About Me
"The visual symphony which I dream of creating will escape all literary logic in order to work, as a musician does, only with feelings."
Germaine Dulac was born on 17 November 1882 into a cultured, haute bourgeois environment: her father was a cavalry officer, her mother a sophisticated and intelligent woman with a lively appreciation of the arts. When her parents died she moved to Paris and combined her interests in socialism and feminism with a career in journalism. From 1909 to 1913 she worked on the staff of one of France’s first feminist publications, La Française (founded in 1906), where she interviewed accomplished women artists and wrote drama criticism.
Dulac also pursued her interest in still photography and by 1910 was convinced of the evocative power of the art, of its capability to do much more than simply reproduce objective reality. ‘Little by little my camera was perfected, the lenses were made more precise, and I arrived at the observation that it isn’t enough simply to capture reality; something else is necessary in order to respect it entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere and to make its moral meaning perceptible through the care taken with angles and framing.’ She began to be interested in moving images ‘not for what they were at the time, but with the intuition of what they could become.’
In 1918 Dulac directed Ames de fous, a four-hour film divided into six episodes. The film seeks to reconcile two contradictory modes of thought and two conflicting images of woman. The film posits a reciprocity between two notions of ‘the feminine’: between ‘woman’ as a metaphor for the past and future, and ‘woman’ as a social construction, composed of varied social discourses on femininity. It is this kind of reflection that would be most fully achieved in the film that takes explorations of femininity as its central concern, The Seashell and the Clergyman. For Dulac, the ideal film would use character merely as a starting point; the real material of the film was to be pure sensation: ‘The visual symphony which I dream of creating someday will use fewer characters; it will go further in terms of the play of light, the clash or the union of objects and fleeting expressions. It will escape all literary logic in order to work, as a musician does, only with feelings.’
Dulac made The Seashell and the Clergyman in 1927. Based on a screenplay by Antonin Artaud, the film was an attempt to give concrete, objective form to human thought processes and fantasies through a studied organisation of images which evolved their own logic: a logic unconstrained by the conventions of narrative coherence and free to explore the evocative powers of the image. Artaud wanted to create a film that emphasized the visual: ‘It is a film of pure images. The meaning must emerge from the very impact of these images. There is no psychoanalytical, metaphysical, or even human meaning underlying them. The film describes true states of mind without any attempt at clarification or demonstration.’
Too much has been made of Artaud’s dissatisfaction with Dulac’s cinematic execution of his scenario. The famous ‘Madame Dulac is a cow’ episode, which occurred during the film’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on 9 February 1928, seems to be a rather quixotic myth that grew up around the incident itself, partly out of a confusion of memories, partly out of an inability to deal with the film’s revolutionary poetics, partly out of a largely misconstrued clash of personalities. Georges Sadoul’s about-face regarding the film is indicative of this ambiguity. His vehement participation in the riot turned out to be mistaken; some 35 years later he admitted that he had thought the protest was directed against Artaud rather than Dulac. Having discredited the film for a long time on the basis of the ‘Ursulines riot,’ Sadoul was forced to reverse his judgment upon seeing the film in 1962: ‘The film has aged quite well, has acquired power with the passage of time, and deserves its place among the classics of Surrealist cinema.’
During this time Dulac conceived and edited the journal Schémas, whose single issue bears the publication date of February 1927. Through it she continued her pursuit of ‘pure cinema’ by working on the theoretical front; each article that she chose deals with the problems and aesthetics of a cinema from a slightly different perspective. Dulac herself wrote one piece, and produced a running editorial commentary to unify the separate discussions. Articles were contributed by filmmakers, artists, theorists, historians, and critics, including Miklos N. Bandi on Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale.
Dulac also taught film courses and was an inspiring teacher. Henri Fescourt, a close friend of Dulac’s at the time, describes how even those who were sceptical about the medium ‘became taken with the charm of her tender and assured words.’ In appreciation of the energy and devotion that seem so characteristic of Dulac he said, ‘If those who go to the movies today are not simply enlightened professionals, curious amateurs or snobs, it is because Germaine Dulac prepared the way.’
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1990)
