Everyday Life vs. Politics: The Image of Joan of Arc in the Cinema of the Twentieth

Abstract

The article draws on a unified corpus of historical feature films released in the twentieth century and centred on a single subject, namely the story of Joan of Arc (1412?–1431), the heroine of the Hundred Years’ War. In modern historiography (études johanniques) such comprehensive studies practically have not yet been conducted: researchers prefer to analyze each film separately, thereby missing possible connections and intersections of their creators’ ideas. In this article, the author aims to examine the extent to which these films conform to one of the most important principles of historical drama, that is, the principle of authenticity, which requires that the daily life of a particular historical era be portrayed on the screen with the utmost accuracy. These observations lead the author to conclude that, in most cases, realism is not a priority for the makers of films about Joan of Arc. Rather, their task is to follow the current historical moment in which a particular screenplay is conceived and implemented. At the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the official canonisation of the Maid of Orleans (1920), the films about her had a distinctly hagiographical character, but over the following decades their semantic load kept changing, ranging from criticism of the European judicial system to criticism (or exaltation) of the existing political system.