wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

1. Netflixing “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece. That is, if you’re not into watching it on YouTube:

The film has an eerie history. Its master negative was lost to fire the year of its release; Dreyer released a second film cut from outtakes, only to have that one be destroyed by another fire in 1935 (Joan, remember, was burned at the stake). Lots of versions have floated around since then, until, unbelievably, a print thought to be from the master negative was found in 1980 in a Norwegian mental institution (!), in a broom closet.

2. Checking out this review of the film on the The Criterion Contraption blog, dedicated to Matthew Dessem’s fabulous effort to see every DVD in the Criterion Collection

3. Reading “Burned Again,” Joan Acocella’s thoughtful essay on various treatments of Joan of Arc; originally published in the New Yorker in 1999, it is collected in “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, which you should own anyway.

4. Getting tickets for “The Passion Project,” which is running this weekend and July 17-19 at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in the Financial District. Part video installation, part performance, “The Passion Project” is the directorial debut of Reid Farrington (also its creator), who has been a video artist with The Wooster Group for the last seven years. He is the man behind the hypnotic video elements in the collective’s 2007 production of “Hamlet.”

Shelley Kay goes face-to-face with Maria Falconetti in “The Passion Project”

A friend and I went last week. It was magical, and sinister, and strange - one of the most satisfying theatrical experiences I’ve had in ages.

What made it so successful? Farrington is going up against some big, BIG historical heavyweights here - this iconic, apocryphal film, and the whole legend of Joan of Arc outside of that. We’ve talked about the idea of preserving art here, and how that can bedevil people’s best intentions. But Farrington has found a way of preserving while still going forward, a way of engaging with history and making this historical work contemporary by exploiting the very distance that exists between us and it - there is no official version being enshrined and set on a pedestal and protected by a trust. We get to see, instead, a contemporary artist/mind grappling with a mythic chimera. And we, as audience members, get to grapple right alongside. We get to be seduced by the grandeur of the original even as (literally, through some gorgeous video work) Farrington shatters it.

5. Brainstorming over how you can change the course of an endless war, piss off the priesthood in the process, get burned at the stake and martyred for your trouble, and later immortalized through art.