Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (64 page)

FIG. 26. “Joan Outside the Gates of Paris,”
Vigiles du roi Charles VII,
1493, Martial d’Auvergne. A demure androgyne with a man’s torso grafted onto a woman’s hidden hips and legs, Joan contemplates action she is not dressed to join.

FIG. 27.
Joan of Arc,
1948, Victor Fleming. Maxwell Anderson’s romantic script ignores the capture of Joan (Ingrid Bergman) at Compièigne. The prayers she offers when free, costumed as though she were a priest, deliver her directly into English captivity and the martyrdom that awaits her.

FIG. 28.
The Messenger,
1999, Luc Besson. Vanquished, Joan (Milla Jovovich) falls not into the enemy’s hands but into a mystical consummation with a Jesus only she can see.

FIG. 29. Rouen tower today. The keep in which Joan spent the last five months of her life, fettered in an unlit cell, was restored in the nineteenth century.

The Passion of Joan of Arc,
1928, Carl Dreyer.

FIG. 30. The director captures the inquisitor Cauchon’s spirit, or lack thereof. (Eugene Silvain as Cauchon)

FIG. 31. Joan (Maria Falconetti), like Jesus, is mocked and crowned before being executed for blasphemy.

FIG. 32. As described by Matthew, “When they came to a place called Golgotha, they offered [Jesus] wine to drink, mingled with gall”—a sedative he refused. Here, as Joan is led to the stake, an old woman steps forward with water for the condemned.

FIG. 33.
The Trial of Joan of Arc,
1962, Robert Bresson. Joan’s executioner complained that her stake had been set too high for him to cast a rope around her neck and strangle her, a mercy routinely extended to those about to be burned. (Florence Delay as Joan)

FIG. 34.
Joan the Woman,
1916, Cecil B. DeMille. The director does a handy job of uniting Joan’s nationalism with her piety, using light to nail her to a great fleur-de-lis.

FIG. 35.
Jeanne d’Arc,
1900, Georges Méliès. Not even in his playful rendition can Joan (Jeanne d’Alcy) escape her messianic destiny.

FIG. 36. World War I poster, 1918, Haskell Coffin. Sword aloft, bathed in the light of her vocation, a rapturous Joan casts her eyes up toward heaven. As though glowing through the carapace of her armor, two orbs of light at the level of her hidden breasts suggest a female bosom that cannot be obscured by the trappings of war.

FIG. 37.
Classics Illustrated
comics cover, 1950. Shining armor and white horse, banner and sword, and a phallic leg sheathed in red: From medieval manuscript to comic book, Joan’s iconography remains consistent.