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77 Chapter 3 Negotiating Art and Industry in the Postwar Context In the wake of World War I, the “war to end all wars,” and amid large-scale economic and humanitarian recovery efforts, peace did not usher in a blithe and tranquil return to France’s Belle Époque. In a postwar climate of shifting social and aesthetic hierarchies, Dulac played a founding role in the creation of a new, aesthetically groundbreaking, and socially engaged cinema. The 1920s—known mythically as les années folles (the crazy years)—were marked by major social fissures. There was a tremendous gap between women’s desires to maintain their wartime experience of liberty and the official postwar moral discourse of pronatalism, which dictated conservative social conceptions of class, gender, and sexuality. A socialist and moderate feminist with a predilection for modern artistic tendencies, Dulac pioneered new cinematic strategies and techniques ranging from reflexive narrative structures and performance styles to symbolic technical effects and abstract visual associations. These allowed her to communicate her progressive social ideals through an elaborate signifying network based on “suggestion.”1 We can best understand Dulac’s approach to the new medium in light of France’s complex postwar social context and an amplified tension between art and industry. She explored with passion the cinema’s infinite formal possibilities to promote a progressive politics within a conservative social context , one that authorizes, reflects, and empowers her own evolving conjugal situation and life choices (namely, her budding love affair with Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville, whom she met in 1921, and her legal separation from Albert in 1922).2 It is from this same perspective that she sought to fashion a more critical spectator and a more stable and flexible industry. To this end, Dulac played a founding role in the creation and elaboration of a film culture 78 P A R T I I / N E G O T I A T I N G A R T A N D I N D U S T R Y I N T H E P O S T W A R C O N T E X T through the ciné-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.3 All of these elements were integral to 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 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. The two chapters in part 2 of this book examine Dulac’s various strategies and trace the evolution of her conception of cinema as it evolved from figurative to abstract. What follows here is an account of the production and social context in which Dulac worked, so 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, particularly in France, have tended to separate Dulac’s cinema into commercial and avant-garde works, with distinct and contradictory goals (narrative immersion and escapism versus abstract contemplation and edification or enlightenment). This is perhaps owing to a view of Hollywood, in its most monolithic sense, as a reference point for a commercial entertainment -based cinema; or, on the contrary, owing to a view of the avant-garde as a formalist, apolitical cinema, whose primary interest is its aesthetics. Dulac’s conception of a single integrated cinema was crucial to determining her relationship to the French industry and the breadth of her ciné-club and corporative activism, as well as the inventiveness of her filmmaking. While it is important to recognize those aspects that resisted assimilation, a global view of her films allows a better comprehension of the interconnectedness of her filmmaking and activism, and it permits...

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