Georges Méliès' Jeanne d'Arc

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the massive changes it brought to the communities and ways of life of Europe, there was a resurgence of interest in those traditions that were lost. It began with the Romantics of the 18th century and flowered with Gothic Revivalism in the 19th. Nor did this this movement escape the notice of France's pioneer of fantastic cinema, Georges Méliès. Indeed, he was fully and completely a part of it, articulating this ethos in the brand new medium of film.
Most famous for his films like Le Voyages dans la Lune (1902),  Le Voyage à travers l'Impossible (1904), and A la Conquête du Pôle (1912), Méliès was never a pure purveyor of Science Fiction. He consistently blurred the lines between the astronomer and the astrologer, the chemist and the alchemist, the scientific and the fantastic. Far more of his films had magic and fairy tales as their subject than futuristic inventions and mad scientists. Even his mad scientists, beneath Gothic arches, have more the character of wizards and sorcerers. Méliès' are the cinematic embodiment of the Scientific Romance and all that evocative term entails. 
As a patriotic Frenchman of the fin de siècle, Méliès would have been tapped into the fascination with Joan of Arc. Since her life, conquests, and tragic death, Joan of Arc became an amorphous symbol of French identity, ready to be used by anyone for any reason who have a stake in French society. A sign of strength and Divine Providence, she was appropriated by Republicans for her humble origins and by Monarchists for her support of the Crown. Just as she was a rallying point for France during the Lancasterian phase of Hundred Years' War (1415-1453), so too was she in the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Against growing Industrialization she was a symbol of the Mediaeval, and against growing secularization she was a symbol of Catholicism. Nine years after Méliès' 1900 release of Jeanne d'Arc (English: Joan of Arc), she was beatified on the steps of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. In 1920 the "Maid of Orleans" was officially canonized as Saint Joan of Arc, Patron Saint of France as well as martyrs, captives, people ridiculed for their piety, military personnel and the US Women's Army Corps. Even those with no particular ties to France venerate the saint, and many women look to her as an icon of feminine heroism.

The nature of Joan's story, replete with angelic visitations and heavenly voices, lends itself well to Méliès' heady trick photography and the air of a fairy tale. Méliès crafts sets of sumptuous Mediavealism in extreme forced perspective, from the exterior of assaulted castle to the interior of churches gleaming with golden hand tinting. Perhaps for this auteur, there was really no necessary distinction to be made between gilded fairy land and the forces of political history. That is much like Joan herself, who turned an otherwise obnoxious war between English and French monarchical heirs into a populist, nationalist uprising and herself into an enduring symbol.

A Tribute to Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

It's well known that I have a connection in my heart to France, and to nowhere is that connection deeper than to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

For more than 850 years it has stood at the centre of Paris and in the centre of French history. In fact, it marks kilometre 0 for all distance measurements in France. To paraphrase Bishop Robert Barron, to say that Notre-Dame stands at the centre of Paris is to say that it stands at the centre of France, which is to say it stands at the centre of Europe, which is to say that it stands at the centre of Western civilization. And at the centre of Notre-Dame stands the Cross.

Notre-Dame is an icon of the city and the supreme example of the Mediaeval genius for both faith and art. The appreciation of Beauty is the aspiration towards the enduring, the transcendent, and the sacred. Beauty is the splendor of Goodness and Truth, their radiance into the world in modes far deeper and more powerful and more moving than an ethical or scientific debate. That is why Beauty - true art, the autonomy of art, uncontrollable art unfettered by propaganda and politics, art of the human experience - is always the first thing to come under attack in zeitgeists that seek to extinguish Goodness and Truth. The quest for Beauty is the longing for meaning. Few, if any, man-made places are as beautiful to my eye as the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris is centuries of devotion and sacrifice petrified into stone. Statuary adorns it in high places that no Earthly eye is able to see. It moves humankind exactly because it was the best of humankind poured into something built to the glory of God. It is sublime and ageless, having survived disaster, desecration, and dilapidation before being restored to its rightful place as a jewel in the crown of Christendom. The July Monarchy deliberated on whether or not to tear the venerable cathedral down, after it had suffered so cruelly by the French Revolution's hatred of all Goodness and Truth and Beauty. Yet a popular novel by Victor Hugo reignited passion for everything about the romance of mediaevalism, patriotism, and religiousity that the cathedral represented. Notre-Dame was not only a symbol for the Church or the nation of France, but for the growing dissatisfaction with the failed promises of modernity. That is also what it represents for me: a living, ancient, enduring emblem of the romance of history, majesty, and faith. 

Notre-Dame figured prominently in my two trips to Paris, once during a brief layover in 2008 when it was one of only three attractions I had time to visit (the others being the Eiffel Tower and Disneyland Paris) and again in 2013 when we passed it nearly every day for two weeks. I lost track of the number of times we stepped inside to offer devotion, but its awesome presence, the breath of the Spirit moving through it, the weight of its ages and the innumerable people who have passed there all seeped into my bones. In the words of Sinclair Lewis: "He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all."

If there was any one building that I would consider my spiritual home, even more than my local parish, it would be the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. It broke my heart beyond words to see the terrible images of its roof ablaze on April 15, 2019, and all I could do not to burst into tears at the good news that the stone structure was saved, along with the three rose windows and majority of the stained glass, and all of the art and relics. She still endures. Thanks be to God. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin and it's Cultural History

It is a comfort to hope, as so many of the world's sorrows and wrongs have, from age to age, been lived down, so a time shall come when sketches similar to these shall be valuable only as memorials of what has long ceased to be.

These words, penned by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the preface to the first edition of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, expressed a hope that became a prophecy. The best-selling novel of the 19th century and second best-selling book of the century after the Bible itself, Stowe's fictionalized exposé of slavery in the United States was an epoch-making tome that accomplished its lofty ambition. Apocryphal accounts have Abraham Lincoln crediting Uncle Tom's Cabin with sparking the American Civil War. Whether or not that was true, it has taken a strange cultural arc: a radically progressive anti-slavery tract in the 19th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin eventually came to be seen itself as an outdated reinforcement of racist caricatures in the 20th. In the 21st century, it has furnished one of the only remaining acceptable forms of racism, which is for white progressives (in Chinese: 白左 or báizuǒ) to label any person of colour who disagrees with them an "Uncle Tom"... An acceptable form of racism because it is perpetrated by conspicuously self-described "anti-racists." 

What could account for such a major shift in its reputation? Undoubtedly, one reason is that, like Disney's Song of the South after it, Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of those things that are controversial in direct proportion to how many people have not seen it. James Baskett received an Honorary Academy Award for his positive, sympathetic, paternal portrayal of Uncle Remus in the 1946 film, becoming the first African-American man to receive an Oscar... And today, that award-winning performance is locked away in the "Disney vault", because of its reputation as a racist film among people who have never had the chance or taken the initiative to watch it. While the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is widely available, it is less frequently on any primary or secondary academic curricula and has not had a Hollywood adaptation since the end of the silent era.

That may itself be symptomatic of the truism that the progressives of one era become the conservatives of the next. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a Victorian novel, published in 1852, and employs a vocabulary of imagery and archetypes that today seem like crude caricatures. The sort of "mammy" character made famous by Aunt Jemima and Hattie McDaniel (who was the first African-American to win an Academy Award, for best supporting actress, for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind) was popularized in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Likewise, the character Topsy is a "pickaninny" stereotype. Yet while seeming racist today, they were representatives of real sorts of people during the time period and would have been readily identifiable from actual experience. There were African-American maids like Mammy and storytellers like Uncle Remus. Furthermore, the same fictionalized shorthands were employed for the white American cast. It is the monstrous Simon Legree who bequeathed the image of the moustache-twirling villain satirized by The Great Race's Dr. Fate, Dudley Do-Right's Snidely Whiplash, and professional wrestler "The Villain" Marty Scurll. 

Film and Vaudeville did few favours for Uncle Tom's Cabin here either. Copyright law was virtually nonexistent when the novel was first published, allowing drama troupes free reign to interpret and reinterpret the text as they saw fit. Because the novel was controversial among those who supported the institution of slavery, pro-slavery "Tom Shows" were performed throughout the South, which valourized the white slavers and demeaned the African-American cast. These pro-slavery Tom Shows and even straightforward anti-slavery ones alike utilized actors in blackface, quickly merging with minstrel shows. Early film followed these traditions. Edwin S. Porter's 1903 adaptation for Thomas Edison is essentially a cinematic transcription of the Vaudeville shows, blackface and all. Disney also preserved this in the 1933 short Mickey's Mellerdrammer, in which Mickey and Minnie (in blackface) put on a Tom Show. It is a "vaulted" cartoon rarely released by Disney, but valuable in capturing an impression - amidst the cavorting characters for whom everything is going comically wrong - of how Tom Shows were produced, performed, and received by their audiences.

Edwin S. Porter's 1903 version of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Digging beneath its popular reputation, what do we find when actually reading Uncle Tom's Cabin? We find a poignant, surprisingly nuanced, and powerful book affirming the dignity of the human person that is still relevant wherever and however that dignity is erased by those who would exploit others as mere instruments of gain.