Germaine Dulac
Writings on cinema
Author(s) Germaine Dulac, Scott Hammen, Tami M. Williams, Prosper Hillairet
Format paperback book
Year 2020-2021
Language(s) English
Pages 336 pages
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 led numerous organizations and, at the same time, carried out tireless activity in defense of women's rights.
In her work, Dulac experimented with cinema's new expressive possibilities. She would direct 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 presentations in which Dulac develops, in a passionate style, her conceptions of cinema.
She defends an unhindered 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 this era are addressed, such as the arrival of sound or color, education through film, and more generally a reflection on the image and the modernity that cinema then represented.
This reflection on representation, a true immersion into the cinematic theories of the 1920s, has lost none of its vigor or coherence at a time when new technologies and image practices are emerging.