Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac (born November 17, 1882, Amiens, France—died July 20, 1942, Paris) was a French filmmaker known for her impressionistic and experimental silent films, including The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).

Early life

Dulac’s father was a brigadier general who held posts in different parts of France, and her mother entered a sanatorium for depression in 1885 after the death of Dulac’s six-month-old sister. She was mostly raised by her grandmother Jeanne Schneider and uncle Raymond Saisset-Schneider in Paris. Dulac displayed an early interest in the arts, with the operas of Richard Wagner a notable influence.

From 1898 to 1902 Dulac studied at a Catholic boarding school at a convent in St. Étienne, France, after which she returned to Paris. Her grandmother had died in 1901, but her uncle was active in socialist politics and a patron of the arts, and in 1904 he introduced her to the agricultural engineer Albert Dulac, whom she married in 1905. Albert was also a devotee of the arts and introduced her to the work of such philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson.

From 1906 to 1913 Dulac interviewed famous women and wrote theater criticism for the feminist journal La Francaise. She also wrote plays during this period; only one, L’Emprise (1907), about a society woman who becomes a feminist, was produced.

Silent cinema

Dulac began an affair with Polish-French actress and dancer Stacia Napierkowska in 1912. She separated from Albert in 1913, but they maintained a cordial relationship. When World War I broke out, Albert was sent to the front, and Dulac threw herself into charitable work for war refugees. Dulac, however, spent much of 1914 with Napierkowska in Rome, where the actress was making a film. Dulac’s experience with Napierkowska at the film studio shifted her artistic focus from theater to film.

Dulac’s affair with Napierkowska ended in 1915; she then became involved with the writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger. The next year Dulac, Hillel-Erlanger, and Albert formed the production company Les Films DH. Dulac’s first film as a director was Les Soeurs ennemies (1917; now lost). After Hillel-Erlanger’s death from tuberculosis in 1920, Les Films DH made only three more films, the last an unfinished adaptation of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther.

After such major studios as Pathé and Gaumont declined after World War I, smaller studios leased their facilities to independent companies. This method of film production lent itself to experimentation, encouraging the development of the avant-garde film movement known as Impressionism (led by Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Louis Delluc, and Abel Gance).

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

For Dulac, cinema was psychological exploration revealed through naturalistic acting. “It seemed silly to place a character in a situation without penetrating the secret domain of his inner life,” she said. Dulac saw cinema as an art, like music: “Musicians perform sounds in movement. Cineastes can perform images in movement.”

Dulac’s earliest surviving film, La Cigarette (1919), concerns an archaeology professor who marries a much younger woman. In La fête espagnole (1920), two men fight to the death over a Spanish dancer who cares nothing for them or their conflict.

Dulac divorced Albert in 1922. The previous year she had met Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville, who became her partner until Dulac’s death and, beginning with the crime serial Gossette (1923), an assistant director on many of Dulac’s films.

In The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), the title character (played by Germaine Dermoz) is trapped in a marriage to a boorish husband (Alexandre Arquillière) who often makes a tasteless joke about suicide by pointing an unloaded pistol at his head. Dulac embodies the conflict between the two with the restrained quiet acting of Dermoz and the broad, menacing performance of Arquillière. Dulac also used a wide range of cinematic techniques—from extreme close-ups to dream sequences with double exposures and stop motion.

Dulac turned to more commercial projects, such as The Devil in the City (1924), a satire set in the Middle Ages, and The Soul of an Actress (1925), a love triangle in the world of the theater. Her next film, The Folly of the Brave (1926), adapted a short story by Maxim Gorky about life among the Roma. Dulac filmed it on a bare-bones budget in south-central France with nonprofessional actors. Her contract gave her “complete artistic freedom,” and she felt the film was her attempt at a “visual symphony.”

After a commercial project, Antoinette Sabrier (1927), a story of a love triangle, Dulac made two short films. The first, Invitation to a Voyage (1927), was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s poem of the same name. While her husband is on a business trip, a woman goes to a nautical-themed nightclub, a dreamlike space where romantic fantasies and desires can be indulged.

The second short, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), is widely considered the first Surrealist film, predating Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Dramatist and actor Antonin Artaud, famed for the “theater of cruelty,” wrote the script, about a clergyman’s lust for the wife of a general. Dulac evoked the clergyman’s mental state in a whirl of sexual and emotional imagery. The film caused a tumult at its premiere, with Artaud reportedly calling Dulac a cow and others loudly defending the film. Accounts, however, differ as to whether it was Artaud or Surrealist poet Andre Breton who shouted the insult, or whether they or Dulac were even at the screening. The film was banned in Britain, where the censor board said, “This film is so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”

Dulac’s last commercial feature was Princesse Mandane (1928), an adventure story about a kidnapped princess. She then made three short experimental films centered on dance and music: Disque 957 (1928), Themes and Variations (1928), and Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque (1929).

Sound cinema, the Popular Front, and ciné-clubs

As the era of silent cinema was ending, Dulac made her last fiction films: six shorts for Columbia Music and Isis Films with accompanying soundtracks from popular and classical recordings. She then started a newsreel company, France-Actualités, which made weekly newsreels and documentaries for the Gaumont studio from 1932 to 1935. Her first sound feature was the documentary Cinema in the Service of History (1935), a compilation of archival film from 1895 to 1935, with an emphasis on the social rupture of World War I.

With the election of the French Popular Front socialist movement in 1936, Dulac became the director of the film division of Mai 36, a government-backed cultural association. The most notable film developed under the auspices of Mai 36 was Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938), about the French Revolution.

Dulac was active in cinema beyond her work as a filmmaker. From 1919 until her death, she was treasurer of the Société des auteurs de films (Society of Film Authors), a union for directors and screenwriters. In 1921 she and fellow filmmaker Abel Gance were vice presidents of the first ciné-club (film society), Le Club des amis du septième art (The Club of Friends of the Seventh Art). The ciné-clubs fostered appreciation for film as a distinct art form and championed avant-garde film. In 1929 Dulac became the first president of the French Federation of Ciné-Clubs.