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THE CRITICS on the border between north and south. If they took that city, they could cross the Loire and invade the rest of France. That was the situation which Joan’s voices eventually addressed. They told this illiterate peasant girl, who had never been more than a few miles from her village, to go to Orléans, raise the siege, and then take the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned King Charles VII of France. In other words, they told her to end the Hundred Years’ War. A CRITIC AT LARGE She did so. Or, by inspiriting the 6 French soldiers at Orléans, she provided the turning point in the war. How Joan BURNED AGAIN managed to get to Charles, and persuade him to arm her, and then convince the The woman at the stake is worthy of another five hundred years of obsession. Valois captains that she should join the BY JOAN ACOCELLA charge at Orléans is still something of a mystery, but at that point the French forces were so beaten down that they OAN OF ARC movies, understand- man finishes, he does up his fly and says were almost willing to believe that a vir- ably, have always been low on to his mates, “Your turn.” Thus begins gin had been sent by God to deliver them. J sex, but in the newest entry, “The the career of Besson’s Joan of Arc. In And once Orléans was saved, under her Messenger: The Story of Joan of past ages, Joan has been seen as a mys- banner, many of the French came to see Arc,” by Luc Besson, the French action- tic, a saint, a national hero. Now, in her as an angel, an actual heavenly messen- movie director, that omission is ad- keeping with the times, she is a victim ger. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Burgundians dressed. Early in the film we have the of post-traumatic stress disorder. regarded her as a witch. (See Shake- following scene: Little Joan, maybe ten speare’s “Henry VI, Part 1,” where she is years old, comes out of church to find OAN, as she testified at her trial, was a witch.) She was a subject of interna- that her village is on fire. We are in the J thirteen when she was first visited tional debate, but not for long. Seven- middle of the Hundred Years’ War, and by voices from Heaven. It was summer- teen when she set out for Orléans, she English soldiers are rampaging through time, around noon, in her father’s garden. was eighteen when the Burgundians fi- Domrémy. Joan enters her house, and At first, it seems, the voices just told her nally captured her and sold her to the there she finds her older sister Cather- to be a good girl and go to church, but English for ten thousand pounds. The ine. (She has just told her confessor how eventually their instructions became more Church then put her through a four- much she loves this sister.) Catherine pointed. The Hundred Years’ War was a month heresy trial—basically a fake had been about to climb into a cup- dynastic conflict over whether the Plan- trial. (Her chief examiners were firmly board to hide from the English, but tagenets (English) or the Valois (French) in league with the English, who de- now she stuffs Joan in the cupboard were the rightful rulers of France. The manded her death.) She was nineteen instead, closes the door, and stands English invaded France, and by the when she was taken out, barefoot, to the in front of it. In come three English fourteen-twenties they had divided the marketplace in Rouen and burned alive. goons. Two of them sit down to eat the country in half. Most of the lands below All that happened in the fifteenth family’s dinner. The third—leering, the Loire were held by the Valois, under century, and it gave Joan a privileged filthy, appalling—approaches Catherine, Charles, the uncrowned, uncertain, un- place in the high and low culture of Eu- pins her against the cupboard (we get a warlike Dauphin. The lands above the rope ever after. For years following her shot of her feet dangling above the Loire were controlled by the English, in death, people claimed that she was still floor), and impales her on his sword, alliance with the Burgundian dynasty. alive, that someone else had been burned which, now wet with her blood, pierces Joan’s village was in the north, in Anglo- in her place. (There were Joan sightings, the cupboard as well, barely missing Burgundian territory.There is no evidence like Elvis sightings. There were also Joan. He then loudly copulates with that she had an older sister Catherine, Joan impersonators.) Paintings, plays, Catherine’s dead body—bang, bang, let alone that she witnessed the murder epic poems were devoted to her. But it bang, against the cupboard—as Joan, of such a sister, but she certainly saw was not until the nineteenth century together with the camera, watches his her village suffer, as all of France suf- that she really came into her own. As contorted face through cracks in the fered. (In the war’s hundred years, the George Bernard Shaw pointed out in the cupboard door. The two other soldiers, country’s population was halved.) In preface to his play “Saint Joan,” she was put off their feed, also watch. When the 1428, the English laid siege to Orléans, born before her time. She was, he said, MULTIMEDIA FACETS COURTESY PHOTOFEST; KIPA; LEFT TO RIGHT: Milla Jovovich as Joan, photographed by Brigitte Lacombe. Bottom, left to right: Renée Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc,” Geraldine Farrar in Cecil B. De Mille’s epic, and Sandrine Bonnaire in Jacques Rivette’s “Joan the Maid.”

100 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 15, 1999 one of the first Protestant martyrs: it sensitive politically, had been carefully they wish to or not; and if they will not was her claim that she had a direct, un- recorded by court notaries. Likewise the obey, I shall have them all killed. I am sent from God, the King of Heaven, to chase mediated connection with God—and proceedings of the so-called nullifica- you all out of France. that she, not the Church, would judge tion trial, by which, after the testimony the truth of her voices—that got her of more than a hundred witnesses, the She was the same way at the trial. condemned as a heretic. Furthermore, Church revoked the verdict against Again and again, her judges tried to trip in her insistence that race and national her twenty-five years after her death. her up, lead her into heretical state- boundaries overrode dynastic inheri- Most of these documents were sitting ments. Again and again, she answered tance, she was one of Europe’s first na- in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Qui- them boldly, commonsensically, even tionalists. (By medieval standards, the cherat called them up from the stacks, wittily. As the transcripts prove, she did English monarchy’s claim to France was edited them, and published them in five not embrace sainthood. Unlike Francis arguably quite legitimate.) volumes (1841-49), whereupon a great of Assisi, for example, she never en- But it wasn’t just nationalist senti- change came over the Joan legend. Be- gaged in soul-struck behavior—never ment that endeared Joan to the nine- fore, she had been a heroine, an icon. ran naked or threw herself on thorn- teenth century. Her story had everything Now she became a nineteen-year-old bushes. When the old Duke Charles II, that century liked. First, medievalism, girl. The trial testimony tells us a huge fallen ill, summoned her and asked and medieval spirituality: the voice of amount about her: her childhood games, whether he would recover, she told him God, arriving to a child in her father’s her love of fine clothes, how impressed she had no idea and then gave him a potato fields. Second, primitivism: the she was by Charles’s court. (There were lecture on his personal conduct. (He fact that she was a child, and a peasant, more than fifty torches in the room, she had fathered five bastards.) Nor did she and so, by nineteenth-century lights, reported.) As a result of Quicherat’s have any interest in becoming a martyr. morally superior to the educated, the work, we know more about this French The most poignant thing about the trial mature, the ordained. Third, sentimen- farm girl than about any human be- transcripts is how hard she tried to save tality: if, as Poe said, there was nothing ing before her time, including—as we herself—how, facing, with no help (she more poetical than the death of a beau- find out in Régine Pernoud and Marie had no lawyer), thirty-odd theologians tiful woman, then, as Dickens and Har- Véronique Clin’s book “Joan of Arc”— and legal scholars maybe twice her age, riet Beecher Stowe proved, the death of Plato, Caesar, and Christ. The tran- she fought, reasoned, and bargained— a beautiful girl was even better. scripts also show her to have been an and how afraid she was of dying. At Joan was thus designed by God for immensely appealing person. Some- one point she tells the judges that her nineteenth-century artists, and they times, in reading the history books, one heavenly guides have promised to save heard the call. Verdi and Tchaikovsky wonders how Joan got soldiers to follow her, but that she doesn’t know whether devoted operas to her; Gounod a music her. She was, after all, a peasant, not to they intend to do this on earth or in the drama, in which Sarah Bernhardt later mention a girl. Furthermore, she did afterlife—a distinction that is important starred. The century also saw more than not allow her men to swear, to gamble, to her: eighty new plays about Joan, the most or to have women. Worse, she forbade St. Catherine told me that I would have influential being Schiller’s 1801 “Maid pillage, which for many of her soldiers help; and I do not know if this will be deliv- of Orleans,” fired with the revolutionary was the chief source of pay. But when erance from prison or deliverance when I zeal of the period and, in the give- you read the trial testimony you under- face judgment. . . . My voices say, “Take them-everything-they-want spirit of stand why these men wanted her as everything serenely, do not shrink from your martyrdom; from that you will come early Romanticism, adding a star- their captain. You would have, too, she finally to the kingdom of paradise.” And my crossed love between Joan and an En- was so wonderful—fiery, frank, and voices say that simply and absolutely, with- glish soldier. There were novels, too— blithe. Here is an excerpt from a letter out fail. I call this a martyrdom because of the pain and hardship that I suffer in my both Dumas père and Dumas fils had a she sent to the English king as she pre- imprisonment. I do not know if I will have go at the story—and essays and books pared to take off for Orléans: to suffer worse. by De Quincey, Lamartine, Jules Mi- I am the commander of the armies, and chelet, Anatole France. In his monu- in whatever place I shall meet your French She is thinking that maybe, by “martyr- mental “History of France,” Michelet allies, I shall make them leave it, whether dom,” the voices just mean imprison- wrote, “Let us remember always, O ment. This is the most painful moment Frenchmen, that our Fatherland was in the trial. born in the heart of a woman, from her Another thing that the transcripts tenderness and her tears, from her blood revealed was that, like Galileo, Joan re- which she shed for us.” She was the canted. Worn down by the long trial, mother of her country, the George Wash- she finally signed a statement abjuring ington of France. her mission from God and agreeing to change into women’s clothes. (She HE man who burned Joan’s image had worn short hair and men’s clothing T into the modern mind, however, throughout her military career.) Then, was not one of those famous writers but four days later, she withdrew her recan- a scholar named Jules Quicherat. The tation. There are many competing expla- proceedings of Joan’s heresy trial, so nations for her change of mind. I favor the A CRITIC AT LARGE 101 one put forth by the Joan scholar Ma- rina Warner: “She found she could not bear the nonsense that such a denial made of her past.” Still, she does not seem to have fully understood what was in store. When, two days after her “relapse,” they came to prepare her for burning, she wept and tore her hair. She died ter- rified, screaming to Jesus to help her.

OR four centuries Joan was treated F as a saint, but she was not a saint. After Quicherat, the movement for canonization began. In 1909, she was beatified; in 1920, she was canonized. And before and after, spurred by the transcripts, the canonization hearings, and wartime nationalism, there was an explosion of Joan art. Mark Twain wrote a book about her; Charles Péguy a series of passionate Christian Socialist poems. Arthur Honegger composed an oratorio, “Joan of Arc at the Stake,” with a text by Paul Claudel. More new plays came out—seventeen in 1909, the year of her beatification, then twenty- nine more in the years between the two world wars—including, if we add post- Second World War offerings, dramas by Maeterlinck, Anouilh, and Maxwell Anderson, together with Shaw’s famous play. Martha Graham made a Joan bal- let. On Broadway in the forties and fifties, according to an old Manhattanite friend of mine, “You couldn’t get Joan of Arc to shut up.” But in our century Joan’s primary medium has been film. By the end of the First World War she had already been the subject of six movies, the most important of which was Cecil B. De Mille’s “Joan the Woman,” the first entry in what would be that direc- tor’s long catalogue of bloated, Bible- quoting spectaculars. Geraldine Farrar, the opera star, neither young nor thin, who plays Joan flings her arms up to Heaven a very great deal. But the ac- tion scenes, in which De Mille is clearly trying to steal the palm from D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” were rev- olutionary for their time. The movie fairly pullulates with people running around in Pied Piper outfits. In the bat- tle scenes at Orléans, De Mille used fourteen hundred men, and he worked them hard, as he did Farrar. According to Agnes de Mille, Cecil’s niece, Farrar spent “whole days in a fosse up to her waist in muddy water, a cowboy guard 102 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 15, 1999

ness of the Cold War period, and nothing in it is smugger than its Joan, Ingrid Bergman. The role was an obvious choice for Berg- man. After “Casablanca,” “Gas- light,” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (in which she played a nun), she was already a saint to much of the American public. Furthermore, she had starred in the Maxwell Anderson play. As a child, she had idolized Joan—together with Jo March, another hair-cropper, Joan has long been an inspiration to serious-minded girls—and she seems to have felt she didn’t actu- ally have to portray this alter ego of hers: she could simply be her. “It wasn’t like acting at all,” she said. And indeed it isn’t like act- ing; she just stalks around in her “Is the rabbit cute?” monobosom armor, looking holy. The film was savaged by the re- • • viewers, and its main effect was to set Bergman up for her fall when, around her dressed in bobbed wigs and shot outside the walls of Carcassonne; the year after its première, she left her fourteenth-century hats, fending off the coronation scene at Rheims; the trial husband and daughter for Roberto broken spears, falling beams and masses at Mont-Saint-Michel. And though Rossellini and, the year after that, bore of struggling extras.” For the closeups Gastyne gives us angels flying in the him an illegitimate child. Posited as a at the stake, they doused Farrar in sky—he likes God as much as France— saint, she now seemed all the more a flame-retardant fluid, stuffed ammonia- his focus is on Joan the soldier, with sinner. She was denounced on the floor soaked cotton up her nostrils, sur- peasants rising up across the land to fol- of the United States Senate. rounded her with oil-filled tanks, and low her into battle. The film is clumsily lit them. made, but it has a rare poetry. When HOSE are the “epic” Joan movies, The movie was a milestone in the Joan, side-lit at her parents’ hearth, sits T but already by 1923 Shaw, in his history of cinematic grandiosity yoked listening to neighbors harried by the “Saint Joan,” had inaugurated another to cinematic realism. It was also a sig- war, and a little cat that she is holding tradition of Joan-staging—the political nificant episode in the history of the crawls out of her arms and runs away, analysis, the discussion of issues. Before political uses of Joan. In the film her we see, with perfect, breathing concrete- Shaw, Joan’s judges were often por- tale is enclosed in a frame-narrative fea- ness, her childhood—actually, her life— trayed as a pack of cruel, cynical func- turing an English soldier who, stalled in slipping away from her. Much of the tionaries. Shaw made them honest men. the trenches of France during the First beauty of the film is owing to its Joan, To quote his preface: “If Joan had not World War, is inspired by Joan’s sacrifice an unknown, big-nosed seventeen-year- been burnt by normally innocent people to go on a suicide mission, thus saving old named Simone Genevois. In the in the energy of their righteousness her the day for his regiment. Released in scene where they prepare her for her death at their hands would have had no 1916, “Joan the Woman” was an un- death she is simply amazing, wiping the more significance than the Tokyo earth- equivocal call for the United States to sweat and tears off her face. quake, which burnt a great many maid- join the fighting in Europe. The medieval scholar Kevin Harty ens.” In his eyes, Joan’s story was a con- In the years that followed, with entre believes that Victor Fleming’s 1948 flict not between good and evil but deux guerres nationalism, the rise of Fas- “Joan of Arc” was another political between good and good—individual cism, then the Second World War and manifesto. In a crucial scene in that good versus public good, as in “Anti- the Cold War, Joan did further political movie, Charles pusillanimously declines gone.” It was not an exemplary tale, duty onscreen. One movie that is almost to take advantage of the victory at Or- from which one could learn how to be never shown is a 1928 silent, “La Mer- léans and go after the rest of France. virtuous, but a tragedy, from which one veilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc,” by Likewise, as many Americans felt at the could learn only what it meant to be Marco de Gastyne, a now forgotten time, the United States was foolishly re- human. Parisian filmmaker of the twenties and fusing to capitalize on its Second World After Shaw’s death, Otto Preminger thirties. The text is almost hysterically War victory and go after the Soviet secured the rights to the play, and the nationalist. The photography, too, glori- Union. Whatever the specific politics of resulting movie was one of the oddest fies the patrie. The battle scenes were the film, it has all the smug righteous- things ever to come out of Hollywood. A CRITIC AT LARGE 103

To start with, it was two movies: an En- presumably suffer big. To aid in that glish one, with people like John Giel- process, he telescoped the action into gud playing the politicians—Europe- one day, from trial to burning. Most of ans knew what necessity was—and an the film is just the trial, a back-and- American movie, with Americans, who forth between the examiners, asking presumably knew what personality was, their questions—we see them in closeup: supplying the stars. The second oddity their nasty smiles, their sweaty bangs— was the stars. For Charles, Preminger and Joan, also in tight closeup, giving chose Richard Widmark, who por- her replies. Typically, Falconetti pauses trayed the Dauphin as a species of neu- for a long time before answering, and rological patient (he twitches, he limps) weeps, and rolls her eyes to Heaven. and also, if I’m not mistaken, as the There are a number of distasteful ac- fifties’ notion of a homosexual (he snig- counts of how Dreyer managed to ex- gers, he pouts). The casting of Joan was tract from Falconetti this tortured per- made into a contest. Eighteen thousand formance. Jean Hugo, who served as applications were received (including one of the film’s art directors, reported one from the teen-age Barbra Strei- that every morning, when Falconetti sand). Preminger chose a seventeen- arrived on the set, Dreyer managed to year-old unknown, Jean Seberg, from bawl her out for something or other. Marshalltown, Iowa, to whom—in the Once he had reduced her to weeping, effort, he said, to keep her unspoiled— he would turn on the cameras. he gave no training and little direction. The film scholar Robin Blaetz retells Seberg played it pert and baby-talking. this story in support of her claim that You turn your eyes away. the history of Joan movies is largely a Preminger’s “Saint Joan” was pre- chronicle of misogyny: “Joan of Arc’s ceded by one of the most aggressive chief attraction may lie in the chance to publicity campaigns in Hollywood his- pornographically depict the death of tory. Once Seberg had been chosen, the this potent female with chains, ropes, press was invited to her every act of and lascivious camera work.” Dreyer’s preparation—the fitting of her armor, film is regarded as one of the world’s the cutting of her hair—and to the great movies—“Falconetti’s Joan may be shooting. Article after article came out, the finest performance ever recorded on drumming up excitement, and then, film,” Pauline Kael has written—but I when the movie was released, in 1957, think Blaetz has a point. The handling the critics walked in and trashed it, sin- of Falconetti is finally oppressive; you gling out Seberg’s performance for spe- feel beaten up by it. (I should add that cial contempt. Soon afterward, Prem- a fresh print was recently discovered— inger sold her contract to Columbia. appropriately, in the broom closet of a This early history does not go unmen- Norwegian mental hospital. Dreyer’s tioned in accounts of how, in 1979, at original negative was destroyed by fire, age forty, Seberg was found wrapped in so he assembled a second version of the a blanket and nothing else, “dead for movie from outtakes. The second nega- several days” (the Times obituary) from tive was lost in another fire. Reportedly, a barbiturate overdose, in the back of what we’ve been watching all these her Renault on a street in Paris. years are damaged copies of that sec- ond version, full of fuzz and specks and BVIOUSLY, the major job for the blur that I, for one, took to be part of O Joan chroniclers, on stage or film, the movie’s pain. The original, now on was to decide what the story was, what video, from Home Vision, is clean as was important about it. Shaw had made a whistle.) a bold choice: Joan’s life was about the I’m not the only one who sagged great world, about politics. Five years under the weight of Dreyer’s Joan. So later, the Danish film director Carl did Robert Bresson, whose 1962 “Trial Dreyer, in his “Passion of Joan of Arc,” of Joan of Arc” is a sort of anti-Dreyer. made the opposite choice: Joan’s life was Bresson follows roughly the same cur- about the inner world, about suffering. tailed script—just the trial and the For his star he hired Renée Falconetti, a burning—but whereas Dreyer’s Joan, former member of the Comédie Fran- before replying to her judges’ questions, çaise. A stage actress—“Joan” was the paused so lengthily for those Murillo- only film she ever made—she could martyr closeups, Bresson’s Joan, Flo- 104 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 15, 1999

rence Carrez, barely takes a breath be- young, human—she cries when she’s fore answering. Then she lowers her wounded—but there is a kind of magic eyes, lest we sully her with our pity. The circle drawn around her. In my favorite trial is not a drama. It is a kind of cate- scene, she asks her confessor to teach chism, something recited rather than her to write her name. She has letters to enacted. Tellingly, the most poignant send; she wants to sign them properly. shot in the movie is not of Carrez’s face We see the two figures framed in light but of her little feet, rushing awkwardly, at a window: the big, sweet, football- as if she were being prodded from be- player-resembling monk and the skinny hind, along a muddy path from the girl. She has all her dignity—she does prison to the pyre. Overhead, a flock of not apologize for being illiterate. Still, pigeons takes off into a fathomless sky. we feel her exposure, her weakness. (She Bresson is often described as a Jansenist; is a peasant; they will burn her.) Slowly this film supports that view. In a way, it the monk guides her hand. Laboriously is the holiest of all Joan movies—cold, she forms the letters: JEHANNE. Rivette’s fast (sixty-five minutes), and humbling. movie is realistic, without Dreyer’s cry Both Dreyer and Bresson may have party; it is abstemious, without Bresson’s been responding to the role that Joan coldness. Accordingly, it does better has occupied in French politics. Social- than any of its predecessors in portray- ists have claimed her; Communists, too. ing Joan’s tragic period, which began But for more than a hundred years, ever long before her trial. After the corona- since France’s humiliating defeat in the tion, Charles basically abandoned her Franco-Prussian War, it has been the (he had got what he wanted), and she right, above all, that has pinned her to was forced to go freelance. In the movie its banner. Sprung from the soil, scourge we see her, with maybe forty men, be- of foreign invaders, Joan became a fig- fore the sky-high walls of Paris. “Give urehead for that late-nineteenth-century the city to the King of France!” she yells Volk-worship which led directly to Fas- to the Anglo-Burgundians on the bat- cism: the Vichy government put her tlements. “Fry in hell!” they yell back. on their posters. Today she is doing A few minutes later in the film, she is similar duty for the National Front’s captured. campaign against immigrant workers. Now, five years after Rivette, we have Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the Na- the Besson movie. Could it, too, have tional Front, calls her his “little sister.” been a reaction to the right’s idea of Some of that history may be lurking Joan? Maybe so. By giving her the re- behind Dreyer’s and Bresson’s discard- venge motive (Catherine’s murder), ing of Joan’s military career—a radical Besson strips her of her holy mission. step, for she was a soldier At the end of the movie, after above all—and dealing only a bit of recovered-memory with her last days. However therapy with what seems to else the two films differ, both be her inner psychiatrist— refuse to give us the right’s an actual character, indeed Joan Triumphans; they give Dustin Hoffman, who ap- us Joan the girl, in big trou- pears and disappears like Tin- ble. And I think that in this sense they kerbell, saying things like “So the mem- served as sources for Jacques Rivette’s ory’s returning?”—she admits that she 1994 “Joan the Maid.” Probably because fought for vengeance, and that God of its length—four hours, in the short- didn’t necessarily call her. The film also est version—Rivette’s film has had weeps a lot over the horrors of war, as very limited distribution in the United the right is not wont to do. On the States, but Facets has just brought it out other hand, Besson dishes out those on videotape. Go get it. It’s the best horrors with a rare enthusiasm. We get Joan movie ever made. Rivette restores a severed hand, a severed foot, a decap- the “epic”—the battles are back—while itation. A dog dines at length on a dead at the same time keeping a tight fo- man’s belly. And, to make it more vivid, cus on the girl. His Joan is Sandrine all this has a curiously sexual tinge. Bonnaire, who brings to the movie When blood flows down Joan’s face all the self-containment, not to speak at Orléans, it doesn’t look like blood. of the cheekbones, that she showed It’s pink and thick and shiny, as is the in Agnès Varda’s “Vagabond.” She is Communion wine that, soon after 106 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 15, 1999

Catherine’s murder, Joan pours down the deconstructionists. (In a recent essay her face, meanwhile crying to Jesus, “I Steven Weiskopf, of Indiana Univer- want to be one with you now!” What sity, finds that Joan fits a “paradigm of Besson seems to be saying is that, as a abyssal indeterminacy.”) Meanwhile, the result of Catherine’s misadventure, sex devout have not deserted the field. got linked with violence in Joan’s mind. Throughout the Christian world, Joan But maybe I’m giving him too much is venerated in churches and schools— credit. Maybe those two things are just on the Internet, too. Virginia Frohlick, linked in his mind, as in the minds of founder of the Saint Joan of Arc Cen- most action-movie directors. His work ter, in Albuquerque, has a Web site has an extra twist, though—something where she tells us about her relation- about women blowing people away, ship with Joan, her “very best friend.” and having nervous breakdowns in On another Web site, you can see a pic- the process, because they don’t actually ture of Joan’s banner, hear the hymn want to do these bad things. (See his sung by the priests in her army, and, “La Femme Nikita.”) Joan was just should you be one of those who think adapted to the scenario. The actress- that Joan was a transvestite, a lesbian, a model Milla Jovovich, Besson’s ex-wife, feminist, a Protestant, or a Wiccan, get plays Joan with bug-eyed frenzy. “She’s a talking-to from the St. Joan of Arc nuts,” one of her comrades-at-arms Anti-Defamation League. There’s a says. Amen. Clash of Arms “war game” devoted to None of this, however, will do Joan’s Joan; there’s a rock group named after reputation any harm. Her cult is big her. Three more movies are reportedly enough to absorb it. There is now a in the works. Madonna and Sinead whole discipline of “Johannic stud- O’Connor have both said they’d like ies,” together with a subdiscipline of to play the Maid. We haven’t yet seen “Johannic-reception studies”—the his- the end of the Johannic reception or, tory of representations of her. The post- I’ll bet, the worst of it, but some- modern folk are on her trail: the women’s- how Joan always slips through the net, studies people, the queer-studies people, small and wiry, brave and glad.