Joan of Arc was born in Domrémy in 1412 and was burned at the stake at Rouen at the age of nineteen, after only one year of public activity. Despite having been in the public eye for such a short period, Joan has excited the collective imagination for more than 500 years. The myth of Joan of Arc, or its “intellectual object” (Foucault, 1972 [1969]), has been engraved in the collective memory and is represented in encyclopedic sources, history books and biographies, and in other cultural texts and artifacts such as poems, sculptures, plays, tapestries, children's literature and even comics.

This process of re-articulation has been epitomized in at least forty films, including those of Georges Méliès (JEANNE D’ARC, France), 1900; Albert Capellani (JEANNE D’ARC, France), 1908; Cecil B. DEMILLE (JOAN THE WOMAN, USA), 1916; Carl Dreyer (LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC, France), 1927-28; Marc[o] de Gastayne (LA MERVEILLEUSE VIE DE JEANNE D’ARC, France), 1928; Gustav Ucicky (DAS MÄDCHEN JOHANNA, Germany), 1935; Victor Fleming (JOAN OF ARC, USA), 1948; Roberto Rossellini (GIOVANNA D’ARCO AL ROGO, [JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE], Italy), 1954; Otto Preminger (SAINT JOAN, USA), 1957; Robert Bresson (PROCÈS DE JEANNE D’ARC, France), 1962; Gleb Panfilov (NACHALO [LE DÉBUT] [THE GIRL FROM THE FACTORY], USSR), 1972; Werner Herzog and Keith Cheetham (GIOVANNA D’ARCO, Germany), 1990; Jacques Rivette (JEANNE LA PUCELLE, France), 1993; and Luc Besson (JOAN OF ARC [THE MESSENGER], France), 1999.

I will argue, however, that Western culture has never really digested the Joan figure. By recurrently authorizing new versions of the story, each of which allegedly provides new historical or textual evidence, Western culture has revealed its inherent ambivalence toward Joan's “initial story.”

The story has troubled Western culture over centuries of memory, concealment and repetition, functioning as a “black hole” – a repository into which society funnels its inescapable terrors.