The Films of Germaine Dulac

9/14/03 to 9/30/03

La Belle Dame sans merci, September 28

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

LA MORT DU SOLEIL
Sunday, September 14 5:30 PM
Introduced by Irina Leimbacher. Joel Adlen on Piano. In 1922, Dulac employed sophisticated technical effects and unusual allegorical imagery for this story of a young woman doctor's fight against TB. Part social-issue film, part feminist melodrama whose real conflict is "between an oppressive reality and a liberating imagination."-Irina Leimbacher
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AME D'ARTISTE
Sunday, September 21 5:30
Introduced by Irina Leimbacher. Joel Adlen on Piano. France's first modern studio spectacular explores the off-stage passions of a famous actress.
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THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET AND OTHER FILMS
Tuesday, September 23 7:30
Introduced by Irina Leimbacher. Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Desire, ever fleeting, and the pleasures of its cinematic rendering are central to these three works: The Smiling Madame Beudet, considered by many to be Dulac's masterpiece, using special effects to evoke the frustrations and fantasies of a young wife; a surviving fragment of La Fête espagnole; and L'Invitation au voyage, based on a Baudelaire poem.
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LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
Sunday, September 28 5:30
Neil Brand on Piano. Introduced by Christophe Wall-Romana. A beautifully restored and tinted print of Dulac's 1920 drama of an actress and the havoc she wreaks on a lover's family, explored with Dulac's "emphatic and empathetic portrayal of women's perspectives."-Irina Leimbacher
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THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN AND OTHER FILMS
Tuesday, September 30 7:30
Introduced by Irina Leimbacher. Scripted by Antonin Artaud and sometimes called the first Surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman plays out a complex dance of desire, fantasy, and frustration. With abstract shorts Thèmes et variations, Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, and Disque 957, examples of Dulac's "integral cinema."
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The Films of Germaine Dulac

9/14/03 to 9/30/03

Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) didn't choose filmmaking as her first career, nor did she believe that directing was a job for women. Nevertheless, she made approximately thirty films, had her own production company, wrote numerous articles on both practical and theoretical aspects of filmmaking, gave impassioned lectures to her peers and to the public, founded and edited a cinema journal, and was cofounder and president of the French Federation of Ciné-Clubs. Dulac's filmmaking alternated between commercial narratives with a feminist perspective and some of the most formally innovative avant-garde works of the twenties; she concluded her career producing newsreels. Many of her films embody a unique critical perspective on the social position of women and offer wry commentary on the gender politics of marriage, adultery, and romance.

Versatile, prolific, opinionated, and politically engaged, Dulac was a tireless practitioner and...

Versatile, prolific, opinionated, and politically engaged, Dulac was a tireless practitioner and advocate of film as an independent art form. She was part of a movement, sometimes known as impressionism or the First Avant-Garde, made up of of filmmakers and theorists who held that cinema was the “seventh art,” not a mere outgrowth of theater or literature. One of their aims was to make manifest the peculiarly cinematic qualities of film as a medium. They tried to use cinema not only to tell stories but first and foremost to elicit sensations in their viewers.

As a feminist, a socialist, a commercial director as well as a champion of the avant-garde and the newsreel, and as a lesbian artist in 1920s and 1930s France, Dulac is a complex figure whose place in film history has recently begun to be reexamined. Duty, Deviance, and Desire brings together archival prints of ten of her films made between 1919 and 1929, some of which have never been screened in the United States. It will be accompanied by a symposium on her life and work on Sunday, September 28, at UC Berkeley. (For more information, please see the Film Studies website: http://filmstudies.berkeley.edu)

Irina Leimbacher
Associate Curator, San Francisco Cinematheque

San Francisco Cinematheque members with their membership card will be offered BAM/PFA member ticket prices.

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Duty, Deviance, and Desire: The Films of Germaine Dulac is sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S.
We wish to extend our gratitude to Gaëlle Vidalie, Archival Loans, Cinémathèque Française; Arja Grandia, Archival Loans, Nederlands Filmmuseum; Yann Beauvais and Christophe Bichon, Lightcone, Paris; San Francisco Consulate General of France, Cultural Services; Susan Oxtoby, Cinematheque Ontario; Jytte Jensen, Department of Film and Media, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Karola Gramann, Kinothek Asta Nielsen; William Moritz, B. Ruby Rich, Christophe Wall-Romana, and Tami Williams.
The symposium is presented with the generous support of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Film Studies, French Department, French Studies, and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley.
All prints shown with permission of Lightcone.
Archival and restored prints and musicians for silent films are presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute.

The Films of Germaine Dulac

9/14/03 to 9/30/03

Past Films

LA MORT DU SOLEIL

AME D'ARTISTE

THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET AND OTHER FILMS

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN AND OTHER FILMS