Georges Méliès – Jeanne d’Arc AKA Joan of Arc (1900)
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A divinely inspired peasant woman becomes an army captain for France and then is martyred after she is captured.
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The film was made in the spring of 1900. 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. 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. The artist Charles Claudel, who also repainted the interior of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1901 following Méliès’s designs, was the set painter for the film. The cameraman was Leclerc, who also worked for Méliès as the pianist at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.
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. (Joan of Arc was beatified by the Church in 1909 and canonized in 1920.)
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.
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.
Georges Melies - 1900 - [Star Film 264-275] Joan of Arc.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 10 min 18 s
Size: 240 MiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 702x576 ~> 768x576
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 2 677 kb/s
BPP: 0.265
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
#2: French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Original French narration text by Georges Méliès)
#3: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Original English narration text by Georges Méliès)
Language(s):English, French (narration tracks)
Subtitles:None
