The Furniture: Taking Joan of Arc Out of Time

Our Production Design series by the brilliant Daniel Walber is finally back for another season. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail. - Editor

by Daniel Walber

Why make a new movie about Joan of Arc? What hasn’t been said? The first film about her was made in 1898 and there have been dozens since. Some of them are regarded among the best films ever made. Why bother?

A few years ago, Bruno Dumont chose to answer these questions with a heavy metal musical. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) is thrillingly strange, anointing the dunes of Dumont’s beloved Pas-de-Calais with dancing nuns and sung revelation. The music lends an unearthly gravitas to Joan’s visions, similar to how Breaking the Waves (the opera) presents Bess’s faith in a very different light than Breaking the Waves (the movie). I’d have written about it, but there’s no furniture to speak of - the entire film takes place outdoors.

Not so with the 2019 sequel...

 Joan of Arc cuts out (most of) the diegetic singing and heads indoors, following Joan first onto the battlefield and then through her trial and execution. Yet Dumont maintains the atmosphere of Jeannette, keeping Joan away from both her historical reality and her prior cinematic touchstones.

A lot of this depends upon the casting of Lise Leplat Prudhomme, who played the younger version of Joan in Jeannette. At only 10 years old, she’s nearly a decade younger than the real Joan at the time of her trial - and nearly two decades younger than both Falconetti and Ingrid Bergman were. Dumont has explained how this liberates his film from reality: “The freedom of interpretation is therefore infinite, just like the style, because what is at stake is timeless, and accuracy is no match for that.”

The same goes for the filming locations. The real Joan was tried in Rouen Castle, which was dismantled in 1591. Carl Theodor Dreyer rebuilt the medieval city of Rouen from scratch for The Passion of Joan of Arc, though his producers would be horrified to see that he barely used this record-breakingly expensive set in the finished film. Dumont moves the action to Amiens Cathedral, only about 120km away.

Now, Amiens Cathedral was largely finished by 1288, so it did exist at the time of Joan’s 1431 trial. It’s also a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, both inside and out. Look at those marble floors! What’s interesting, though, is where Dumont goes within the Cathedral. Most of the trial takes place in the choir, with its 16th century sculpted wooden stalls and its enormous baroque altarpiece. These monumental pieces dominate the trial scenes, yet they were built many years later.

Should we bother noticing the differences between 15th, 16th and 17th century church decor? Maybe! Maybe not. But things do get a little clearer when the film returns to the Pas-de-Calais. To stand in as a French torturer’s shop and the English jail where Joan was held, Dumont repurposes some of the Nazi-built bunkers that still dot the French coast.

It’s a lot more obviously anachronistic. Sure, by this point in the film the audience has encountered plenty of bizarre spectacles, including horse dancing. But it’s still striking to see the young Joan held under 20th century concrete, an occupying army of the past repurposing the fortifications of the future.

So is that what it’s about? Is Dumont taking Joan outside of time only to place her more thoroughly in France? Charles Péguy, whose plays were the basis for these films, was a noted nationalist. And Amiens Cathedral is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, chosen by the French government in 1981 to represent their cultural contribution to humanity. Does Joan of Arc critique French “high culture,” a culture lauded by those right-wing French nationalists that Dumont has been spoofing in his Quinquin films? And what of the bunkers?

Péguy, for his part, could have felt either way about them. Since his death in 1914, experts have debated whether to consider him proto-Fascist or proto-Antifascist. Moreover, for him, Joan’s mission was as much Catholic as it was French. In the play, Joan laments that “the greatest physician in the world has passed by, and nothing has changed” -  she, too, would try to change everything. Yet her mission remained painfully incomplete at her death.

To be honest, though, I think these nationalist and Catholic aspects are secondary to Dumont’s Joan. Both Amiens Cathedral and the surviving German bunkers now mostly function as tourist attractions. The urgency of acknowledging the injustice of Joan’s execution has fallen away. She was finally canonized in 1920. When Dreyer made The Passion of Joan of Arc, that was fresh in people’s minds. Now it’s been a century.

So what’s left? Perhaps mysticism. What remains fascinating is the unknowable. Did Joan really hear voices? Who were they? How do we understand her? The bizarreness of the music, of the casting of a child, of the anachronistic locations - all of this adds up to the atmosphere of a spiritual mystery, an intentionally surreal spark for contemplation. And that, it seems to me, is an excellent reason to revisit the story of Joan of Arc in the 21st century.

previously on The Furniture

Comments

[NATHANIEL R]

I've missed this series so much! glad to have you back.

[Steve G]

Yes, my favourite regular series on this site. Welcome back Daniel! Your pieces are fascinating, even when you write about films I've not seen (or even much want to see!), like this one.

Can't wait for future instalments.

[Joel]

Great text Daniel, many thanks! I use to love this series, great to know that The Furniture is back!!!