Germaine Dulac - Career

Career

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 opposed the modernity of the French capital to the provincial nature of rural France, a common dichotomy in her films. 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 soeurs ennemies (1915/16; Dulac's first film), Vénus Victrix, ou Dans l'ouragan de la vie (1917), Géo, le mystérieux (La vraie richesse, 1916), and others.

Dulac's first major success was Âmes des 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 most 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.

In 1921, Dulac reflected on a meeting with D.W. Griffith in an article she wrote entitled "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.

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 Madam Beaudet", 1922/23) and La Coquille et le Clergyman ("The Seashell and the Clergyman", 1928). 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. 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.

With the advent of sound film, Dulac's career started its decline. From about 1930 she returned to commercial work, producing newsreels for Pathé and later for Gaumont. She died in Paris on 20 July 1942.