Germaine Dulac
Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ?
Author(s) Germaine Dulac
Format softcover
Language French
Pages 253 pages
Year 2019
Description
Nearly 75 years after its conception, here is the first edition of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? by Germaine Dulac. Composed of the filmmaker's numerous lectures (1925-1939) assembled by her partner Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville, this work illuminates the major role of this pioneer of the French avant-garde, an innovator of modern film theory, who was already theorizing in the 1920s what cinema is.
A highly talented theorist, Germaine Dulac discussed in Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? numerous aspects of the film industry such as public taste, the importance of film clubs, newsreels, and editing. In a chapter of the book specifically dedicated to the avant-garde, she gave her definition of "integral cinema": "Harmony of lines, surfaces, volumes, evolving directly without artifice of evocations, in the logic of their forms stripped of all too human meaning to better rise toward abstraction and give more space to sensations and dreams: such is the integral cinema to which certain filmmakers have devoted themselves."