Five
The Historical Epic and Progressive Era Civic Pageantry: Joan the Woman

A Usable Past: Civic Pageants as Historical Representation

DeMille began work on his first historical epic, a production about Joan of Arc starring Geraldine Farrar, before a successful negotiation for the Lasky Company's merger with Famous Players was announced in July 1916. Several weeks prior to shooting, the director was consumed with historical research, scriptwriting problems, casting decisions, costume designs, and construction of elaborate interior and exterior sets.^[1] A two-color process, advertised on souvenir programs as the "Wyckoff Process" (also known as the Max Handschiegl process), was developed for use in specific sequences in addition to standard color tinting.^[2] For musical accompaniment, DeMille hired David Belasco's composer, William Furst, to write an orchestral score that would be synchronized with various projection speeds.^[3] When the director's name was omitted from ads run in Theatre, Vogue , and Motion Picture Mail , Arthur S. Friend, sensitive to the authorship issues involved, mollifed him with an apologetic letter. Friend wrote reassuringly, "We . . . will make the exploitation of your first big picture the most lavish and impressed exploitation ever given to anything offered to the theatres in this country."^[4] Accordingly, exhibitors replicated museums in the lobbies of first-run theaters by displaying suits of armor, historical costumes, colorful banners, and murals framed by drapery embroidered with fleur-de-lys.^[5] DeMille even furnished his own office in Gothic style and filled it with mementoes from the production. So that he could supervise details of the film's exhibition, the director traveled to New York, where Joan the Woman was premiered at the Forty-fourth Street Theatre on Christmas Eve, 1916.

23. De Mille and his leading lady, Geraldine Farrar, pose with 
a statue of Joan of Arc to publicize Joan the Woman (1916).

Although widely acclaimed, DeMille's first historical epic, a genre that became his trademark in later decades, did not attract large crowds to the box office. When the filmmaker returned to Los Angeles, Jesse L. Lasky wrote:

The advertising has been . . . increased until I do not think any production has received quite the newspaper boosting that "Joan" has received. . . . The receipts have been a bit discouraging. . . . It has really puzzled us all—I mean the fact that everyone is talking about the picture and praising it in the highest terms and yet business is nothing like it should be.^[6]

Admittedly, the film's length, 10,446 feet—or thirteen reels totalling more than two hours—was excessive; indeed, theater owners complained that they could not schedule the customary two matinees and two evening shows per day. B. Barnett, a states rights exhibitor, wrote to Lasky in May 1917:

We own the rights for Ohio and Michigan of . . . 'Joan.' We found after having shown same at the principal cities of Ohio, viz, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Youngstown, etc., meeting with absolutely no financial success but on the contrary with losses, after having given it the presentation that your organization would have been proud of. . . . I would suggest that this picture be cut down.^[7]

A pragmatist, DeMille agreed that states rights buyers be allowed to cut the film to eight reels, a considerable reduction, but he insisted on retaining the prologue and epilogue relating the narrative to trench warfare then occurring in France.^[8] Undoubtedly, many exhibitors advertised and retained scenes of historical spectacle, such as the siege of Orléans and the coronation of Charles VII, and cranked up the projection speed for the rest of the film.

Apart from the excessive screening time required by a special feature, the film's title, Joan the Woman , proved to be a drawback in exploitation strategies. The director recalled, "Jeanie Macpherson wanted me to use that title and I did. I listened to her arguments and was convinced . . . but it was a mistake, because people did not know that it was Joan of Arc."^[9] An auteur whose name became synonymous with historical spectacle, DeMille failed at the box office with his first epic, an effort that did not accrue profit relative to cost nor the amount of time involved in production.^[10] The director produced only four features in 1916, compared to thirteen in 1915, because he devoted so much energy to his first costume drama. Scrutinizing the balance sheet, Lasky advised his colleague to "get a subject modern in theme" for his next special.^[11] Yet Joan the Woman remains an interesting case study because it demonstrates that feature films articulating genteel middle-class ideology had limitations in appealing across class and ethnic barriers. Such was especially the case in marketing constructions of the past as highbrow culture rather than as a legacy transcending cultural diversity. Since history was a lofty and noble subject that represented an ideological consensus among the elite, their conceptualization was not inclusive enough to provide the basis for a broad sense of community. As a matter of fact, working-class unrest and seemingly unassimilable immigrants were threatening social cohesion at a time when there was controversy about military preparedness. On the eve of war the nation was by no means united in its response to German aggression. DeMille's first epic, bracketed by scenes of trench warfare in France, continued the tradition of civic drama that articulated the historical consciousness of the local elite rather than a shared

sense of national origins. As such, it was antimodernist both in its vision of an urban society rooted in an idealized past and in its representation of history as an inspirational series of tableaux.^[12] Understanding the reasons for the box-office failure of Joan the Woman first requires a consideration of civic pageantry as an intertext that defined public history for the genteel classes but excluded the urban "Other."

Linda Nochlin sums up the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis , held at the height of the pageantry movement before America entered the war, as "a premonition of Cecil B. DeMille in its ambitious crowd-spectacles—choruses and Pioneers, World Adventurers and 'multitudes of men and women, garbed in the native costumes of all nations,' and reminiscent of Longfellow's Hiawatha in its speech.^[13] Although community leaders envisioned pageants as an alternative to the passive consumption of commercialized amusement, historical reenactments undoubtedly influenced filmmakers as intertexts in the production of spectacles. A municipal project sponsored by the cultivated elite, civic drama had histrionic antecedents in upper-middle-class performance rituals that defined the self in relation to others. Amusement that had previously been translated from elegant parlors to ornate theaters now provided the basis for an articulation of history on an immense public stage. As David Glassberg argues, civic pageantry was a continuation, albeit on a monumental scale, of tableaux vivants of historical events reenacted in parlor theatricals and mounted on floats for parades and processions. A movement that attempted to transform recreation into a celebration of local history to instill patriotic, aesthetic, and moral uplift, pageantry was an antimodernist phenomenon in its nostalgic invocation of civic culture as a bulwark against modernization. Although there were some attempts to recognize and include ethnic groups in the festivities, pageants reinforced existing hierarchical relations and projected a conservative view of social change in representations of history as linear progression. A succession of historical episodes as civic drama in effect dramatized the pictorial unfolding of divine revelation as conceptualized by the genteel classes. Despite its conservatism, the pageantry movement was nevertheless related to the New History articulated by Progressive historians, largely sympathetic to urban reform, because both constructions of a usable past emphasized social and economic as well as political issues.^[14] Yet a selective and pragmatic approach to history in terms of its present usefulness had implications not only for an agenda of democratic reform but also for the commodification of the past as a form of commercialized amusement. Ultimately, the consumption of spectacle as visual appropriation rather than Progressive historiography, confined within the halls of academe, provided the basis for a shared sense of national identity and historical consciousness advocated by the proponents of civic theater.

Undoubtedly, the most celebrated historical spectacle of the era was the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis held in 1914. Written by Thomas Brood Stevens and Percy MacKaye, son of theatrical producer Steele MacKaye and a leading exponent of civic theater, the event was publicized in a manner anticipating DeMille's epics. Roger N. Baldwin of the Civic League of Saint Louis described the enormous setting of the production: "The drama will take place in a great natural amphitheater seating 60,000 persons and 7,500 men, women and children [and a chorus of 750 voices] will take part. The stage, thrown across one of the lagoons left from the World's Fair of 1904, will be the largest ever constructed." (The reproduction of a Mayan temple at center stage prefigures DeMille's even more massive set for an 'Aztec spectacle titled The Woman God Forgot [1917].) Charlotte Rumbold, secretary of the city's Public Recreation Committee, described the production committee as "organized into sub-committees on book, music, cast, costumes, properties, dancing, lighting and wiring, stage management, stage setting, and auditorium." Production expenses for this mammoth reenactment of three centuries of local history exceeded $125,000. Demonstrating an outburst of civic pride, an estimated half-million citizens witnessed four separate marathon performances lasting over five hours. The pageant itself consisted of a series of realistic historical episodes, whereas the masque was an allegory regarding the cosmic significance of the rise and fall of civilizations. Glowing with success, Rumbold characterized the spectacular effort as a "democratization of administration of public recreational facilities." Similarly, Baldwin claimed, "groups of citizens who have never known of one another's existence have been brought together." And yet, unassimilable racial groups such as Native Americans and African Americans, as well as labor unions with suspect ideological beliefs, were not invited to participate. Glassberg concludes that the civic event catapulted Saint Louis into the front ranks of the pageantry movement, but that its "forbidding length and 'highbrow' pretentions did little to endear it among the masses to whom it was directed."^[15] A similar conclusion is warranted about the commercial failure of DeMille's first spectacle, Joan the Woman .

Although civic theater was sponsored by the genteel classes as a means of articulating a teleological vision of history, in relation to a conservative definition of community, the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 showed that immigrants and workers could appropriate spectacle for their oxen ideological purposes. Following the lead of Greenwich Village radicals like John Reed, who had acted in one of Percy MacKaye's productions at Harvard, approximately fifteen hundred Italian, Polish, and Jewish silk workers reenacted scenes from an ongoing, protracted, and bitter strike in Paterson, New Jersey. Robert Edmond Jones, later acclaimed for his set design of Eugene O'Neill plays, staged the pageant in Madison Square Garden,

bedecked for the occasion with red banners of the International Workers of the World. John Sloan, who was then a contributor to The Masses , painted a two-hundred-foot-wide backdrop representing the silk factory as a grim construction with smokestacks. Dispensing with boundaries signified by the theater curtains of the proscenium stage, the performers emerged from the back region to redefine the public sphere as they sang the Marseillaise and the Internationale while marching down Fifth Avenue to the Garden. During a reenactment of a May Day parade, they also marched through the audience to eliminate barriers between participants and observers. I.W.W. organizers Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn delivered stirring speeches as part of a program of five episodes representing the events of the strike. Production costs for this unprecedented spectacle amounted to over $7,000 so that a net gain of only $384 for the strikers' relief fund was reported. Granted, the workers eventually lost their cause, but for a few hours on the night of the pageant, the letters I.W.W . flashed in red electric lights to illuminate the public space of the respectable middle class.^[16]

After the United States entered the war, the pageantry movement focused on the necessity to create a national allegiance rather than local pride, but motion pictures soon eclipsed such community efforts.^[17] Distributed a few months before full-scale mobilization began, DeMille's Joan the Woman was prophetic in recasting history in the service of a call to arms. Although the Committee on Public Information established in April 1917 created a mood of intolerance in orchestrating public opinion to support the war, the commercial failure of DeMille's epic demonstrated the need to transcend cultural diversity.^[18] By staging magnificent spectacles whose very costliness reinforced a consumer ethos, the prewar pageantry movement unwittingly paved the way for cinematic representations of history with a national appeal. As self-theatricalization in genteel parlors had earlier signified the commodification of social relations, oversized productions of civic drama emphasized the sheer expense of reproducing the historical past. Spectacle based on the consumption of enormous quantities of matériel proved seductive not only to middle-class spectators accustomed to visual appropriation, but, as the Paterson Strike Pageant demonstrated, to the urban "Other" excluded from public history enacted in the public sphere. Pageant leaders, to be sure, shared the goal of Progressive historians to "write the history of the past anew" in order to meet the requirements of succeeding generations, but rewriting history as pictorial dramaturgy also lent itself to the process of reification in a consumer culture.^[19] The success of both the pageantry movement and the film industry in inventing a usable past, in other words, meant the commodification of historical images as spectacle. Furthermore, the parallel between monumental reproductions of history—frequently impressive battle scenes—and modern global hostilities underscored the extent to which technological war itself had become a form

not only of theater but of obscene consumption involving unprecedented expenditures of men and matériel.

Representations and the Body Politic: Joan the Woman

Although social conventions dictated the nature of women's participation as well as their historical representation in community pageants, their presence nonetheless attested to fissures in republican civic culture. An antimodernist response to the dictates of the machine age, pageantry reinforced Victorian sentimental notions of womanhood in an era when the practice of separate spheres was collapsing due to economic and sociocultural changes. According to Glassberg, "the pageant woman symbolizing the community resembled the idealized female image represented in public statues, murals, and posters of the period but was explicitly tied to images of both maternity and maturity."^[20] American propaganda efforts on behalf of the war, such as Red Cross advertisements, also emphasized public images of women as inspirational maternal figures. Yet Charles Dana Gibson, head of the Division of Pictorial Publicity for the Committee on Public Information, had invented the Gibson girl, an early, if ambiguous, incarnation of the "new woman." Gibson, however, was hardly sympathetic toward the feminist movement.^[21] Contradictions in wartime representations of women are evident in juxtaposing an ad titled "The Greatest Mother in the World," who is cradling an injured soldier, with another ad of a muscular female, clenched fist at her side, declaring "I am Public Opinion." Copywriting on the latter, an advertisement for government bonds, begins with the exclamation, "All men fear me!" A group that worked closely with the Division of Advertising, Gibson's Division thus perpetuated the ambiguous use of female icons as symbolic of motherhood, on the one hand, and as allegorical figures representing tyrannical public opinion or warlike nations, on the other.^[22] Such contradictions also inform Joan the Woman , an epic that is intertextually related to discourse on civic culture as exemplified both in historical pageants and in wartime propaganda.

Although historical pageantry, like world's fair exhibits, excluded specific racial and working-class components in defining a sense of community, on a symbolic level cultural forms represent marginalized groups including women as homologous entities in the social formation. As discourse on the body politic, therefore, Joan the Woman foregrounds the issue of gender with respect to women's emergence in the public sphere and represents the problem of assimilating new immigrants as a threat to the purity of white womanhood. Discontented with the title of the film, which implies romantic melodrama rather than historical epic, DeMille was quite revealing when he recalled, "Joan the Woman may have suggested that she was—that they were

going to see a story where her chastity was violated or something of that sort."^[23] Indeed, a sadistic Catholic prelate, whose characterization raised objections in municipal communities, subjects the Maid of Orléans to sexual threats for persisting in acts of female deviance such as wearing male garments. Such a narrative strategy conflates paranoia regarding women and ethnic minorities in a pluralistic urban culture.

As revealing as DeMille's statement is Macpherson's division of the script into two epochs, the first emphasizing Joan's renunciation of romance, and the second focusing on documented historical events, in order to rationalize the saint's unconventional role. The film thus represents sexual difference not only through a two-part narrative structure but also in terms of two conflicting and intersecting genres. An expressive form associated with the sentimental culture of women, melodrama predominates but remains a problematic mode for realistic reenactments of history. As Christine Gledhill argues, unlike individual actors representing social forces in realist texts, melodramatic figures experience historical events "only as they touch on . . . moral identities and relationships." DeMille's Joan of Arc, for example, achieves military glory, national renown, and spiritual redemption at the cost of romantic fulfillment. Yet rendering the social world in terms of personal dilemmas conflicts with the mode of realism essential to traditional historical film as validated by the critical establishment. According to John L. Fell, "a narrative scheme that plots individual actions so that they relate causally to great, even transcending, events" involves "credibility risks" in "fictional patterns where singular acts have to produce society-restoring consequence. . . . [C] onnections between the two story elements— the macro and micro versions of a writer's cosmos—must be constructed with extreme care."^[24] DeMille was able to resolve the narratological problem of civic pageantry as a macrocosm, albeit at the cost of historical veracity, by constructing historicity in uneasy tension with romantic melodrama.

During the Progressive Era, historical pageants constituted a macrocosm because, despite narration, audiences could neither distinguish between foreground and background nor comprehend the symbolic level of events without a program.^[25] DeMille, however, bridged the gap between macrocosm and microcosm through the use of cinematic language, especially editing and variations in shot angle and scale due to camera placement. Predictably, a high ratio of medium shots predominated in the sentimental melodrama of "Joan the Woman," whereas extreme long shots and panoramic shots conveyed the masculine epic of Joan of Arc. Furthermore, critics noticed that DeMille employed variations in intertitles to register shifts in mood and genre. Specifically, the director used conventional titles—mostly for dialogue—art titles with drawings to communicate the emotional tone of a sequence, and historical titles that simulated hieroglyphs on stone tablets to convey the historicity of reenacted events. Ac-

cording to Wid's , "The titles were very well prepared, there being a number of new ideas incorporated in the decorations. These helped materially in keeping the note of distinction predominantly throughout the film." Similarly, Moving Picture World commented, "There are novelties in the titling. Many of the leaders are of raised letters, simulating brass on a dark background. Others are of the atmospheric sort."^[26] Additionally, Furst's orchestral score was undoubtedly effective in establishing the proper mood for romantic melodrama as opposed to historical epic. DeMille in fact arranged for the composer to travel to various cities to supervise the film's musical accompaniment.^[27] Also noted by critics, the director used his well-known lighting effects with color tinting and a two-color process to foreground specific scenes or sequences. The marketing of special effects in conjunction with woman constructed as spectacle and with historical film requiring advanced technology' to achieve realism was hardly coincidental.^[28] The Handschiegl two-color process in Joan the Woman is especially vivid in the protracted sequence in which the saint is burned to death in the public square. In sum, DeMille employed all the resources at his command as director-general of the Lasky studio to surpass Progressive Era civic pageantry. Yet his first epic failed to attract audiences to the box office, especially in key urban areas, because it appealed to an elitist and orthodox sense of history that excluded the "Other."

Discourse On Femininity: Joan of Arc as a Symbol of Gender Conflict

According to Richard Hofstadter, "American historians in the nineteenth century were in the main a conservative class of men writing for a conservative public." What they wrote "embodied the ideas of the possessing classes about industrial and financial issues, manifested the complacency of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants about social and ethnic issues, and, on constitutional issues, underwrote the requirements of property and of national centralization." Although the professionalization of historiography after 1890 produced a new generation of university-trained historians more sympathetic to social change, the pageantry movement drew on the conservative legacy of the nineteenth century as well as the historicism of the Progressive Era. As custodians of culture, the genteel classes were accustomed to history as orthodoxy based on an ideological consensus, that is, a form of knowledge that inculcated moral and patriotic values in a loyal citizenry.^[29] Given the intertext of American historical literature in the early twentieth century, Joan. the Woman is unmistakably addressed to the educated and privileged middle class. During and after the credits, DeMille precedes the first shot of the film with seven historical intertitles that appear three-dimensional, as if chiselled on stone:

Founded on the Life of Joan of Arc, the Girl Patriot, Who Fought with Men, Was Loved by Men, and Killed by Men—Yet Withal Retained the Heart of a Woman

For seventy years defeat after defeat had followed the French arms, until in the year 1429, France was on the verge of becoming an English province

Charles VII, King of France—deserted by his most powerful nobles—was opposed by his cousin the Duke of Burgundy, whose wealth and soldiers were at England's call

Paris, itself, was in English hands; and Charles, the weakling King, ruled a shabby, debt-ridden little court—unhonored and uncrowned

At this time—when the soul of France was slowly dying—there dwelt in the little village of Domremy, a simple peasant girl, the daughter of Jacques d'Arc

Her name was Joan of Arc, and her life that of the sturdy country maiden as she worked at the hearth or in the pasture

Joan of Arc [a crest appears in upper right hand corner]

DeMille had never before begun a narrative with a succession of intertitles equivalent to voice-over narration in sound films; historical literature that only educated audiences could understand evidently comprised the intertext for such titles. The sentimental tone of the first intertitle which, unlike the rest, is featured in the credits, clearly demarcates the romantic melodrama from the textbook rhetoric of the epic. The mise-en-scène of the first two shots of the film, photographed in low-key lighting, further contrasts the domestic life of the peasant girl confined to the private sphere with the martyrdom of a warrior sacrificed in defense of the public sphere. A telescoping of events for didactic purposes, these two shots juxtapose the beginning and end of the narrative before the plot unfolds. Specifically, Joan is introduced spinning thread in a medium shot which is then contrasted with a full shot of her martyred figure lit by a fleur-de-lys cast against a shadowy wall. As she extends her arms outward and lowers her head, she is obviously the victim of a crucifixion. After a slow fade-out, a historical intertitle informs the audience, "Joan of Arc is not dead. She can never die—and in the war-torn land she loved so well, her spirit fights today." Although there is no mention of either the prologue or epilogue in the script, an art title illustrated with barbed wire links the past with the present, "AN ENGLISH TRENCH SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE."^[30]

DeMille constructs his version of a usable past in the prologue by showing a young British officer (Wallace Reid) discovering an ancient sword embedded in the wall of a trench. After volunteering for a suicide mission, the soldier is pensive. An art title with the single word "MEMORY," evoked by the drawing of a British castle on a horizon of fields intersected by a stream, conveys his nostalgia for the bucolic scene that is home. Spending his last

moments in a darkened trench lit by a single candle, the soldier is seated on his bunk when a brilliant apparition of Joan of Arc appears to his left. She links the events of the past to the present, as well as melodrama to realistic newsreel footage, by stating rather enigmatically, "The time has come for thee to expiate thy sin against me." Stilted utterances repeated by actors in countless sound epics, it should be noted, underscore the advantage of dialogue titles as archaically inflected speech in silent film; in this instance, the intertitles give further evidence of historical address constructed for a highbrow audience. Plunged "INTO THE PAST," the maid of Domrémy meets Eric Trent, an English nobleman in the service of the Duke of Burgundy during the Hundred Years' War. A French counterpart of the art title, "MEMORY," an extreme long shot shows Joan in a pastoral scene as she tends sheep on a brilliant sunlit day in woods where skyscraping trees form graceful arches. Although they are separated by historical time, nationality, and gender, the British officer and the French peasant girl both have ties to a romanticized vision of a rural landscape. Americans have a quarrel with history, as Hofstadter argues, because they are unable to reconcile a yearning for the agrarian past with modernization as progress. The contradictions of antimodernist civic drama rooted in nostalgia are expressed in Joan the Woman in terms of the politics of gender rather than urban class conflict. The peasant maid whose spiritual mission meant a refusal, indeed, a reversal, of traditional gender roles is represented according to a sentimental tradition familiar to genteel audiences. A fan magazine novelization captured Macpherson's concept of the heroine as a woman who foregoes romantic love to become the savior of her country:

And so she grew to womanhood, with the flame that burned in her heart shining in her wide, grave eyes. . . . And those beautiful, sad-seer eyes of hers glanced once into other eyes, bold and beseeching and loverlike, and the brave heart nearly faltered ere she could look away.

Human love was not for her, nor the touch of her child's groping fingers on her breast, nor the homely, humble joys of home.

"I cannot love you," she told her lover quietly; "I shall not wed any man."^[31]

At a time when anxiety regarding the diminution of the Victorian practice of separate spheres for the sexes informed political discourse, Joan the Woman exemplified confusion regarding gender roles. For an untutored peasant maid in a remote village, romantic love proves to be as treacherous as court intrigue. DeMille uses Freudian symbolism to show that Joan of Arc assumes the unconventional role of a warrior only because men are cowardly and unprincipled. A timid French deserter named Gaspard (Lawrence Peyton), for example, seeks shelter in Domrémy and flings his sword on the table. Joan carries the weapon out of the room as if she were transfixed by it. When the villagers flee in panic from Burgundian troops led by Eric Trent, DeMille shows the peasant maid in a medium shot as she hands the sword back to Gaspard so that he may "parley" with the invaders. Carrying

a child in her arms, she then rushes off to join her family but stops to glance backward; a cut to a point-of-view shot reveals the unmanly Gaspard taking refuge in a barn. A cut back to Joan shows her handing the child to another woman; in the next shot, she occupies the space that Gaspard has abandoned to confront enemy soldiers advancing from the rear. At the head of his troops, Eric Trent, in a reverse high angle shot, first sights Joan with arms outstretched as she entreats him to turn back. Dismounting, he forces her into the barn where Gaspard is hiding. DeMille cuts between interior medium shots of Eric Trent expressing dishonorable intentions and exterior long shots of pillaging soldiers to emphasize sexual assault. Awed by the French maid's fearlessness and spirituality, the invader becomes a gallant courtier but is felled by Gaspard, concealed in the loft, before he can rejoin his men. Joan decides to hide the wounded Englishman to nurse him back to health. Photographed in a slightly high angle medium shot, Joan of Arc and Eric Trent are lit against a darkened loft strewn with straw; while he sleeps in the foreground, she wears his glove and looks inspired. The dim illumination gradually fades except for a spotlight on the face of the saint transported by a vision of her future.

DeMille had no compunction about foregrounding fictional scenes of romantic melodrama seemingly out of place in a historical pageant. As Eric Trent recovers from his wound, for example, he plucks the petals from a daisy and recites, "She loves me. She loves me not." When he later bids Joan farewell, DeMille cuts from a frontal two-shot to an oblique angle to show an apparition of a lighted sword against the Englishman's body. As Eric Trent descends the ladder, the brilliant figure of a courtier representing one of Joan's angels appears to announce, "Prepare thyself, Joan, for thou art to save France." Astounded, the peasant maid drops to her knees as the light from the apparition illuminates the loft. DeMille cuts to a close medium shot of Joan to capture her awed response, but in the next shot her mother emerges from a hut to pluck the feathers from a bird. The director thus juxtaposes domestic scenes with historical tableaux until Joan leaves Domrémy during a nighttime sequence that impressed critics with a two-color process that intensified the orange glow of a candle in a room flooded with ambient moonlight.^[32] At the court of Charles VII (Raymond Hatton), where the focus is on historical reenactment rather than romantic melodrama, Joan of Arc inspires French soldiers to follow her into battle. An extreme long shot of the crowded throne room, intercut with English soldiers advancing on Orléans, dramatizes Joan's extraordinary ability as a seer; she announces the siege as superimposed images of the enemy march across the screen. After the call to arms, a historical tableau titled "The Blessing of the Standard" consists of two shots, the second beginning with an iris that opens out to reveal a panorama with clergy in ceremonial robes flanking the screen, Joan holding the consecrated flag in the center, and General La Hire

(Hobart Bosworth) and his troops kneeling in the background. As evidence of research to achieve authenticity in these sequences, the script cites several sources such as Manners, Customs, and Dress during the Middle Ages , the Encyclopedia Britannica , the Life of Charles the Bold , and the Life of Louis XI .^[33]

After "The Blessing of the Standard," which is constructed in the tradition of historical reenactments in parlor theatricals and civic pageants, DeMille's representation of space becomes more cinematic in the first of his monumental battle scenes, the lifting of the siege of Orléans. Although the director demonstrates finesse in handling extras in the huge crowd scenes that became his trademark, the geography of the conflict is unclear because the French attack an outlying fortress occupied by the English, who are laying siege but have not yet become the conquerors of Orléans.^[34] Assisted by a team of ten directors, including his brother William and Oscar Apfel, each in charge of a regiment of one hundred men and armored horses, DeMille produced a spectacle that represented the battle of the sexes as well as the end of a famous siege.^[35] Advancing knights carrying banners on horseback and foot soldiers with pikes are photographed in sweeping long shots from frontal, lateral, and reverse angles as they ride over impalements and charge into the English line to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The fighting becomes especially fierce in the moat surrounding the castle as the French, photographed in high angle shots, attempt to scale the wall. After an artillery barrage creates an opening in the stone wall of the fortress, Eric Trent and his men retreat toward the tower as Joan of Arc enters through the breach and is immediately felled by an arrow. About to slay the woman he loves, the Englishman halts with a shock of recognition. DeMille cuts from extreme long shot to medium shot to medium close-up to focus on human feelings in the midst of stirring historical events. When Eric Trent is later brought to Joan as a captive, he surrenders his sword and is obliterated by an iris that focuses on the saint glancing up toward the heavens. According to a historical title, this victory marks the "End of First Epoch." At first-run theaters that projected the entire film, a ten-minute intermission followed.^[36]

Although the battle for Orléans is symbolically represented as a sexual assault under the command of a female warrior, especially in scenes in which Joan of Arc storms the castle, the victor herself becomes the prey in "The Second Epoch." Welcomed by the jubilant inhabitants of the city, who had previously been shown close to starvation, Joan leads her troops into the city in one of the few forward tracking shots in the film. She is immediately surrounded by admiring women, one of whom offers her an infant to be embraced. At the very moment of her triumph, however, Joan is reduced to a voyeuristic object as the suspicious eyes of a spy are shown behind the rectangular slot of a door. A reverse shot of the interior reveals the voyeur to be L'Oiseleur (Tully Marshall), a monk in the employ of a British agent

24. Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc is surrounded by women, one of whom lifts 
up her child, after the liberation of Orléans in Joan the Woman, 
DeMille's first historical epic. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

25. Farrar relinquishes romantic love as represented by Eric Trent 
(Wallace Reid), a fictional character, in favor of spirituality 
and martyrdom. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

named Bishop Cauchon. Following the coronation of Charles VII, another impressive historical tableau, Joan of Arc refuses both filial obligation and romantic love in separate interviews with her uncle and her English prisoner. DeMille ends this sequence with a lyrical set piece in which Eric slowly walks toward the Gothic arches in the rear of the dimly lit cathedral, still strewn with flowers from the coronation. A cut to a reverse shot shows the saint ascending the stairs to the altar where she kneels to dedicate herself to God.

Joan of Arc's demise quickly follows as Eric Trent is enlisted in a plot orchestrated by Bishop Cauchon (Theodore Roberts) and a court advisor nicknamed "The Spider" (George Clary), both agents in the English cause. A forward tracking shot shows the Maid of Orléans, dressed without her usual armor, riding at night with a handful of men to Compiègne. Accompanying her is the superimposed image of the angel of death on horseback. At daybreak she is captured by Eric's men and sexually harassed as a sign of foul play to come. Gaspard, who has become a devoted follower, is stabbed to death as he attempts to defend her honor. Anticipating events with unbecoming glee for a cleric, Bishop Cauchon threatens Joan in a darkened chamber with a boiling cauldron in the foreground. Photographed in extreme low-key lighting, this sequence proves riveting because the Bishop terrifies the saint in the presence of three hooded figures costumed like Ku Klux Klansmen. DeMille thus conflates a Catholic clergyman, symbolizing new immigrants in a Protestant culture, with hooded persecutors in scenes that aroused protest. After she "promises to return to the garb of a woman," Joan is led back to her cell, but the Bishop initiates a scheme to pronounce her "a relapsed heretic" to be burned at the stake. At this point, even L'Oiseleur protests, "Thou art a priest and should seek the salvation of the girl rather than her death!" Cauchon orders a soldier to "place the worst ruffian of thy guard in the cell of Joan the Maid" and, in another highly voyeuristic moment, proceeds to spy on her through a large opening in the floor above the prison chamber. An overhead shot photographed through the aperture shows the brute trying to assault Joan as Eric Trent finally comes to her rescue, but his attempt to save her is foiled.

Condemned to death because she has "resumed the garb of a man," a sure sign of heresy, Joan of Arc spends her final nightmarish hours in a sequence tinted blue and intercut with amber shots of the court of Charles VII in utter debauchery. At dawn, she is carted to the public square where black smoke turns day into night in a stunning two-color process that shows orange flames consuming piles of faggots. Joan triumphantly cries out, "My voices were of God—they have not deceived me!" As clouds of billowing smoke fade out, the epilogue continues the events of the prologue to relate the Hundred Years' War to World War I. The British officer has been fatally wounded during a successful effort to destroy an enemy trench.

As he lays dying in the foreground, a large apparition of Joan, lit against the surrounding darkness of the trenches, appears to dominate the skyline. Aside from linking past and present through the fate of the characters in the romantic melodrama, the prologue and epilogue convey the universal significance of the life of Joan of Arc as an allegory.

Critical Discourses: Gender and the Moral Lesson of History

Although it was unsuccessful at the box office, Joan the Woman was one of the most critically acclaimed productions of its time and provoked further discourse on motion pictures as an art form. The film industry and its critics, in other words, were still addressing a genteel audience regarding the cultural legitimacy of cinema. A special production such as Joan the Woman thus represented a noteworthy event. According to the New York Dramatic Mirror ; the film was "perhaps the most dramatic and wholly commendable screen offering of a decade. It is difficult to see how an advance is to be made on this production and it should have the effect of absolutely silencing those critics of the motion picture who affect to regard them as unworthy of serious consideration." Wid's agreed that "there is an air of distinction and class about the entire offering which places it in the front rank of big productions, and certainly no one can see this offering without being impressed with the tremendous strides made in the last two or three years by our producers of big films." Peter Milne, critic of Motion Picture News , described the film as "a true classic of the screen" that was "so intelligently welded as to give complete satisfaction and to be fully worthy of its classification as a high grade piece of theatrical entertainment at corresponding prices." For filmgoers in Boston, the price of evening tickets ranged from twenty-five cents to one dollar. Sounding a similar note to that in trade journals, the New York Times observed "lapses into pure fiction for romantic or melodramatic purposes" but declared "the photodrama takes its place among the half-dozen finest films yet produced.^[37] The New York Evening Sun trumpeted in a headline that Joan the Woman was "One of the Most Artistic and Satisfying Pictures That Ever Has Been Shown." Calling attention to the sheer magnitude of the production, the review linked the film to publicity about historical pageantry as a mode of conspicuous consumption that commodified history:

It required months of preparation on the part of a score or more assistants to assemble copies of practically everything obtainable in Joan of Arc literature, heraldry and design. Even before the first photographs were made a hundred seamstresses were working daily on the several thousand costumes which were required. . . . It was necessary to provide suits of mail in sufficient number to purchase the entire output of a Pacific coast manufacturer of chain pan and

pot cleaners. Thousands of yards of chain mesh were demanded, and the machinery of the factory, worked overtime on the supply. [According to] DeMille, "we had in all some 13,000 separate items of costume, equipage, heraldry, and the like. . . . [W]e built three separate villages, all careful duplicates of the original where the embattlements and the like are accurate to an inch. The interior of the Rheims Cathedral is perfectly executed."^[38]

Not surprisingly, DeMille's first historical epic dictated comparisons with those of D. W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince. Critical discourse on cinema, it should be noted, had advanced by 1917 to the point where film authorship was readily being discussed in reviews of special productions. Although Moving Picture World expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of the romantic relationship in Joan the Woman , it claimed, "Cecil B. DeMille belongs in the front ranks of the great producers of the day." Photoplay's Julian Johnson compared DeMille's camera work to Michelangelo's use of the chisel in a review that recalled earlier discourse on cinema in relation to traditional art forms. But Johnson also discussed the film in relation to other filmic texts and concluded that Joan the Woman had been excelled only by The Birth of a Nation . The New York Review volunteered in a similar vein, "This production easily ranks with 'Intolerance,' 'Civilization,' and 'A Daughter of the Gods' in size, scope, imagination, drama, photography, and ethical purpose." According to the Boston Evening Transcript , DeMille's epic "is not the equal of that unparalleled 'Birth.' Yet it achieves an effect far finer than anything but the Babylonian episodes in 'Intolerance'. . . at what seems. . . a smaller cost of production." Joan the Woman , not coincidentally, succeeded Intolerance at the Colonial Theatre in Chicago after the Griffith film completed a long engagement. Griffith enjoyed such preeminence in the prewar years of the industry that a congratulatory telegram he sent to Farrar was reproduced in a two-page ad in Motion Picture News . The Western Union message read, "I hope you will not consider it a boldness to offer you my most sincere congratulations on this beautiful contribution to our little new and budding art." The director was probably then involved in negotiations to direct films for Artcraft, which Adolph Zukor acquired a few months later to consolidate vertical integration of the industry. DeMille himself acknowledged a communication from Griffith in a letter addressed to Lasky shortly after the film's premiere: "I received a very delightful telegram from Griffith on the subject of 'Joan.' He was most enthusiastic."^[39] Despite the fact that it was not a commercial success, Joan the Woman consolidated DeMille's status as an author and contributed to the increasing cultural legitimacy of motion pictures.

After winning unanimous acclaim for her debut in Carmen , Geraldine Farrar, however, received mixed notices as the star of Joan the Woman . Critics who applied standards of realism to historical representation not only fulminated about the fact that she neither looked nor acted like a peasant

girl, but disapproved of the romantic melodrama. DeMille in fact suppressed an episode in the script in which Joan's father attempts to marry her to Gaspard, a fiction that would have elicited even more objection.^[40] Discourse on historical authenticity signifying a cultural practice that validated realism proved disadvantageous to the actress. Julian Johnson was particularly unkind: "Those who object to Miss Farrar's Joan because she is rising to battle-cruiser weight had best turn to their histories. Joan is described as broad, short, heavy. But Joan had a peasant's face. . . . One of Miss Farrar's eyes reflects Riverside Drive, the other, Fifth Avenue, and her mouth seems to be singing Broadway." George Blaisdell was more insightful when he observed in Moving Picture World , "Geraldine Farrar in her interpretation . . . has crossed all the centuries of time, and . . . portrays a woman of regal, dominating presence rather than a simple child of God and of France. . . . We may even feel that had the story adhered to history it would have been of greater strength."^[41] As a matter of fact, Farrar projects throughout the film a majestic and commanding dignity befitting a historical tableau or pageant. She easily resembles the sculptured female forms that had been familiar to the public and functioned on an allegorical level in wartime posters. What, then, does the critical response to Farrar as Joan of Arc signify besides a preoccupation with realism as a cultural practice valorized by male critics? A consideration of discourse on gender within a broad social context reveals why the narrative strategy of the film disrupts realist historical representation and privileges sentimental romance.

Aside from introducing a human interest story to the macrocosm of historical pageantry, the romantic melodrama of Joan the Woman alleviates spectator anxiety regarding a heroine who achieves sainthood by assuming a masculine role. At a time when controversy regarding the doctrine of separate spheres was being aired in diverse forums, sex-role reversal proved to be a disconcerting issue. Were men indeed being unmanned by the "new woman"? Charles Dana Gibson drew a dinner table scene titled "A Suffragette's Husband" (1911) in which an emasculated male shrinks from the glance of his domineering wife, a weighty figure with a double chin and a stern glance.^[42] During the first two decades of the twentieth century, many fashionable women were asserting class and ethnic solidarity against the new immigrants by campaigning for the right to vote and even mounted theatrical spectacles in support of their cause. At the same time, a radical restructuring of female employment or the feminization of clerical work resulted in young middle-class women becoming salaried employees in unprecedented numbers. Furthermore, 40 percent of the college population in 1910 was female. Departing from tradition, a number of college-educated women chose careers and social activism rather than marriage and motherhood. As for married women, they routinely participated in club work and community projects in an era of reform.^[43] The multifaceted

activities of middle-class women, not to mention their shopping in downtown business districts, had redrawn if not erased the line between public and private spheres.

Anxiety regarding the dynamics of social change as it affected gender roles in middle-class families accounts for critical preoccupation with Joan of Arc as a woman.^[44] Critics who responded to sentimental values, interestingly, were not concerned about the historical veracity of DeMille's epic. According to the New York Evening Sun , "the remarkably well chosen love interest that shows what this woman (who was too great to lose her identity as a woman) was like are touches that have made . . . one of the mightiest pictures of screendom, a close, thrilling personal narrative."^[45] The Reverend Thomas B. Gregory, surely a representative of sentimental culture, argued at length in the New York American :

Perhaps the greatest thing that the picture will accomplish . . . will be the revelation of the greatness of the womanly character when it is really and truly womanly.

We of today are just beginning to see the entrance of woman into the great, wide life of the world from which she has heretofore been debarred; and many are wondering what the result will be. Will woman be able to act her part nobly and well in the great arena toward which she is drifting? And can she go into the battle, into the . . . rough-and-tumble competition and not be ruined? Will she not cease to be woman, becoming . . . God knows what.

The play answers these fears and answers them in a way to encourage us all.

Joan, thrown headlong into the whirl and stress of the world, did not lose her womanliness, her modesty, her beautiful reserve, nor was she in any way corrupted by contact with the world's brutalities and coarseness, its plots and conspiracies.^[46]

DeMille solved the narratological problem of civic pageantry as a macrocosm by casting Joan in sentimental terms as a woman who sacrifices romantic love for a spiritual cause. Although he did not meet expectations for a more realistic historical drama, as some critics complained, his discourse on gender deftly exploited sentimentalism to alleviate anxiety about a sex-role reversal. Yet the director's work remains ambiguous because the male characters in the film are far from admirable, and even despicable. Wallace Reid, who became a dashing matinee idol before succumbing to drug addiction, played a particularly passive, uninspiring, and unheroic role as Eric Trent.

Since critics invested in realism did not perceive Farrar as a symbolic icon and criticized her weight gain, age, and sophistication, the intertextuality of film and publicity material proved to be disadvantageous to the actress. A beautiful and internationally renowned diva with an enthusiastic following, dubbed "Gerryflappers," Farrar led a well-publicized life. She had even

been romantically linked with the Hohenzollern crown prince so that she had to deny pro-German sentiment on the eve of war. After she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Romeo et Juliette in 1906, stylish magazines such as Theatre Vanity Fair , and Harper's Bazaar featured color photographs of her on the cover and printed articles about her fashionable wardrobe and elegantly furnished home. For example, the caption of a full-page photo in Theatre read, "Miss Geraldine Farrar. In A Wonderful Chinchilla and Sable Creation. By Paquin." Farrar had been associated, in other words, with the world of high art, aristocracy, and luxury since her operatic debut at the Berlin Royal Opera in 1901. Furthermore, the soprano was hardly reticent about airing her ambivalent views about marriage. She was widely quoted as having remarked, "I shall never marry, I never intended to marry. . . . I am old fashioned enough to think that a woman should be subordinate to her husband, and I must have my freedom or I can't work." Signifying ambivalence about women's issues, the Boston Daily Advertiser ran a headline that labeled Farrar a "Self-Supporting, Independent Working Woman" but attributed to her the following statement: "This feminism, race suicide, etc., what is it but this, that all repressed women are getting discontented and muttering."^[47]

Although the validity of these quotations cannot be ascertained, they nevertheless reveal confusion about and hostility toward the "new woman." When Farrar married actor Lou Tellegen in a volte-face, Photoplay reported the event as the result of a primordial contest, "Farrar's Real Romance. Cave Man Tellegen's Conquest In A Stone-Age Episode With A Movie Background." "Never did a lovely woman more completely change her mind," began the article, which described Tellegen as "the physical embodiment of the rugged and resourceful man . . . a man's man."^[48] Farrar soon regretted her decision even though she did not divorce Tellegen for seven years. In a revealing letter, DeMille wrote to Lasky during the filming of Joan the Woman : "Incidentally, a word on Farrar—She seems to have lost a little something of the great spark of genius that animated her last year . . . also, she has gotten pretty plump." Later, he recalled, "I never had any difficulty with Geraldine at all on the pictures that I made with her. Now, on the last one we weren't speaking, but we still didn't have any temperament. We weren't speaking because she married Lou Tellegen. . . . [H]e wanted to direct, so I let him . . . and boy! I put my foot down and said, 'No, he cannot direct any more.'" The director had enjoyed a friendlier relationship with the soprano before her wedding: "the warmth after shooting wasn't there. I didn't go over and hold her hand the way I had before."^[49] Despite her marriage, Farrar projected the image of a glamorous and independent diva that, for some critics, interfered with her representation as a spiritual heroine in the sentimental tradition. Yet her engaging persona as a "new

woman" resonates in both Carmen and Joan the Woman as heroines who refuse to submit to traditional prescriptions of womanhood.

Despite evident differences in class, ethnicity, and gender, workers and immigrants represented entities interchangeable with "new" women who were remapping separate spheres as threats to the body politic. Contrary to The Cheat , in which racial groups are conflated and scapegoated in Orientalist consumer fantasies, paranoia as a response to social change is displaced in Joan the Woman onto the body of the saint burned in the public sphere. Unlike Edith Hardy, the erring socialite whose body is exhibited as a courtroom spectacle so that she may be recuperated as a sentimental heroine, Joan of Arc is sacrificed for future redemption. Sadistic Catholic clergy execute her as a deviant woman for assuming masculine prerogatives. Subject to threats of sexual assault and torture, she is finally burned at the stake because church leaders interpret her refusal to confine herself to the domestic sphere as an unnatural ambition to rule. After the liberation of Orléans, for example, L'Oiseleur reproaches her, "Wouldst thou become Queen—that thou lettest the people kneel to thee!" During the trial, the monk testifies that Joan, who wears female apparel for the first time since grasping the sword, is a "weaver of spells" and that "people fall down and worship her." "The Spider" deters Charles VII, a pitiful weakling, from ransoming his military leader because she "would make herself queen and reign in thy stead." A great deal of attention is focused on clothing as a sign of subordinate behavior appropriate for the female gender. Under threat of torture, Joan is forced to sign a statement in which she "promises to return to the garb of a woman."^[50] Although the Duke of Burgundy and the English are French foes in the Hundred Years' War—an unhappy alignment given the events of modern trench warfare—a Catholic bishop and hooded inquisitors resembling Klansmen are the ultimate villains.

A sign of the rising tide of nativism in small towns eclipsed by cities in the South, Midwest, and Far West, the Ku Klux Klan reorganized in 1915. Catholics as well as blacks were among its chief targets. DeMille repressed fault lines in the social formation by conflating the Catholic hierarchy with the Klan as conspirators against Victorian womanhood. Although prewar civic pageantry excluded specific racial and working-class groups, movement leaders attempted to project a vision, however antimodernist and nostalgic, of a stable community. Absent in DeMille's spectacle, essentially addressed to the genteel middle class, is not only an articulation of history that transcends cultural differences but a harmonious vision of public life. Catholics, who were themselves divided according to class and ethnicity but faced increasing nativism, censured the film.^[51] Anticipating criticism, the Cardinal Film Corporation, formed to produce and distribute Joan the Woman during the consolidation of Famous Players-Lasky, printed souvenir programs that

26. As a sadistic bishop, Theodore Roberts threatens Joan of Arc 
with torture in scenes that aroused Catholic protest and minimized the 
film's box-office appeal in urban areas. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

characterized Cauchon as a man who "did not hesitate to misuse the mighty power of the Church to defeat his personal enemies." The program cited the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica to describe the ugly fate awaiting the cardinal as his due.^[52] Critic Peter Milne referred to the quotation in his review:

There has been some question raised as to the manner in which those of Catholic faith will accept the character of Pierre Cauchon, the churchman who ultimately causes Joan's downfall. There should be none whatsoever. The Catholic Encyclopedia itself refers to Cauchon as an "unscrupulous and ambitious man" and states in dealing with the various acts of Pope Callixtus III that the sentence passed on Joan . . . was "quashed and the innocence of the Maid of Orleans proclaimed." The Encyclopedia Britannica . . . tells more harshly of Cauchon's fate, in that he was excommunicated posthumously by the Pope, his body exhumed and thrown in the common sewer.^[53]

Similarly, another critic commented, "it should be perfectly understandable that this is a representation of an historical character, and not intended as a reflection on any creed or people."^[54] The citation of historical data reveals more about the condescension of the privileged classes, however, than it does about Catholic reception of the film. Correspondence involving a Midwest exhibitor, Famous Players-Lasky in New York, and DeMille at his

California studio reveals that the high concentration of Catholics in urban areas meant negative reception of the film. Barnett, the exhibitor, claimed that in the "principal cities of Ohio . . . criticisms expressed in various newspapers was not favorable to the success of the picture, but only on account of the religious atmosphere in the picture. I would suggest that this picture be cut down to at least eight reels, eliminating the religious part in the picture, that is made objectionable to particularly the Catholics." Corresponding with DeMille from the New York office, H. Whitman Bennett suggested some "radical cuts in the latter half of the work" and cited "those episodes and scenes which have caused us so much trouble with the Catholic public." Bennett advocated "entirely eliminating the prison scene and the torture scene, and possibly the earlier part of the burning at the stake" because "we have to face much adverse criticism from unenlightened Catholics."^[55] DeMille's confusing reply gives evidence not only of ethnic and religious differences in the country but of his own inability to think in positive terms regarding civic culture:

It might be better for the States Rights buyer, himself, to make these eliminations as the different parts of the country would probably prefer to see different scenes cut out. That is, in the strong Catholic communities, those scenes relating to the Catholic Church might best be spared; while in the Protestant portions of the country, it might be desirable to retain such scenes.^[56]

The director had yet to craft a spectacle that would eclipse cultural diversity in appealing to a shared sense of historical consciousness and national identity.

Although Joan the Woman did not appeal to urban working-class and ethnic groups, its enthusiastic reception by educated filmgoers attested to the cultural values of the genteel middle class. A construction of a usable past to educate the public on the eve of war, the film was much admired. The Reverend Thomas B. Gregory noted, "What a mighty aid to the teaching of history the motion picture is destined to be . . . and that, too, through the most royal of all the faculties, that of the sight." Critic Frederick James Smith claimed, "As a work of art this picture should be seen by everyone, but its worth as an instrument of uplift and patriotism is incalculable." A great deal of publicity resulted when Lasky sent the Forty-fourth Street Theatre orchestra to play at a special Washington, D.C., premiere for an audience including Vice-President Thomas R. Marshall, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the Russian ambassador, and their wives. Ads for the film exploited middle-class belief that public reenactments of history would educate a responsible citizenry. Copy for a two-page ad in Motion Picture News , for example, made extravagant claims dwarfing those of pageant officials and anticipated the tone of wartime propaganda: "This picture . . .

may become a great shaping force in this remarkable era . . . . Patriotism and religious fervor . . . will sweep all Europe after the war the motion picture will outdo the mightiest work ever accomplished by a free press."^[57]

DeMille's epic was in fact part of public discourse enlisting support for an embattled France symbolized by Joan of Arc rather than the modernist aesthetic so alienating to Protestant middle-class sensibility. Patriotic appeals associated with the Maid of Orleans were useful in overcoming American prejudice against Parisian avant-garde movements that contravened the sacrosanct notions of genteel culture.^[58] An ad, for example, addressed the reader as follows: "Would Joan of Arc Be Burned Today? . . . Is the world freed of the arch-enemies of Truth—Ignorance and Superstition?" Articles even exploited accusations that Farrar was pro-German in sentiment. Attacking persistent rumors, the diva claimed, "I knew when I played Joan of Arc for Mr. DeMille's picture that it would be . . . the greatest of all pro-ally propaganda." Such marketing strategies attest to the commodification of history not only because the past became useful for propagandistic purposes, but, as pageant leaders feared, profitable as commercialized amusement. Joan the Woman was exploited, not coincidentally, in a lobbying effort on behalf of Sunday film exhibition in the state of New York. After a special screening for the governor, legislators, staff members, and wives, a straw vote resulted in 425 out of 502 votes in favor of Sunday theater openings. Similarly, Kansas legislators, "many of whom admitted never having seen a motion picture in their lives," adjourned for a special screening of the epic, to which their wives and children were invited, before considering legislation on state film censorship.^[59] Publicity about these events in trade journals indicates that although great strides had been made since the advent of feature film, the cultural legitimacy of cinema had yet to be firmly established among the genteel classes in the years before the war.

A spectacle produced after the height of the pageantry movement and before the recruitment of the film industry, by the Committee on Public Information (which set up a War Cooperating Committee, including DeMille and Griffith), Joan the Woman demonstrated the pitfalls of marketing historical representation.^[60] An increasingly pluralistic urban audience, fragmented by class and ethnic differences, was unwilling even under threat of war to accept public history validated by the genteel middle class. Unlike DeMille's earlier features—such as the Chimmie Fadden series, Kindling, The Golden Chance, The Heart of Nora Flynn , and The Dream Girl —Joan the Woman offered neither criticism of the idle rich nor sympathetic figures with whom workers and immigrants could identify. Addressed to educated filmgoers who valued history as a sign of ideological consensus and as a vehicle to Americanize foreigners, the spectacle did not exert broad audience appeal. Lasky discouraged the production of any further epics when he wrote to DeMille, "I had some long conferences with Griffith [who was to direct films

for Artcraft] and he frankly admitted that after his experience with 'Intolerance,' . . . the ideal pictures for money making . . . and every other purpose—are subjects of about 6500 feet in length, carefully and elaborately produced.^[61] In 1917 DeMille directed two films starring Mary Pickford—Romance of the Redwoods , a Western, and The Little American , an anti-German propaganda piece—and two films with Geraldine Farrar—The Woman God Forgot , an abbreviated epic about the Aztec empire, and The Devil Stone, a romantic melodrama with the first of his trademark flashbacks. After The Whispering Chorus (1918), an impressive if dated reaffirmation of Victorian sentimentalism, DeMille charted a new course and began to address a national audience in terms of shared consumer values rather than fore-grounding intertexts in genteel culture. With the consolidation of his stature as a film author, the director began the "second epoch" of his silent career, an epoch that coincided with the burgeoning of a consumer culture that would bear the inscription of his signature.