The more than forty cinematic representations of the story of Joan of Arc created during the last century offer us the possibility of examining the twists and turns of the “same” historical biography over an extended period of time. It would appear that Joan's life is a well-defined object, around which the cinema has created its own choreography of changing reflections. But, in fact, the story itself already contains the tension between events and their representation. Joan, in her various testimonies, and others, at her rehabilitation trial, were – like historical cinema itself – recounting a reality no longer in existence. Furthermore, the historical and cultural memory of Joan is not a singular entity; it exists in a number of formulations, some of them contradictory.

Joan's life, as recorded by the cinema reflects the interplay between the various historical and cultural sources of her life, the changing conventions governing historical biography over the past five hundred years (the existence of at least 126 biographies of Joan attests to this [Margolis, 1990]) and the qualities inherent in the filmic image itself. Despite developments from the silent film to the digital, these qualities are one of the major sources of the complex relations between cinema and historical biography.

Using the corpus of Joan of Arc films as my example will enable me to trace the ways in which the cinematic institution maneuvers between cultural-historical memory and the conventions of the genre. By repeatedly creating new versions of Joan's biography, cinema has revealed a certain unease with the existing inventory of historical referents, and each new version purports to tell the “true” story, the story that has not yet been told. The concreteness of the cinematic medium produces a unique representation system for the historical referent. As we shall see, some versions try to conceal the limitations of their own knowledge, while others openly reveal them. In both cases, however, previous visual and filmic materials are used as if they too were historical referents.