Reviewed by: Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations by Tami Williams Margaret C. Flinn Tami Williams. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 336pp. Tami Williams’s Germaine Dulac is, as one would guess from its title, an auteur (or more appropriately given the case, auteure!) study. It is also, an exemplary piece of film history—and in spite of its auteur framing, a significant contribution to what one hopes is a burgeoning trend in cinema and media studies of revisionist histories dedicated to the role of women in the film industry. (Williams spends a good deal of time discussing Dulac’s work in the ciné-club movement and film industry beyond her actual directing.) Composed of prose that is clear, logical, and enjoyable to read, this book is essential reading for anyone who has an interest in early French cinema, the Interwar avant-garde, and/or the history of women filmmakers. The book is divided into three parts, each with two chapters, whose titles are fairly self-explanatory: 1. “ ‘How I Became a film Director’: Dulac’s early Life and Pre-Filmmaking Career”; 2. “The Great War and Dulac’s First Films”; 3. “Negotiating Art and Industry in the Postwar Context”; 4. “Dulac’s Aesthetic Matures”; 5. “Fiction, Newsreels, and Social Documentary”; 6. “Popular Front Activism and Vichy.” A full third of the book is dedicated to back matter, not only extensive endnotes and bibliography (including a helpfully isolated list of Dulac’s own publications), but an extremely useful chronology and detailed filmography. The book is a straightforward and fairly quick read, and therefore lends itself well as a case study for a film history methods course, for either undergraduate or graduate students, where cover-to-cover reading of an entire study is beneficial. In this auteur study dedicated to refining the reductionist reputation of an exceptional woman filmmaker and engaged feminist intellectual, a great deal of time is spent elaborating on what constitutes Dulac’s vision (as film theorist and industry leader) and her aesthetic (as a filmmaker). According to Williams, Dulac’s films all bear evidence of a productive dichotomy and [End Page 311] stylistic dualism made up of realist and symbolist tendencies, while her broader vision for film and society is consistently anchored in the belief that film has an integrated social mission and always involves artistic, pedagogical, and commercial concerns. Throughout the book, Williams uses Dulac’s correspondence to shed light on less known or discussed aspects of Dulac’s personal life, including her personal and professional partnerships with Albert Dulac, actress Stasia de Napierkowska, writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, and filmmaker Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville. The early chapters (dealing with the period before Dulac began making films and the early years whose films are for the most part lost) lean especially heavily on such documentation, as well as on Dulac’s published articles—mostly theater criticism in the feminist press. Her Catholic upbringing/formation and her longstanding passion for music (and how the latter manifests itself both in Dulac’s filmmaking and film theoretical writings) are also detailed. Williams’s analyses of Dulac’s characters and plot structures excavate the ways in which Dulac elaborated both explicitly and implicitly feminist representations of women’s lives, even in the face of relatively socially conservative eras (such as the pronatalist post-WWI years, when women were returned to a more limited domestic sphere after maintaining the home front’s workforce during the war). The reconstructive descriptions of lost films as well as the accounts of films unavailable to the average viewer today furnish specialist and early-film buff alike with a much more complete picture of Dulac’s filmmaking than has been available to date. The book’s central chapters include the most extensive analysis of films, both individually and in thematic groupings. Besides the central paradigm of mixed realism and symbolism, which Williams shows to apply to all of Dulac’s filmmaking, she includes thematic discussions of the use of dance, gesture, sport, music, and abstraction. Here a reader’s understanding of Dulac’s two most famous and familiar films, La Souriante Madame Beaudet (1923) and La Coquille et...