Toward the Development of a Modern "Impressionist" Cinema: Germaine Dulac's La Belle Dame sans merci (1921) and the Deconstruction of the Femme Fatale Archetype

In the post-World War I climate of shifting aesthetic and social hierarchies, Germaine Dulac played a central role in the development of a modern "impressionist" and politically progressive cinema. In contrast to its mythical designation, "les années folles" (the roaring '20s), in France of the 1920s there was a deep fissure between women's desires to continue their wartime experience of liberty on the homefront, and the official moral discourse of neonatalism, which dictated conservative perceptions of class, gender, and sexuality. As a writer of women's portraits and reviewer of modernist and reformist theater for the Women's Progress movement journal La Francaise (1906-13), Dulac became a socialist and moderate feminist. Influenced by new tendencies in symbolist theater, impressionist music, and modern dance, she pioneered new cinematic strategies and techniques ranging from reflexive narrative structures and performance styles to symbolic technical effects and abstract visual associations. These permitted her to communicate her progressive social ideals through a symbolist network based on "suggestion," which became the crux of the politically driven approach that she would term "impressionist."

It is in light of postwar France's complex social context and the tension between art and industry that we can best understand Dulac's approach to the new medium. That is, her impassioned exploration of its infinite formal possibilities to promote a progressive politics within a conservative social context. It is from this same perspective that she sought to fashion a more critical spectator and a more stable and flexible industry. For instance, Dulac played a founding role in the creation and elaboration of a film culture through the cine-club movement, to which she further contributed through her prolific writings and lectures to both popular and elite publics. She also undertook numerous corporative initiatives to strengthen the French cinema in the face of Hollywood domination, as well as to defend the film director's status as auteur, or what she termed the "artiste créateur" (artist creator) within the industry.¹

Figure 1.

Germaine Dulac

All these elements were integral parts of her filmmaking strategy. It was in this constantly shifting context that Dulac developed her cinematic ideal in her commercial and avant-garde films using a wide variety of approaches, from Impressionism (1919-28) and Surrealism (1927) to abstract cinema (1929), before turning to the domain of nonfiction filmmaking (1930-42). She also developed a number of experimental film strategies to reconfigure and subvert formal, narrative, and generic codes (caricature, parody, mise-en-abyme, technical effects, multiple endings) for the purpose of social critique and the expression of her discourse on gender and sexuality, as well as a means of exploding or analyzing the film from within.

Thus, in their appropriate context, my work examines the constituent parts of Dulac's various strategies and traces the evolution of her conception of cinema as it evolved from figurative to abstract. It is important to give an account of the production and social context in which Dulac worked so that we may understand how she negotiated art and industry, developing in the process her notion of aesthetics as a means of social criticism.

Film historians have separated Dulac's cinema into commercial and avant-garde works, with distinct and contradictory goals (entertainment versus contemplation and enlightenment). This is perhaps due to their use of Hollywood, in its most monolithic sense, as a reference point for a commercial entertainment-based cinema; or, on the contrary, due to their view of the avant-garde as a formalist, apolitical cinema, whose primary interest is its aesthetics. My larger project problematizes this distinction and emphasizes the continuity of Dulac's films by examining her cinema as a whole. Dulac's own conception of a single integrated cinema was crucial to determining her relationship to the French industry, the breadth of her cine-club and corporative activism, as well as the inventiveness of her filmmaking strategy. While it is important to recognize those...