Germaine Dulac (French:[dylak]; born Charlotte Elisabeth Germaine Saisset-Schneider; 17 November 1882 – 20 July 1942)[2] was a French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic. She was born in Amiens and moved to Paris in early childhood. A few years after her marriage she embarked on a journalistic career in a feminist magazine, and later became interested in film. With the help of her husband and friend she founded a film company and directed a few commercial works before slowly moving into Impressionist and Surrealist territory. She is best known today for her Impressionist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madam Beudet, 1922/23), and her Surrealist experiment, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928). Her career as filmmaker suffered after the introduction of sound film and she spent the last decade of her life working on newsreels for Pathé and Gaumont.
Germaine Dulac was born in Amiens, France into an upper-middle-class family of a career military officer. Her mother, Madeleine-Claire Waymel came from a middle-class family of mainly career soldiers and industrialists. Her father, Pierre-Maurice Saisset-Schneider, was a captain of cavalry in the Second Army Corp.[3] Since her father's job required the family to frequently move between small garrison towns, Germaine was sent to live with her grandmother in Paris. She soon became interested in art and studied music, painting, and theater. Following the death of her parents, Dulac moved to Paris and combined her growing interests in socialism and feminism with a career in journalism.[2] In 1905 she married Louis-Albert Dulac, an agricultural engineer who also came from an upper-class family. Four years later she began writing for La Française, a feminist magazine edited by Jane Misme where she eventually became the drama critic.[4] Dulac also found time to work on the editorial staff of La Fronde, a radical feminist journal of the time.[2] She also began to pursue her interest in still photography, which preceded her initial entry into filmmaking.
Dulac and her husband divorced in 1920.[5] After that, she began a relationship with Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville that lasted until the end of her life.[6]
Following her long and influential cinema career, Dulac became the president of the Fédération des ciné-clubs, a group which promoted and presented the work of new young filmmakers, such as Joris Ivens and Jean Vigo. Dulac also taught film courses at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie on the rue de Vaugirard.[2] Following her death in 1942, Charles Ford called attention to the difficulty the French Press had with printing her obituary:
Bothered by Dulac’s non-conformist ideas, disturbed by her impure origins, the censors had refused the article which, only after vigorous protest by the editor-in-chief of the magazine, appeared three weeks late. Even dead, Germaine Dulac still seemed dangerous...[7]
Career
Before her filmmaking career, Dulac wrote articles for the feminist magazine, La Fronde, from 1900 to 1913. In 1909, she began writing for La Française as a journalist, then later as an editor until 1913. Here she interviewed a plethora of established women in France with the intention of solidifying women's roles in French society and politics.[8] One of those women was Anna de Noailles, a french poet, as her first assignment. However, when Dulac got to her door, she panicked and interviewed Noaille's valet de chambre. Soon after, she moved to theatrical criticism, but still occasionally contributed to La Fronde. Her experience as a theatrical critic sparked her interest in film and kickstarted her career in film.[3]
Dulac became interested in film in 1914 through her friend, actress Stacia Napierkowska. The two women traveled to Italy together shortly before World War I; Napierkowska was to act in a Film d'Art film, and Dulac learned the basics of the medium during that trip. In the early 1900s through the late 1920s, Dulac frequently contrasted the modernity of the French capital to the provincial nature of rural France, a common dichotomy in her films.[9] Soon after her return to France she decided to start a film company. Dulac and writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger then founded D.H. Films, with financial support provided by Dulac's husband. The company produced several films between 1915 and 1920, all directed by Dulac and written by Hillel-Erlanger. These included Les Sœurs ennemies (1915/16; Dulac's first film), Vénus victrix, ou Dans l'ouragan de la vie (1917), Géo, le mystérieux (ou La vraie richesse, 1916), and others.[10][11]
Dulac's first major success was Âmes de fous (1918), a serial melodrama written by Dulac herself. The film features an early appearance of actress Ève Francis, who introduced Dulac to her friend (later husband) Louis Delluc, filmmaker and critic. A short time later Dulac and Delluc collaborated on La Fête espagnole (Spanish Fiesta, 1920), another film featuring Francis, which was proclaimed one of the decade's more influential films and allegedly a major French Impressionist Cinema work. However, only a few excerpts from the film exist today. Dulac and Delluc went on to collaborate on a number of pictures.[10]
In 1921, Dulac reflected on a meeting with D.W. Griffith in an article she wrote titled "Chez D.W. Griffith." In the article, Dulac presented two popular themes which arise in many of her films:[2]
Autonomy for the cinema as an independent art form free from the influences of painting and literature.
The importance of the filmmaker as an individual artistic and creative force.
She continued her career in filmmaking, producing both simple commercial films and complex pre-Surrealist narratives such as two of her most famous works: La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1922/23) and La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928).[10] Both films were released before the epoch-making Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and La Coquille et le Clergyman is sometimes credited as the first Surrealist film; however, some scholars, such as Ephraim Katz, consider Dulac first and foremost an Impressionist filmmaker.[12] Dulac's goal of "pure cinema" and some of her works inspired the French Cinema pur film movement. Her other important experimental films include several shorts based on music: Disque(s) 957 (1928/29; based on Chopin) and Thème et variations (1928/29; classical music), and others from the same period.
In 1929, she was awarded the Legion of Honor in recognition of her contributions to the film industry in France.[13] With the advent of sound film, Dulac's career shifted. From 1930, she returned to commercial work, producing newsreels for Pathé and later for Gaumont. She died in Paris on 20 July 1942.
Filmography
The exact chronology of Dulac's oeuvre has not yet been established.[14]
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Louis Delluc was an Impressionist French film director, screenwriter and film critic.
La Souriante Madame Beudet is a short French impressionist silent film made in 1923, directed by pioneering avant-garde cinema director Germaine Dulac. It stars Germaine Dermoz as Madame Beudet and Alexandre Arquillière as Monsieur Beudet. It is considered by many to be one of the first truly "feminist" films. It tells the story of an intelligent woman trapped in a loveless marriage.
French impressionist cinema refers to a group of French films and filmmakers of the 1920s.
Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to film theory, criticism, and production, with origins in Paris in the 1920s. The Surrealist movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Philippe Soupault and André Breton’s 1920 book collaboration Les Champs magnétiques is often considered to be the first Surrealist work, but it was only once Breton had completed his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 that ‘Surrealism drafted itself an official birth certificate.’
The Seashell and the Clergyman is a 1928 French experimental film directed by Germaine Dulac, from an original scenario by Antonin Artaud. It premiered in Paris on 9 February 1928. The film is associated with French Surrealism.
La Fête espagnole is a 1920 French silent film directed by Germaine Dulac and written by Louis Delluc. It was cited by critic and film historian Georges Sadoul as being first in ushering in French impressionist cinema.
Gaston Modot was a French actor. For more than 50 years he performed for the cinema working with a number of great French directors.
Ève Francis was an actress and film-maker. She was born in Belgium but spent most of her career in France. She became closely associated with the writer Paul Claudel, and she was married to the critic and film-maker Louis Delluc.
Women Surrealists are women artists, photographers, filmmakers and authors connected with the surrealist movement, which began in the early 1920s.
Marie Epstein was an actress, scenarist, film director, and film preservationist. Her career is distinguished by three important collaborations. Throughout the 1920s, she acted in and wrote scenarios for films directed by her brother, Jean Epstein. From the 1920s through the early 1950s, she collaborated with the director Jean Benoît-Lévy on sixteen films, serving variously as a writer, assistant director, and co-director. From the early 1950s to her retirement in 1977, Epstein served as a film preservationist at the Cinémathèque française.
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
The Studio des Ursulines is a cinema in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, at No.10, Rue des Ursulines. It is one of the oldest cinemas in Paris to have kept its facade and founder's vision: to offer a venue for art and experimental cinema. Gilles Renouard of Paris Cinéphile describes it as 'an astonishing experience' for its nostalgic associations and being able to be within 3 metres of the screen if you sit in the balcony. It has 1 screen.
Dominique Schneidre is a French novelist.
Lilian Constantini was a French silent actress in the 1920s and 1930s.
Charles Schneider was a French businessman. He served as the Chairman of Schneider Electric from 1942 to 1960.
Narjiss Nejjar is a Moroccan filmmaker and screenwriter. Her film Les Yeux Secs was screened at Cannes in 2003.
Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville, born Marie Anne Françoise Mareau, was a French film director, best known for her short documentary films about Algeria. She was the partner of director Germaine Dulac from the 1920s until Dulac's death in 1942.
Jeanne-Caroline Augusta Violet Dussap was a French writer who wrote under the pseudonym of Guy Chantepleure or Guy de Chantepleure. She is best remembered for her novel Ma conscience en robe rose (1895), which was awarded a Montyon Prize in 1896.
References
Dulac, Germaine (1994). Écrits sur le cinéma : (textes réunis par Prosper Hillairet). Éditions Paris Expérimental. ISBN2-9500635-5-1
Williams, Alan Larson (1992). Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-76268-8.
Williams, Tami Michelle (2007). Beyond Impressions: The Life and Films of Germaine Dulac from Aesthetics to Politics. PhD thesis. University of California Los Angeles.
Further reading
Dozoretz, Wendy (1982). Germaine Dulac: Filmmaker, Polemicist, Theoretician. Diss., New York University, 362 pp.
Ford, Charles. Germaine Dulac: 1882 – 1942, Paris: Avant-Scène du Cinéma, 1968, 48 p. (Serie: Anthologie du cinéma; 31)
Katz, Ephraim, Fred Klein, Ronald Dean Nolan (2005). The Film Encyclopedia; (5th edition). New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN0-06-074214-3.
Williams, Tami (2014). Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. University of Illinois Press. ISBN978-0-252-07997-9
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