Bruce Loeb on Piano Germaine Dulac was a leading figure of the French avant-garde cinema of the twenties-an innovator in film impressionism and, later, surrealism, a passionate film activist and feminist. She is best known today for La Fête espagnole (1919), her masterpiece The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), but this screening of a preserved print from the Cinémathèque Française offers an opportunity to rediscover another of her important films, Ame d'artiste (1925). Coming after her impressionist classics, Ame d'artiste is a melodrama that is enriched by Dulac's heightened sensitivity to meaning and film language. Richard Abel, in French Cinema: The First Wave, cites it as the first French modern studio spectacular, with an international cast and crew (including Russian emigré artists from Films Albatros, see Le Brasier ardent and Casanova), a London locale (created in the studio) and a theatrical setting, all lending the film a cosmopolitan flavor. But the concerns are Dulac's specialité de la maison-the difficult relationships between men and women, and the sacrifices that pass for love in a bourgeois society-so that even the big studio creations-a masked ball, a crowded cafe-are infused with poignancy and irony conveyed in subjective shots and intercutting. The film opens cleverly with a domestic near-murder that turns out to be a stage play, ironic since what will occur in the drama to follow-the story of a famous actress, an aspiring dramatist who loves her, and the playwright's self-sacrificing wife-will not reach these violent proportions, as things rarely do.