Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet

Abstract

Louis Delluc died in 1924, not yet 34 years old. But in slightly more than a decade and a half of feverish activity, scarcely slowed by the war and a short period of military service, he left behind a considerable body of work. Publishing a prize-winning poem in 1905 while still in school, two years later he had written two one-act comedies and had begun regularly writing drama criticism. In 1910 he began his journalistic career in earnest with the prestigious weekly devoted to the arts, Comoedia Illustre. Subsequently, and often simultaneously, while continuing as a poet and dramatist, he exercised his skills as editor, novelist, short-story writer, film critic, screenwriter, film maker.1 This essay confines itself to Louis Delluc as film critic, a principal preoccupation from 1917 through 1922. Delluc possessed all the qualities of the superb art critic. He was cultured, passionate, sensitive. He had great analytical capacity, an extraordinary sense of detail, an ability for striking verbal expression. And he had himself experienced the excitement and the burden of creation. He was both less and more than a critic. He refused to consider himself