Germaine Dulac
Écrits sur le Cinéma
Author(s) Germaine Dulac, Prosper Hillairet, Scott Hammen, Tami M. Williams
Format paperback
Language French
Pages 336 pages
Year 2021
Description
A pioneer of cinema, Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) is one of the major figures of the French avant-garde of the 1920s. An important personality, she initiated and headed numerous organizations and, in parallel, led a tireless campaign for the defense of women's rights.
In her work, Dulac experimented with cinema's new expressive possibilities. She directed some twenty films starting in 1916. La Souriante Mme Beudet (1923) and La Coquille et le clergyman (1927), based on Antonin Artaud, are among her landmark films. Les Ecrits sur le cinéma presents another facet of the filmmaker and feminist, Dulac the writer, theorist, lecturer. The publication brings together the principal texts, interviews, and lectures in which Dulac develops, in a passionate style, her conceptions of cinema.
She advocates for an unfettered cinema of creation, attempting to trace the specificities of this new art around the watchword of the French avant-garde: cinema as movement. All the major questions of the era are addressed, such as the advent of sound or color, education through film, and more generally a reflection on the image and the modernity that cinema represented at the time.
This reflection on representation, a true immersion in the film theories of the 1920s, has lost none of its vigor or coherence at a time when new technologies and image practices are emerging.