Media Affects in Dulac’s La Cigarette

Abstract

With sensuality and innovation, French cinéaste Germaine Dulac illuminated the flaws in bourgeoise relationships. Her earliest extant film La Cigarette (1919) exposes the self-contempt that marriage breeds as it follows a husband’s suicidal mission. Fixated on living an “ideal,” patriarchal marriage, the husband falls into despair when his wife refuses to stay at home. His obsession reflects Sara Ahmed’s notion of happiness as a social obligation rather than a sincere feeling (The Promise of Happiness 2010). Beyond the diegesis, Dulac’s creative process and Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the socio-technical climate’s influence on the psyche dovetail. Dulac aimed to transform the “unique ratios of sense perception” that McLuhan analyzes in The Medium is the Massage (41), and she succeeded by deploying all the technology at her disposal. In La Cigarette, color filters, iris lenses, and typographical variations collapse the happy marriage and wife-as-object norms. This disruption occurs most notably as the female body engages with music. Aurality along with visual-verbal texts exemplify what I am calling “media affects,” or the affective responses that emerge from Dulac optimizing her medium. This reading of La Cigarette synthesizes a media theory of perception (McLuhan), the affective object (Ahmed), and existing research on Dulac’s cinematography.