Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations by Tami Williams

Abstract

Williams, Tami. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Chicago: UP of Illinois, 2014. ISBN 978-0-252-03847-1. Pp. 314. $28. Standard histories of French filmmaking long associated Germaine Dulac (1882– 1942) with The Seashell and the Clergyman (1927), the visual dreamscape scripted by Antonin Artaud hailed as the first surrealist film, and with the associative, symbolfueled Smiling Madame Beudet (1923).While scholars Sandy Flitterman-Lewis andAlain and Odette Virmaux made strides in rehabilitating Dulac, who was arguably the Third Republic’s most important woman filmmaker alongside Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), their partial portrayals fell far short of the extraordinary archival reconstruction performed here. Using documents made public in 1996 and tracking down prints of all extant features and shorts Dulac shot between 1916 and 1936, Williams delivers primary scholarship of the highest order. Her jargon-free prose blends biographical narrative, institutional histories of Belle Époque feminism and syndicalism, economic and industrial considerations, as well as close analyses of films that survived and reconstructions of those that did not.Dulac emerges as a socially committed journalistcritic , an astute film theoretician, and a subversive yet diplomatic creator who braved considerable prejudice as a homosexual and as a woman.Williams notes the privileged background of Dulac (born Schneider, her family headed the metallurgy concern at Le Creusot) and the nontraditional marital arrangement she enjoyed with Catholic freethinker Albert Dulac even as she pursued liaisons with actress Stacia Napierkowska and onetime production associate Irène Hillel-Erlanger.Attracted in equal measure as a theater-goer and dramatist to Lugné-Poë’s symbolism and to Antoine’s realism (41), Dulac looked primarily to modern dance (Fuller, Duncan) and post-romantic music (Debussy) to conceive a“pure”cinema predicated on gesture, movement, and rhythm. For all its abstraction and self-reflexivity, this view of cinema remained bound to ordinary social life, particularly, argues Williams, to those gender norms that screenplays from La cigarette (1919) to La princesse Mandane (1928) consistently undermine. A pioneer in the interwar ciné-club movement and international documentary circuit (she shepherded early projects by Jean Vigo and Jean Painlevé), Dulac co-founded, in 1936, the storied Cinémathèque française.Williams reappraises the maligned newsreel years with Gaumont and France-Actualités, underscoring the several innovations Dulac brought to the musical short (disques illustrés); to sports coverage (dailies for Le tour de France [1932] saw national distribution, reducing the temporal gap between the event and its transmission); and to the compilation film (Le cinéma au service de l’histoire,1935).Her equivocalVichy-era shorts lauding Philippe Pétain,arguesWilliams, show a surprisingly conservative turn toward political accommodation while reflecting the national consensus circa 1940–41. At times, the book’s monographic focus hides from view other players of note: readers unfamiliar with interwar film comment might wonder whether, Dziga Vertov aside, anyone in the 1920s save Dulac thought to write about gesture, movement, and rhythm in film. A Cinema of Sensations is nonetheless an impressive achievement. It establishes Dulac as no less a crucial architect of France’s 244 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 245 flourishing yet economically-embattled cinema culture than Henri Langlois, Louis Delluc, or André Bazin. Retrospectively, in light of this groundbreaking, generously documented study, it is perhaps their achievements that should be compared to hers. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Albanese, Ralph. Racine à l’école républicaine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. ISBN 9782 -343-01839-3. Pp. 285. 29 a. Albanese explores the same question that he posed in earlier monographs on Molière, La Fontaine, and Corneille: how did the French educational system after the Revolution appropriate and nationalize a seventeenth-century writer, in this case Racine? Racine would appear to be the most difficult classical author to assimilate into “l’école républicaine,” given the tragedian’s association with monarchist and religious values, precisely the opposite of what a democratic and secular school system should inculcate.Yet Albanese shows a remarkable plasticity to Racine’s works, which can serve a variety of moral purposes depending on the particular value that the pedagogue wishes to highlight—e.g., maternal virtue (Andromaque), the...