Joan of Arc
About Joan of Arc
In Domrémy, Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret appear to Joan. Her father Jacques d'Arc, her mother Isabelle Romée, and an uncle beg her to stay. She goes to Vaucouleurs. Captain Robert de Baudricourt scorns her, then gives her soldiers. She enters Orléans at the head of a procession. Charles VII is crowned at Reims. At Compiègne she is taken while her army storms the castle. In prison she dreams of the saints, refuses to recant, and is burned in the marketplace at Rouen. A wood carrier dies in the smoke. Joan rises to heaven and is received by God and the saints.
Cast & crew
More about Joan of Arc
Georges Méliès wrote, directed, and produced it in the spring of 1900 for Star Film, catalog numbers 264–275. The film runs past 200 meters. Jeanne Calvière plays Joan, with another rider doubling her in the Compiègne charge. Jehanne d'Alcy plays Joan's mother. Méliès himself plays the father, the uncle, Baudricourt, a beggar at Orléans, a soldier, a jailer, and the wood carrier. Bleuette Bernon is in the cast.
Themes
Background
The film tells the standard nineteenth-century sequence of Joan's life, from the voices at Domrémy through Orléans, the coronation at Reims, Compiègne, and the stake at Rouen, and then adds a heavenly tableau.
Making
Méliès staged the visions and the ascent with the substitution cuts and painted sets he was using at the Montreuil studio and in the Robert-Houdin programs. The surviving colored print shows the tinting applied by hand after the shoot.
Look
Wikidata credits Méliès as cinematographer. The scenes are staged tableaux, with the saints appearing by substitution and the final ascent staged against a painted heaven.
Technique
The hand-colored release used applied color on the costumes and the fire. The 1982 print still carries that color.
Preservation
It was believed lost until 1982, when René Charles found a hand-colored print. The first scene, at Domrémy, is missing from that copy.
Notes
- Calvière did not do the horseback charge at Compiègne. An unnamed rider doubled her.
- Méliès takes seven parts, including the man who dies from the smoke at the stake.
- The Star Film numbers are 264 through 275, sold as one reel or as separate tableaux.
- A hand-colored print turned up in 1982. The Domrémy opening is missing from it.
- Jehanne d'Alcy also appears as a lady at Vaucouleurs and at Orléans.
Scenes
- Three saints appear to Joan in Domrémy while her parents plead with her to stay.
- She rides into Orléans at the head of a crowd.
- She is burned in the Rouen marketplace, and the wood carrier falls in the smoke.
- She rises and is greeted in heaven.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Jeanne d'Arc (1900).webm)
