Joan of Arc (1900 film)

1900 French film

Jeanne d'Arc

Joan burning at the stake at the climax of the film

Directed by| Georges Méliès
Written by| Georges Méliès
Produced by| Georges Méliès
Starring|

* Jeanne Calvière
* Georges Méliès
* Jeanne d'Alcy

Cinematography| Leclerc

Production
company

Star Film Company

Release date

* 1900 (1900)

Running time

| 10 minutes
Country| France
Language| Silent

Joan of Arc (French: Jeanne d'Arc) is a 1900 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, based on the life of Joan of Arc.

## Plot

[edit]

In the village of Domrémy, the young Joan is visited by Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, who exhort her to fight for her country. Her father Jacques d'Arc, mother Isabelle Romée, and uncle beg her to stay at home, but she leaves them and travels to Vaucouleurs, where she meets with the governor, Captain Robert de Baudricourt. The dissipated Baudricourt initially scorns Joan's ideals, but her zeal eventually wins him over, and he gives her authority to lead French soldiers. Joan and her army lead a triumphal procession into Orléans, followed by a large crowd. Then, in Reims Cathedral, Charles VII is crowned King of France.

At the Siege of Compiègne, Joan is taken prisoner while her army attempts to storm the castle. In prison, Joan has another dream in which she sees her visions again. Taken to the interrogation, Joan refuses to sign a retraction, and is condemned as a heretic. In the Rouen marketplace, Joan is burned at the stake. The wood carrier at the execution, bringing in fuel for the burning, dies on the spot from the fumes. In a final apotheosis scene, Joan rises to heaven, where she is greeted by God and the saints.

## Cast

[edit]

* Jeanne Calvière as Joan of Arc.[1] Calvière, a stablewoman at the Cirque d'Hiver, was hired for this film and remained among Méliès's core troupe of actors for several years afterward.[2]
* Georges Méliès in seven roles: Jeanne's father; Jeanne's uncle; Robert de Baudricourt; a beggar at the Orléans procession; a soldier at the Siege of Compiègne; one of Joan's jailers; and the wood carrier at the execution.[3]
* Jeanne d'Alcy in three roles: Jeanne's mother; a lady at Vaucouleurs; and a lady at Orléans.[3]

## Production

[edit]

The surviving print of the film

The film was made in the spring of 1900.[4] It was the first of Méliès's films to surpass 200 meters in length, and the second (after his Cinderella the previous year) to use changes of scene, with twelve sets employed and that number of scenes, or tableaux, advertised.[4] (Cinderella was advertised as having twenty tableaux, but they were filmed on only six sets; this division of long scenes into smaller segments for advertising purposes would become Méliès's standard practice. Joan of Arc, by contrast, was advertised with twelve scenes, one per set.)[3] The artist Charles Claudel, who also repainted the interior of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1901 following Méliès's designs,[5] was the set painter for the film.[6] The cameraman was Leclerc,[6] who also worked for Méliès as the pianist at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.[7]

Méliès's scenario for the film strongly emphasizes Joan's status as a national hero of France and a martyr for the French people; the first scene, in which Joan enters leading a flock of sheep, foreshadows her eventual leading of the French army. The final scene, with its triumphal entry of Joan into heaven and her meeting God, suggests Joan's suitability for Catholic sainthood.[8] (Joan of Arc was beatified by the Church in 1909 and canonized in 1920.)[9]

Most of the film is staged in Méliès's usual theatrical style, with a stationary camera viewing the action from afar, in a long shot, as if viewing a stage spectacle from a seat in the audience. However, the eighth scene, the Siege of Compiègne, is notable for a more modern-looking visual effect: in that scene, actors move much closer to the camera, in the distance of a medium shot. This is the second example, among Méliès's extant films, of experiments with medium shots; the first had occurred the previous year in Bagarre entre journalistes, an installment of Méliès's series The Dreyfus Affair.[3]

An advertisement for the film claims that "almost 500 people" can be seen in the grand parade at Orléans, an effect created by having a moderately sized group of people cross the screen from left to right, go around the north side of the studio, and re-enter, repeating the cycle several times to simulate a much larger crowd.[4]

## Release and survival

[edit]

Joan of Arc was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 264–275 in its catalogues,[3] where it was advertised as a pièce cinématographique à grand spectacle en 12 tableaux.[4] As the film scholar Jacques Malthête has noted, Méliès's descriptions of the film in advertising material never mention that Joan's enemies are English; this omission occurs not only in the English-language materials (where mentioning conflict with the French may have been thought harmful to sales), but also in the French ones (where the omission is less understandable).[3]

The film was Méliès's second big cinematic success (Cinderella was the first).[4] It was shown widely in France, and was also exhibited elsewhere, including in Montreal and Havana.[3] In England, the film was distributed by the Warwick Trading Company, which handled English releases of Méliès's films until 1902.[3] In the United States, the Edison Manufacturing Company sold "dupes" (illegally duplicated prints) of the film.[10] American film piracy became such a problem for Méliès, especially after the success of his much-pirated 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, that he opened an American branch of his company in New York in 1903, under the direction by his brother Gaston Méliès, for added copyright protection.[11]

The film was believed lost until 1982, when a hand-colored print with the first scene missing was discovered by the collector René Charles.[3]

## See also

[edit]

* Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Bertrand, Aude (2010), Georges Méliès et les professionnels de son temps (PDF) (master's thesis), Université de Lyon, p. 69, retrieved 19 December 2014
2. ^ Wemaere, Séverine; Duval, Gilles (2011), La couleur retrouvée du Voyage dans la Lune (PDF), Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, p. 165, archived from the original (PDF) on 11 November 2011, retrieved 19 December 2014
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Malthête, Jacques (2002), "La Jeanne d'Arc de Georges Méliès", 1895, 36 (36): 117–132, doi:10.4000/1895.140, S2CID 191477181, retrieved 20 December 2014117-132&rft.date=2002&rft_id=info:doi/10.4000/1895.140&rft_id=https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:191477181#id-name=S2CID&rft.aulast=Malthête&rft.aufirst=Jacques&rft_id=http://1895.revues.org/140&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Joan+of+Arc+(1900+film)" class="Z3988">
4. ^ a b c d e Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 106, ISBN 9782732437323
5. ^ Rivière-Petitot, Anne, "L'énigme Charles Claudel (1873-?)", Association Camille Claudel, archived from the original on 20 December 2014, retrieved 20 December 2014
6. ^ a b Blaetz, Robin (2001), Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, p. 249, ISBN 9780813920764, retrieved 20 December 2014
7. ^ Rosen, Miriam (1987), "Méliès, Georges", in Wakeman, John (ed.), World Film Directors: Volume I, 1890–1945, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, p. 753, ISBN 0-8242-0757-2
8. ^ Harty, Kevin J. (1996), "Jeanne au Cinéma", in Wheeler, Bonnie; Wood, Charles T. (eds.), Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, New York: Garland Publishing, pp. 237–238, ISBN 9781135064884237-238&rft.pub=Garland+Publishing&rft.date=1996&rft.isbn=9781135064884&rft.aulast=Harty&rft.aufirst=Kevin+J.&rft_id=https://books.google.com/books?id=0JFrSBF-E3UC&pg;=PA237&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Joan+of+Arc+(1900+film)" class="Z3988">
9. ^ Gildea, Robert (1996), The Past in French History, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 159–161, ISBN 0300067119159-161&rft.pub=Yale+University+Press&rft.date=1996&rft.isbn=0300067119&rft.aulast=Gildea&rft.aufirst=Robert&rft_id=https://books.google.com/books?id=-JcLOEKvJ2kC&pg;=PA159&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Joan+of+Arc+(1900+film)" class="Z3988">
10. ^ Musser, Charles (1991), Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 238, ISBN 9780520060807
11. ^ Rosen 1987, p. 755

## External links

[edit]

* Joan of Arc at IMDb

* v
* t
* e

Georges Méliès

Actualities|

* Actualities (1896–1900)
* Reconstructed actualities (1897–1902)

Films|

| 1896|

* Playing Cards
* Conjuring
* Watering the Flowers
* The Rag-Picker
* Post No Bills
* The Rescue on the River
* A Terrible Night
* Arrival of a Train (Joinville Station)
* A Lightning Sketch
* Conjurer Making Ten Hats in Sixty Seconds
* A Serpentine Dance
* Miss de Vère (English Jig)
* The Vanishing Lady
* The Haunted Castle
* Tom Old Boot

|

1897|

* A Nightmare
* Comedian Paulus Singing
* A Funny Mahometan
* An Hallucinated Alchemist
* The Haunted Castle
* On the Roofs
* D. Devant, Conjurer
* The School for Sons-in-law
* The Last Cartridges
* The Surrender of Tournavos
* Sea Fighting in Greece
* Gugusse and the Automaton
* Between Calais and Dover
* The Laboratory of Mephistopheles
* The Barber and the Farmer
* The Bewitched Inn
* A Private Dinner
* After the Ball
* A Hypnotist at Work
* Dancing in a Harem

1898|

* A Novice at X-Rays
* Divers at Work on the Wreck of the "Maine"
* The Magician
* The Famous Box Trick
* Pygmalion and Galatea
* Adventures of William Tell
* The Astronomer's Dream
* The Cave of the Demons
* The Four Troublesome Heads
* The Temptation of Saint Anthony

1899|

* A Dinner Under Difficulties
* Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb
* The Bridegroom's Dilemma
* An Up-to-Date Conjuror
* The Devil in a Convent
* The Pillar of Fire
* The Clown and Automobile
* A Mysterious Portrait
* Christ Walking on the Water
* Summoning the Spirits
* The Dreyfus Affair
* The Human Pyramid
* Cinderella
* The Snow Man
* The Mysterious Knight

1900|

* Addition and Subtraction
* The Miracles of the Brahmin
* The Cook's Revenge
* The Misfortunes of an Explorer
* Paris Exposition, 1900
* The One-Man Band
* Joan of Arc
* The Rajah's Dream
* The Two Blind Men
* The Artist and the Mannikin
* Thanking the Audience
* The Christmas Dream
* Crying and Laughing
* Coppelia, the Animated Doll
* Fat and Lean Wrestling Match
* A Fantastical Meal
* Going to Bed Under Difficulties
* The Doctor and the Monkey
* What Is Home Without the Boarder
* China Versus Allied Powers
* The Brahmin and the Butterfly
* The Triple-Headed Lady
* Dislocation Extraordinary
* Red Riding Hood

1901|

* The Magician's Cavern
* Excelsior!
* The Sacred Fountain
* Blue Beard
* The Man with the Rubber Head

1902|

* The Eruption of Mount Pelee
* The Catastrophe of the Balloon "Le Pax"
* A Trip to the Moon
* The Shadow-Girl
* The Coronation of Edward VII
* The Treasures of Satan
* The Human Fly
* Up-to-Date Surgery
* Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants
* Robinson Crusoe
* The Marvellous Wreath

1903|

* Misfortune Never Comes Alone
* The Infernal Cake Walk
* The Mysterious Box
* The Queen's Musketeers
* The Enchanted Well
* The Inn Where No Man Rests
* The Drawing Lesson
* The Mystical Flame
* The Witch's Revenge
* The Oracle of Delphi
* A Spiritualistic Photographer
* The Melomaniac
* The Monster
* The Kingdom of the Fairies
* The Infernal Cauldron
* The Apparition
* Jupiter's Thunderbolts
* Ten Ladies in One Umbrella
* Jack Jaggs and Dum Dum
* Bob Kick, the Mischievous Kid
* Extraordinary Illusions
* Alcofrisbas, the Master Magician
* Jack and Jim
* The Magic Lantern
* The Ballet-Master's Dream
* The Damnation of Faust
* The Terrible Turkish Executioner
* A Moonlight Serenade

1904|

* Tit for Tat
* A Wager Between Two Magicians, or Jealous of Myself
* Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter
* The Bewitched Trunk
* The Fugitive Apparitions
* The Untamable Whiskers
* The Clockmaker's Dream
* The Imperceptible Transmutations
* A Miracle Under the Inquisition
* Faust and Marguerite
* Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjurer
* The Wonderful Living Fan
* The Cook in Trouble
* The Mermaid
* The Providence of the Waves
* The Barber of Seville
* The Wonderful Rose-Tree
* The Impossible Voyage
* The Firefall
* The Christmas Angel

1905|

* The Living Playing Cards
* The Black Imp
* The Crystal Casket
* The Lilliputian Minuet
* A Mesmerian Experiment
* The Venetian Looking-Glass
* The Palace of the Arabian Nights
* The Tower of London
* The Enchanted Sedan Chair
* An Adventurous Automobile Trip
* The Mysterious Island
* Unexpected Fireworks
* Rip's Dream
* The Scheming Gambler's Paradise
* The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship

1906|

* A Mix-up in the Gallery
* The Chimney Sweep
* The Tramp and the Mattress Makers
* The Hilarious Posters
* A Desperate Crime
* Punch and Judy
* A Roadside Inn
* Soap Bubbles
* The Merry Frolics of Satan
* A Seaside Flirtation
* The Mysterious Retort
* The Witch
* Robert Macaire and Bertrand

1907|

* Rogues' Tricks
* Under the Seas
* How Bridget's Lover Escaped
* Tunnelling the English Channel
* The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon
* Hamlet
* Shakespeare Writing "Julius Caesar"
* Sightseeing Through Whisky
* Good Glue Sticks
* Satan in Prison
* Delirium in a Studio
* The Knight of Black Art
* The Good Luck of a "Souse"

1908|

* Humanity Through the Ages
* The Genii of Fire
* Why That Actor Was Late
* The Dream of an Opium Fiend
* Long Distance Wireless Photography
* The Prophetess of Thebes
* In the Barber Shop
* A Fake Diamond Swindler
* The New Lord of the Village
* The Miser
* Sideshow Wrestlers
* The Broken Violin
* A Love Tragedy in Spain
* Mishaps of the New York–Paris Race
* The Woes of Roller Skaters
* Love and Molasses
* The Mischances of a Photographer
* The Indian Sorcerer
* A Tricky Painter's Fate
* French Cops Learning English
* Fun With the Bridal Party
* Not Guilty
* Buncoed Stage Johnnie
* A Grandmother's Story
* The Helping Hand
* The Old Footlight Favorite
* Honeymoon in a Balloon
* The Duke's Good Joke
* Incident from Don Quixote
* The Fairy Dragonfly
* Moitié de polka
* Fortune Favors the Brave
* Hypnotist's Revenge
* Pharmaceutical Hallucinations
* The Good Shepherdess and the Evil Princess
* The Living Doll
* Seein' Things
* The Frozen Policeman
* Tribulation or the Misfortunes of a Cobbler

1909|

* The Doctor's Secret
* The Diabolic Tenant
* Whimsical Illusions
* King of the Mediums
* The Spider and the Butterfly

1911|

* Baron Munchausen's Dream
* The Diabolical Church Window

1912|

* The Conquest of the Pole
* Cinderella or the Glass Slipper
* The Knight of the Snows
* The Voyage of the Bourrichon Family

Related|

* Jehanne d'Alcy (wife)
* Gaston Méliès (brother)
* Georges Méliès in culture
* Le Grand Méliès (1952 documentary)
* Around the World in 80 Days (1956 film prologue)
* The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007 book)
* Hugo (2011 film)
* Théâtre Robert-Houdin

* Filmography
* Bibliography
* Category

* v
* t
* e

Joan of Arc

Life and background|

* Maid of Lorraine prophecies
* Hundred Years' War
* Loire Campaign
* Siege of Orléans
* Jargeau
* Meung-sur-Loire
* Beaugency
* Siege of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier
* Name
* Trial
* Retrial
* Canonization

Family and
contemporaries|

* Jacques d'Arc (father)
* Isabelle Romée (mother)
* Pierre d'Arc (brother)
* Charles VII of France
* Pierronne
* André de Lohéac
* Gilles de Rais
* Guy XIV de Laval
* Jean II, Duke of Alençon
* Jean V de Bueil
* Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick

Cultural depictions|

| Poetry|

* The Tale of Joan of Arc (1429)
* Joan of Arc (1796)

|

Paintings|

* Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance (1863)
* Joan of Arc (1879)

Statues|

* Jeanne d'Arc (Frémiet)
* New York City
* Paris
* Portland, Oregon
* Washington, D.C.
* Jeanne au Sacre

Plays|

* The Maid of Orleans (1801)
* Saint Joan (1923)
* The Lark (1952)
* The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431 (1952)
* I, Joan (2022)

Films|

* Joan of Arc (1900)
* Joan the Woman (1916)
* The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
* Saint Joan the Maid (1929)
* Joan of Arc (1935)
* Joan of Arc (1948)
* Daughters of Destiny (1954)
* Joan of Arc at the Stake (1954)
* Saint Joan (1957)
* The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)
* Joan the Maid (1994)
* The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999)
* The Silence of Joan (2011)
* Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017)
* Joan of Arc (2019)

Television|

* Saint Joan (1967)
* Joan of Arc (1999 miniseries)

Operas|

* Giovanna d'Arco (1845)
* The Maid of Orleans (1881)
* Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna (written 1943)
* The Triumph of St. Joan (1950)
* The Survival of St. Joan (1970)
* Das Mädchen aus Domrémy (1976)

Related|

* March to Reims (initiated)
* National symbols of France
* Cross-dressing, gender identity, and sexuality
* Alternative historical interpretations

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