THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET AND OTHER FILMS

Desire, ever fleeting, and the pleasures of its cinematic rendering are central to these three works. Only a fragment remains of La Fête espagnole, a collaboration between Dulac and critic Louis Delluc about a woman who, coveted by two men, chooses a third. In The Smiling Madame Beudet, considered by many to be Dulac's masterpiece, she uses all the cinematic means at her disposal to tell the story of the frustrations and fantasies of a young wife, trapped in a loveless marriage with a boorish husband. Here female desire is inherently deviant and can only be expressed through the imagination. Dulac gives us access to Madame Beudet's inner life through the use of a variety of effects (special lenses, superimpositions, odd angles, a focus on repeated gestures) so that we see and feel the marriage through her eyes. L'Invitation au voyage also takes the point of view of a frustrated wife and suggests the disillusionment inherent in all romantic fantasy. Without intertitles, save an excerpt from the eponymous Baudelaire poem, it evokes the desires of a woman and a sea captain during their brief encounter in a cabaret. Dulac described it as “a suggestion of emotional states” and “a melody of images, not a transposition of actions.”