Filmmakers have been fascinated by Joan’s story for more than a hundred years, beginning with the 1895 Edison Laboratories short Joan of Arc (aka Burning of Joan of Arc) and Georges Hatot’s 1898 short, Execution de Jeanne d’Arc.
Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman was the first to use her story to address contemporary concerns and to shape her image to fit contemporary attitudes toward women. DeMille wanted to persuade American audiences of the need to go to the aid of French and British forces that had been bearing the brunt of the war since 1914. His Joan, played by the operatic celebrity Geraldine Farrar, is depicted as a fearless leader of men. At the stake she seems to experience little discomfort, and in the closing frames of the movie she is shown in her previous glory standing over the English soldier who has performed a heroic action in her memory. Joan the Woman was made at a time when few middle-class women were in the workforce and no American woman had the right to vote. DeMille’s Joan of Arc was intended to inspire men to fight and women to contribute to the war effort in womanly ways.
Two things happened in 1920 to alter perceptions of Joan of Arc. First, she became a saint of the Catholic Church (feast day: May 30). Joan’s official sainthood eclipsed her secular nature; now a religious heroine, she could no longer serve as a universal symbol of patriotism. Second, American women obtained the right to vote. Whereas before, the image of an assertive woman like Joan could be seen as an anomaly, as newly emancipated American women began to seek higher education and professional occupations, the image of a vigorous, independent Joan posed a threat to the traditional ideal of woman as domestic-minded homebody.
DeMille’s 1916 movie, with its pageantry and battle scenes, had been inspirational for both men and women. The next major film about Joan of Arc, Theodore Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), stripped Joan of her glory. Dreyer’s film begins with Joan already the prisoner of the English— helpless, confused, and wearing a dress.
DeMille’s intention had been to show Joan as a reluctant leader. His Joan clearly would have preferred marriage to a military career. He didn’t anticipate that some women would interpret the film as a feminist statement that taught respect for the power and hearts of womankind who can rise to the highest pinnacle of success without the aid of men—“[the film] will take the conceit out of the male mind.”
The Passion of Joan of Arc permits no such interpretation. Dreyer’s Joan is helpless from beginning to end. When the film premiered in Boston, “two hundred well-dressed women” walked out, repelled by the stark depiction of Joan as passive victim.
World War II propaganda also made use of Joan’s story but transformed it in such a way as to minimize female assertiveness. Women in war were to be seen as enablers of men, but not in any way their leaders. The most important element of Joan’s story that emerged in movies of the 1930s and 1940s was her willingness to become a sacrificial victim.
American World War I propaganda attempted to mask the horrors of war with the trappings of chivalry and idealism. World War II imagery and rhetoric stressed the peaceful American way of life. War was an evil inconvenience, to be ended as quickly as possible so that men could return to domestic scenes inhabited by nurturing women. Instead of an epic Joan of Arc movie with a historical setting, filmmakers produced movies with contemporary settings using character names and plot lines that referenced Joan of Arc and emphasized the auxiliary role of women in war. The “Joan” characters enabled the male characters to do the serious business of fighting, but they did not themselves lead or fight. Such movies ended with the Joan characters either dead or married and back in the domestic sphere.
The next major feature about the historical Joan of Arc appeared after the war, in 1948, and it too embodied these attitudes. Victor Fleming’s epic Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan and with a screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, is filled with pageantry and historical accuracy, but it deliberately reduces the importance of Joan’s military leadership with a male voiceover that interrupts and interprets her actions as the story progresses. The movie is a beautiful cinematic achievement, but its title character is, above all, gentle and deferential. In the final frame, viewers are told that Joan of Arc’s greatest achievement was her death at the stake.
The last two twentieth-century feature productions about Joan of Arc, both released in 1999, present two very different Joans, neither of whom much resembles the historical personage. Of nine major Joan of Arc films produced in the twentieth century, Christian Duguay’s television miniseries pays the least attention to the historical record; Leelee Sobieski’s Joan is a petulant teenager motivated more by a desire to gain her father’s approval than by any national or spiritual fervor. Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc, released in English-speaking markets as The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, pays closer attention to the historical record than Duguay’s effort, but it does the greater disservice to the memory of Joan of Arc. Played by Milla Jovovich, Besson’s Joan is presented as a hysterical lunatic who goes to the stake stripped of even the illusion that her life had meaning.
Although the first 10 years of the twenty-first century have passed without another major feature film about her, Joan of Arc continues to be a powerful icon of popular culture, occurring as a character in literature, video games, comic books, movies, and television.
World History
