Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

4. Dulac's Aesthetic Matures

124 Chapter 4 Dulac’s Aesthetic Matures In mid-1920s France, a consolidated production environment and a persistent pronatalist conservatism called for yet greater entrepreneurship and more inventive rhetorical strategies on Dulac’s part. In the wake of her separation from Albert, her new romantic and professional partnership with Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville brought with it new liberties, while bolstering her productivity , and the creative complexity of her collaborations during this period. Her films of the mid- to late-1920s, while containing echoes of her own life experiences, offer a new approach to the politics of film form through a highly critical vision of traditional gender roles and hetero-normativity, associated with bourgeois marriage, as well as a critique of the conventions of linear and invisible narration that support it. Dulac’s fiction films from 1923 to 1929 show an increasingly sophisticated integration of contemporary sociopolitical concerns with complex narrative forms. Her maturing aesthetic—the loosening of filmic narration from the constraints of linear plot and heavy subtitling, in favor of wordlessness and visual association—contributed to her efforts to develop a stronger, more effective barrier to political censorship through a more modern, symbolistinspired visual style, one that grows and develops from narrative figuration toward contemplative abstraction. La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923) Dulac’s independent production La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923) marks a turning point in her work. Although not her first feminist film, it is one of the most sophisticated in its portrayal of female subjectivity through specifically cinematic means, ranging from intimate and mobile compositions to 125 associative editing and technical effects. In the fall of 1922, at the suggestion of the playwright André Obey, Charles Delac and Marcel Vandal had offered Dulac the project of directing a film based on the successful avant-garde play by André Obey and Denys Amiel La Souriante Madame Beudet, which had premiered at the Nouveau théâtre a year earlier (April 16, 1921).1 In a letter to Vandal, dated November 8, 1922, Obey wrote “the cinema is what interests me most and, while I am a writer, I would give all of French theater for a small projection room. [ . . . ] Would you allow me to collaborate on [the] production, under the supervision of your director, [ . . . ] I would be happy if it were Madame Germaine Dulac!” Obey, a sportswriter as well as a lover of music and cinema, worked with Dulac to adapt the script for the screen.2 The film tells the story of Madeleine Beudet (Germaine Dermoz), an intellectually curious young woman with modern aspirations, who seeks to escape from her oppressive marriage to a stodgy accountant, with classic bourgeois tastes (played by the grand boulevard actor Alexandre Arquillère).3 The film’s highly original juxtaposition of diverse classic and modern elements can be traced back to the influence of the realist and symbolist movements upon Dulac, who draws upon a variety of techniques in La Souriante Madame Beudet including associative montage to express her feminist vision, while developing her idea of gesture in movement and rhythm within the image. Shooting on location, natural lighting, and Germaine Dermoz’s understated acting convey the heroine’s bleak, unpromising petit bourgeois marriage. Montage, technical effects, and allusions to symbolist music, painting, and poetry translate her interiority and her modern dreams and desires. The contrasting acting styles and the self-reflexive strategy of mise-en-abyme highlight cinema’s superiority as a medium better able than theater to express Dulac’s ideals. Realism in Madame Beudet: The Provincial Setting As a young woman, Dulac had developed an aversion to the countryside, and it is thus not surprising that in Madame Beudet, she adopts a realist approach to convey her heroine’s dismal provincial existence as directly as possible. While the film takes place almost entirely indoors, emphasizing its female protagonist’s sense of imprisonment, it opens and closes with an impressionistic montage of the then conservative and religious town of Chartres, where it is set. As specified in Dulac’s shooting script, the prologue contains a series of austere shots of a “hazy church tower,” a “deserted path,” an “isolated 126 P A R T I I / D U L A C ’ S A E S T H E T I C M A T U R E S canal,” a “courthouse,” and a “prison entrance”—all shots of equal lengths taken from low or level camera angles, before moving...