Falconetti's face under interrogation
The Passion of Joan of Arc is built almost entirely out of faces in extreme close-up, an approach so radical for 1928 that Carl Dreyer had sets built and then largely refused to show them, trusting Renee Jeanne Falconetti's performance to carry the film alone. She reportedly never acted again after this role, and film historians still debate how much of her visible anguish was performance versus Dreyer's famously punishing directing methods. The film was thought lost for decades until a nearly pristine print turned up in a Norwegian mental institution's closet in 1981.