Joan the Woman
R: Cecil B. DeMille. B: Jeanie Macpherson, William C. de Mille. K: Alvin Wyckoff. D: Geraldine Farrar, Raymond Hatton, Hobart Bosworth, Wallace Reid, Theodore Roberts, Tully Marshall, Walter Long, Cleo Ridgely, Horace B. Carpenter, Ernest Joy, William Elmer. P: Paramount Pictures. USA 1916
Print: George Eastman Museum

“Cecil B. DeMille’s first feature-length epic is an exercise in equivocation. Joan the Woman (1916) attempts to tell the story of a woman whose chosen path in life is inherently defiant of the gender norms of both her time and that of the film’s audience, while at the same time using the Maid of Orleans to reinforce the value of feminine-patriotic virtues. Joan the Woman follows the popular story of Joan of Arc, portrayed here by Geraldine Farrar, from her departure from Domremy to her arrival at the court of Charles VII of France, where she convinces the dauphin to put her at the head of an army to oust the English from France. Her subsequent victory at Orleans comprises roughly twenty minutes of the two-and-a-half hour film. After Charles’s coronation at Reims, however, the film departs from the documented history dramatically. Joan is captured at Compiegne only because of the betrayal of her English suitor, Eric Trent. The Maid’s fictional love interest attempts to redeem himself through a daring rescue, but ultimately fails. Joan is led to her inevitable death at the stake in Rouen. Watching her burn, Trent laments, ‘We have killed a saint!’ and the villainous Cauchon is led away in disgust before she is dead.

Framing this version of Joan’s story is a prologue and epilogue that takes place in the trenches of World War I in France. English soldiers keep watch over the parapets for any signs of a German attack, though as the audience is introduced to the story all is fairly quiet. Here, Eric Trent has supposedly been reincarnated as an English officer. In the dugout, he pulls an ancient sword from the wall and wonders ‘what queer old chap’ once carried it into battle. Moments later, the armored apparition of Joan of Arc appears behind him to inform him that the time has come to expiate his sins against her. After Joan’s story is told, Trent goes on a suicide mission to destroy a German trench. His mission is a success, and as he lays dying Joan once more appears and all is seemingly forgiven.

While the film was met with generally positive reviews, it was a box office disappointment. DeMille had a $300,000 budget, partially as a result of the success of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith’s film, which was an expensive but epic story, grossed at least $20 million. The Birth of a Nation emboldened fledgling studios to invest great amounts of capital into large film productions; audiences were willing to sit through multi-hour historical epics. Joan, bringing in only $600,000, was an unexpected failure. (…)

The film seemingly appealed to mostly those of the upper or middle classes. It is these people who were likely well-versed in Joan’s history, though perhaps more in folklore than the actual historical record detailing Joan’s deeds. Despite the medieval documentation we have detailing Joan’s post-Domremy life and her death, DeMille and screenwriter Jeannie MacPherson consulted only the Encyclopedia Britannica and biographies of Charles VII and Louis XI, as attested in the screenplay’s margins. The main source that served as inspiration for Joan the Woman was Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play Maid of Orleans, in which Joan of Arc refrains from killing an English soldier when she falls in love with him. DeMille and MacPherson took Schiller’s soldier as inspiration for their character Eric Trent. (…)  By the time the film was released in the United States, the war had been raging for two years, leaving many millions dead. Releasing a film about the English occupation of France at a time when French and English men were fighting side-by-side was not feasible for the politics of wartime. By inspiring Trent to destroy the German trench, DeMille’s Joan demonstrates that old grievances are dead in the face of a new enemy.”
Patrick Duff
Medieval Hollywood

Commissioned by the United States Department of the Treasury, Haskell Coffin created this poster in 1918. Feeding off the popularization of Joan of Arc in American culture, Haskell uses the imagine of Joan of Arc to encourage women to buy War Savings Stamps in order to save their country, much as Joan of Arc saved France. (Nicole Powell: Joan of Arc Saved France, 2014)

 

Timeline of Historical Film Colors: Joan the Woman
Developed and curated by Prof. Barbara Flueckiger

Further reading:
Anthony L’Abbate (George Eastman Museum): Joan the Woman (1916), Restored

 

>>>  Georges Méliès: Jeanne d’Arc on this site

Comment les pauvres mangent à Paris
R: Unknown. D: Unknown. P: Pathé Frères. Fr 1910
Print: British Film Institute
German titles
Piano: Günter A. Buchwald

“Charitable organisations and dedicated journalists decried the misery of the slums in industrial cities. ‘Slumming’ was the term used to describe tourist outings or philanthropic day-trips to witness the poverty. Those who eschewed direct confrontation could visit magic lantern shows or the cinema: the photographic and film industries provided a constant supply of new material covering diverse issues of the ‘Social Question’. (…) Comment les pauvres mangent à Paris / How the Poor Dine in Paris (FR 1910) (…) is the first film reportage about the ‘clochards’ of Paris: it is difficult to distinguish the extras acting in the film from the real homeless people.”
Martin Loiperdinger / Ludwig Vogl-Bienek
The Bioscope

“These kinds of films were predecessors of documentary films proper and were, at that time, labelled as ‘actuality films’ (or, as the Lumière Brothers called them, les actualités). However, the argument that can be made for pre-cinematic magic lantern slum shows, can also be made for such early cinematic slum actualités because, as Gunning has emphasised, in this early period ‘actuality films constituted the main product of the cinema rather than fiction filmmaking, and the motion picture camera itself remained the focus of attention.'”
Igor Krstic: Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums. Edinburgh University Press 2016, p. 62

>>> SOCIAL DRAMA

>>> EARLY DOCUMENTARY FILMS II (Urban Life)

Giant Trees of California
R: unknown. P: Thomas A. Edison Inc. USA 1912
Original Print: 22mm for Edison Home Kinetoscope projector

“In December of 2014, The MediaPreserve was tasked with the digital preservation of an unusual film. The California Audiovisual Preservation Project, a coordinated program which aims to preserve the rich heritage of that state through archival digitization of film, video and audio materials, sent us a film in the rare 22mm Edison Home Kinetoscope format. The film, titled Giant Trees of California, comes from the collection of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library.

The Edison Home Kinetoscope (EHK) was a film projector introduced by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. in 1912 to the home and educational markets. The 35mm film used in commercial movie theaters in the first half of the twentieth century was made of highly-f lammable cellulose nitrate but like other home cinema systems of the time, EHK films were produced on a non-f lammable acetate base. Unlike competing systems (…), EHK films consisted of three rows of images on a single strip of film. This configuration was an attempt to squeeze more images onto the film which functionally maximized running time while economizing on film stock and space. Indeed, the shipping canister for Giant Trees of California is a miniscule 1.5 inches high with a diameter of 2.75 inches. The 22mm name by which this format is known describes the entire width of the film and all of its three rows of images. Each frame is less than 4mm by 6mm making it the smallest film gauge to ever find mainstream use.  (…)”
Diana Little: Digitizing Giant Trees of California, a  22mm Edison Home Kinetoscope Film
LBS/Archival Products

>>> EARLY DOCUMENTARY FILMS II (Nature / Science)