Happy Birthday, Germaine Dulac! Born today in 1882 as Germaine Saisset-Schneider, this French journalist, film theorist, critic, screenwriter, producer and pioneering avant-garde film director was a feminist filmmaker of the impressionist school.
She had made close to thirty fiction films throughout her career, as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels.
Dulac was born in Amiens to an upper-middle-class family of a career military officer. They later moved to Paris early during her childhood.
Since her father's job required the family to frequently move between small garrison towns, Dulac 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.
Before her filmmaking career, Dulac wrote articles on the editorial staff for the radical feminist magazine, La Fronde, from 1900 to 1913.
It was here where she interviewed a plethora of established women in France with the intention of solidifying women's roles in French society and politics
During that time, Dulac married Louis-Albert Dulac in 1905. He was an agricultural engineer who also came from an upper-class family.
Four years later, Dulac began writing for La Française, a feminist magazine edited by French journalist and feminist Jane Misme where she eventually became the drama critic. She also began to pursue her interest in still photography, which preceded her initial entry into filmmaking.
In 1914, it was with the help of Dulac's husband and friend, French actress, dancer, and director Stacia Napierkowska, of whom caused her to become interested in film.
Through Napierkowska, Dulac founded a film company and directed a few commercial works before slowly moving into Impressionist and Surrealist territory.
The two women later 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 Paris to the provincial nature of rural France, a common dichotomy in her films.
Soon after her return to France, Dulac decided to start a film company. She, along with French writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, then founded D.H. Films, with financial support provided by Dulac's husband.
Over time, company produced several films between 1915 and 1920, all directed by Dulac and written by Hillel-Erlanger.
In 1920, Dulac and her husband were divorced. After that, she began a relationship with French director and assistant director Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville that lasted until the end of her life.
Afterwards Malleville, her constant companion from the time of her divorce from Albert Dulac in 1920, donated all of Germaine's papers to BiFi, and it is from these papers that her less well-known work on newsreels can be reconstructed.
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:
• 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.
Dulac continued her career in filmmaking, producing both simple commercial films and complex pre-Surrealist narratives such as two of her most famous works.
The first is the film of which she is best known. This was the fifty-four-minute 1923 French silent black and white drama short film 'La Souriante Madame Beudet' ('The Smiling Madame Beudet').
The short French impressionist silent film starred Germaine Dermoz as Madame Beudet and Alexandre Arquillière as Monsieur Beudet.
It tells the story of the eponymous intelligent woman (Dermoz) trapped in a loveless marriage to a slovenly, unromantic man (Arquillière). The short is considered by many to be one of the first truly "feminist" films.
The second is the forty-four-minute experimental French silent black and white short film 'La Coquille et le Clergyman' ('The Seashell and the Clergyman').
Both of Dulac's films were released before the epoch-making twenty-one-minute 1928 Franco-Spanish silent black and white surrealist fantasy/short film 'Un Chien Andalou' ('An Andalusian Dog') by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
However, 'The Seashell and the Clergyman' is sometimes credited as the first Surrealist film.
It was Dulac's controversial collaboration with French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director Antonin Artaud of which led to a row with the Surrealists.
Such scholars as Israeli writer, journalist and filmmaker Ephraim Katz, considered Dulac first and foremost an Impressionist filmmaker.
Dulac's goal of "pure cinema" and some of her works inspired the French Cinema pur (or non-narrative) film movement.
Her other important experimental films include several shorts based on music These were 'Disque(s) 957' (1928/29; based on Chopin) and 'Thème et variations' (1928/29; classical music), and others from the same period.
In 1929, Dulac was awarded the Legion of Honor in recognition of her contributions to the film industry in France. This is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil.
With the advent of sound film, Dulac's career shifted. From 1930 on, she supervised the production of newsreel documentaries for Pathé-Journal, France Actualities-Gaumont and Le Cinema au Service de l'Histoire.
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 later passed in obscurity during the German occupation. This was in Paris, France on July 20, 1942. Dulac was 59.
Dulac had written on cinema as a critic and theorist, championing film as a medium distinct from the other visual arts.
Well-known in her time, both as creator and enabler, always well-regarded by film specialists, she was however in need of rediscovery when feminist film historians in recent years began to explore the work of the very few women directors active before 1939.
Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory.
One can hardly argue with her point that if only cinema had been invented a hundred years earlier, even the most naively-filmed images of the French Revolution would give us invaluable historical evidence.
Dulac didn't choose filmmaking as her first career, nor did she believe that directing was a job for women.
Nevertheless, she made approximately thirty films, had her own production company, wrote numerous articles on both practical and theoretical aspects of filmmaking.
Through these, Dulac gave impassioned lectures to her peers and to the public, founded and edited a cinema journal, and was cofounder and president of the French Federation of Ciné-Clubs.
Dulac's filmmaking alternated between commercial narratives with a feminist perspective and some of the most formally innovative avant-garde works of the 1920s; she concluded her career producing newsreels.
Many of her films embody a unique critical perspective on the social position of women and offer wry commentary on the gender politics of marriage, adultery, and romance.
Versatile, prolific, opinionated, and politically engaged, Dulac was a tireless practitioner and advocate of film as an independent art form.
She was part of a movement, sometimes known as impressionism or the First Avant-Garde, made up of filmmakers and theorists who held that cinema was the “seventh art,” not a mere outgrowth of theater or literature.
One of their aims was to make manifest the peculiarly cinematic qualities of film as a medium. They tried to use cinema not only to tell stories but first and foremost to elicit sensations in their viewers.
As a feminist, a socialist, a commercial director as well as a champion of the avant-garde and the newsreel, and as a lesbian artist in 1920s and 1930s France, Dulac was a complex figure whose place in film history has recently begun to be reexamined.
Dulac had been active from 1915–1934.
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