This beautifully restored and tinted print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum is the earliest of Dulac's features in our series. It is based on an idea by Irène Hillel-Erlanger, the poet and writer with whom she had collaborated on four earlier features (none extant) and founded her first production company, DH Films. La belle dame sans merci is Lola de Sandoval, an actress hardened by youthful disappointment into a woman who deliberately breaks the hearts of men. Dulac explores the web of desires and tensions that arise between Lola, her rich protector d'Amaury, his wife, and various secondary characters including the wife's suitor, her son, and his fiancée. Not only does she evoke empathic understanding for both Lola and d'Amaury's wife, but the havoc that Lola wreaks on the family is presented as a lesson in female independence. Speaking about the film, Dulac said it was not the characters' actions that were important, but “the moments where the soul turns inward, this flux and reflux of the emotions” that only cinema can express.

Christophe Wall-Romana is a UC Berkeley doctoral student writing on cinema's influence on French experimental poetry.