyred for it. The BSFO will perform its new original score with chorale and strings, to the original, and definitive 20-frames-per-second version of the film.
Lauded in publications including Indiewire, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal, and twice honored by the Boston Society of Film Critics, the BSFO has garnered lengthy standing ovations for its original film scores, in live-to-picture performances at (among others) the Coolidge, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, New York’s Tony Bennett Concert Hall, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and Boston Symphony Hall.
About the BSFO
Described by film critic Leonard Maltin as “nothing short of thrilling," the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra (BSFO) is dedicated to composing new, original scores for silent feature classics, and performing them live-to-picture. Based at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, in the world’s first undergraduate degree program in film scoring, the student orchestra has composed this new work, and will perform it as an ensemble, under the leadership of Berklee Chair of Film Scoring Alison Plante, and Assistant Professor of Film Scoring Peter Bufano. The BSFO’s seven student composers each conduct the 12-piece film orchestra in a “reel” of the film, passing the baton, in a small spectacle of musical synchrony and virtuosity, live-to-picture.
To date, the BSFO has scored and performed twelve iconic silent features, including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Faust, and The Last Laugh, Clarence Badger’s It, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality, E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly and Varieté, Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! and The Freshman, each of these commissioned by the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Sounds of Silents® program.
