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This chapter explores Germaine Dulac's family background, drawing on personal records, memoirs, and correspondence. Her early upbringing and encounters with certain people, events, and tendencies during France's Belle Époque later impacted Dulac's political and aesthetic views and the many alternatives and choices that shaped her film career. These include the influence of moderate socialism on her views of class, gender, sexuality, and national politics, and the impact of nineteenth-century symbolist and naturalist tendencies on her inventive rhetorical and representational strategies as they contributed to her filmmaking and activism. The chapter examines Dulac's “women's portraits,” as well as her early political activities and nonfiction writings as a pacifist and feminist from 1906 to 1913.

This chapter studies several of Dulac's early narrative Impressionist films, and her ideal of cinema as a spatiotemporally complex universe of symbols—one in which meaning is created through an intertextual network of figurative associations, such as pictorial and rhythmic gesture. Dulac's integral approach, based on life, movement, and rhythm, exemplified in a surviving extract of what is considered the first Impressionist film, La Fête espagnole (1920), is used in a particularly innovative and feminist manner in one of her earliest extant films, La Belle Dame sans merci (1921). Dulac's use of dance as a discursive metaphor disrupts a heteronormative, monogamous, and linear narrative structure, creating a queer subtext in her later films, both commercial and avant-garde.

This chapter illustrates Dulac's gradual shift from scenic naturalism and pictorial symbolism to the use of film-specific technical effects, and a choreography and montage-based notion of “rhythm within and between the images” in her feminist classic La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923), her subversive short L'Invitation au voyage (1927), and in a new restoration of her first surrealist film La Coquille et le clergyman (1927). The chapter also analyzes Dulac's lesser known La Folie des vaillants (1925), which among her narrative films comes closest to fulfilling her ideals of a “visual symphony” and a “pure cinema” free from the conventions of literature and theater.

This chapter traces Dulac's transition to nonfiction filmmaking in the early 1930s, in her work as founding director of one of the most important news reel companies of the period (France-Actualités-Gaumont, 1932–35). It examines the aesthetic and social dimensions of her conception of the newsreel and its capacity for objectivity, as well as its ability to reveal reality and inner meanings beyond that which is visible with the human eye. The chapter also considers Dulac's socially and politically engaged nonfiction films and projects of the Popular Front, particularly her unique newsreel-based, pacifist documentary feature, Le Cinéma au service de l'histoire (1935), which investigates cinema's role as an actor within history.

This chapter focuses on Dulac's wartime activism and literary writings, as well as the debut of her film career—from her first activities as a film producer for Pathé (La Lumière du coeur, 1916) to her first directorial efforts (Soeurs ennemies to Le Bonheur des autres, 1917–18)—and evaluates the historical significance of her incursion into and negotiated course within the French film industry as a female artist and entrepreneur. A close examination of archival sources documenting Dulac's early professional activities provides insight into her humanist egalitarianism, universalism, and her strong belief in the emancipatory potential of art, as well as her early rhetorical strategies.

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby rewriting the plant once again as an opening onto new worlds. In these films the “inorganic” function of vegetality—as linked to and inspiring new forms of technology and new means of sociability—returns in the visual domain, generating an “electric plant” that retains its utopian dimensions and its power to deprioritize the human. Thus avant-garde vegetal cinema ties the plant once again to a tradition of speculation that extends into the production and creation of new media capable of apprehending and imitating the subtle materiality of vegetal being. The “electric plant” brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement. The French experimental cinema discussed in this chapter reinvents the project of imagining vegetal worlds, this time in cinematic contexts. While filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) turn with excitement toward vegetality, other contemporaneous artists, including Colette (1873–1954), re-inscribe the plant into the domain of ordinary experience and human pathos.

This introductory chapter discusses how Germaine Dulac played a groundbreaking role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac directed more than thirty fiction films, many marking new cinematic tendencies, from Impressionist to abstract. A careful study of Dulac's life and work establishes the importance of her voice in the diffusion and legitimization of French film and film culture, as evidenced through her prolific writings and lectures. She also played a prominent role in several cultural organizations such as the Society of Film Authors (SAF), the French Federation of Cine-Clubs (FFCC), the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Educational Cinematographic Institute(IECI), and the League of Nations' International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), among others.

This chapter details the evolution of Dulac's socialist humanist politics under the Popular Front, from her activism and syndicalism or labor union work within the context of the vast cultural movement of Mai '36, to a rather controversial shift that led to her complex political position under the Vichy regime. During this era, from 1936 to 1938, Dulac's activism for the cinema and by way of the cinema blossomed. She undertook several Socialist film projects, and played a major role in restructuring the French film industry and in cultivating a propitious environment for the future of the medium. Her role was central on several fronts, from the nationalization of the industry to the creation of a French cinematheque and a film directors' union.

This concluding chapter explains how Dulac's cinema, in its aesthetic and sociopolitical complexity, is only beginning to be recognized and understood. Dulac studies until recent years had been limited to a few films, and predominantly to a feminist theoretical approach that launched a recovery of this great filmmaker in the Anglophone context. In contrast, in the French context, Dulac's work has long been subject to a depoliticized formalism, where identity politics and gender considerations have only slowly been making their way into film studies. Drawing on various archival materials (manuscript, printed, filmic) and secondary sources, and considering the environment's dynamic sociopolitical context, the chapter further reveals Dulac's films and her filmic ontology of a “pure cinema,” a cinema of suggestion and potentiality.

As a moving art, cinema was linked to dance from its earliest moments and, like dance, held an idealized position for artists of the avant-garde, from the serpentine dance films of Edison and the Lumière brothers to the abstract cinema of the interwar avant-garde. At either end, whether filming a dancing body or creating abstract montages, cinema strove to express, not a new formal image on the flat screen but the dancing effects (and affects) of motion itself. This chapter follows a series of early twentieth-century artistic engagements with cinematic abstraction. Despite varying levels of formal abstraction and representational imagery, these films are no longer concerned with reproducing a world to look upon but now an environment to look through with kinesthetic sensation and desire. In a particularly rich case, Germaine Dulac, outwardly indebted to the dance of Loïe Fuller, became her successor in choreographic cinema, engaging the multisensory body through the medium of abstraction.

This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s contact with the world of cinephilia in Brazil and his links to the European avant-garde. In doing so, it analyzes the film’s style in the light of Germaine Dulac’s emphasis on cinema’s visual rhythms. Rather than providing us with a story or even presenting us with the psychological state of mind among its characters, it shows how Peixoto’s film “thinks” in pictures, movements, and angles, trying to intertwine diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. The chapter this shows how Limite accomplishes what Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms.”