Les larmes cinématographiques de Jeanne d’Arc

When we think of Joan of Arc in the movies, we picture Renée Falconetti’s face as framed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc: Tear-soaked eyes gazing skyward, a face the size of a movie screen. The weeping face becomes the film’s supreme emblem, triggering the saint’s transcendence, until the face covered in tears strips itself of its particularities to achieve Passion. Focusing on the same theme, Robert Bresson’s Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962) shows us a body stripping itself of its matter to be free from the shackles of corrupt humans. In 1957, with his film Saint Joan, Otto Preminger extracts the soul from the body to represent Jeanne’s never-before-seen background. The filmmaker makes Jeanne appear as a ghost to implement a certain inventiveness in elaborating her image. Jean-Louis Leutrat demonstrates that a form of fantasy is born “between cinema, appearing-disappearing, melancholy, a certain luminous unreality and tears”. In the light of this idea, Jeanne would be a reincarnation of her own tears. Through these three films, and based on the idea of a certain dynamic of tear in terms of Poetic representations, we notice a complementary evolution that helps the regeneration of Joan of Arc as a Saint.