Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

1. "How I Became a Film Director": Dulac's Early Life and Pre-Filmmaking Career

9 Chapter 1 “How I Became a Film Director” Dulac’s Early Life and Pre-Filmmaking Career Pierre de Coulevain [nom de plume of Jeanne Philomène Laperche] observes that our life, since childhood, is filled with desires, aspirations, facts, and encounters that, despite their disparate appearance, are very closely related. . . . and that all lead us, sooner or later, to our destiny, to the real role we must play, and for which we are truly created. . . . Looking back I now realize that everything, all of my joys and dominant tastes, fit together to form this art. . . . that all my trials, all my projects and experiments, were part of an unconscious apprenticeship, and that the directing career to which I am devoted is the true response to my desires, the synthesis of my faculties. —Germaine Dulac, “Comment je suis devenue ‘metteur en scène’ cinématographique ” (1924) Belle Époque Paris (1890–1914), where Dulac came of age, was the epicenter of all that was modern in art, science, and social politics. These developments ranged from the renovation of the literary, plastic, and performance arts (poetry, novel, theater, painting, haute-couture, pantomime, and dance), to the elaboration of grand scientific theories (Marie Curie on radioactivity, De Vries on genetic mutation, Rutherford on atomic structure) and revolutionary technological advances (electric lights, phonographs, horseless carriages, airplanes, and moving pictures). They also entailed a fundamental modernization of social attitudes, and research disciplines (political science, sociology), including a positivist (and counter-positivist) turn in philosophy (Nietzsche 10 P A R T I / “ H O W I B E C A M E A F I L M D I R E C T O R ” on human creativity, Henri Bergson on vitalism, duration, and perception), as well as the secularization of women’s education under the Third Republic. In the 1924 Ève magazine interview quoted in the chapter epigraph, Dulac aphoristically depicts her youth in this dynamic environment as the foundation for her film career.1 While this path may not have been as inevitable as she suggests, a study of her early life reveals many of the key persons, events, and tendencies that shaped her unique approach to filmmaking. While Dulac’s diverse film career may appear disjointed or incoherent at first glance, read in context it proves to be both fluid and complex, and a mark of her extraordinary ability to move both with and against the currents of her time. Original sources, from private and public archives, indicate a great deal about her early life, from her struggle for emancipation and the affirmation of her feminism and homosexuality, and her first creative and professional activities to how she came to create a cinema that was at once visually engaging and politically effective. “Entirely Parisian”: Family Origins as Model and Counterpoint Central to understanding Dulac is an appreciation of her family background and social standing, as well as her influential relationship with and marriage (1905–22) to Albert Dulac. Her family was both the source of her exposure to the arts, and their modernist promise, as well as the conservative and traditionalist backdrop against which her nascent activist politics emerged. While scholars have rightly highlighted her privileged social status, Dulac’s tumultuous childhood also shaped her self-reliant personality and the independent social ideals that set her apart among young women of her milieu.2 Pierre Maurice Saisset-Schneider (1849–1921) and Madeleine Claire Waymel (1863–1918) married in 1881. Their first of two children, Germaine Dulac was born Charlotte Élisabeth Germaine Saisset-Schneider on November 17, 1882, in Amiens, in the Somme department of Picardy, in northern France (coincidentally, near modernist fantasy and sci-fi writer Jules Verne). During her childhood, her father, a brigadier general, was stationed in various parts of rural France, from Normandy to the Haute-Loire. During her late teenage years, Dulac’s parents were effectively absent. After the early passing of Dulac’s six-month-old sister, Françoise Adelaide Gabrielle, in 1885, her mother was diagnosed with chronic depression, and spent extended periods at a sanatorium from 1898 until her death in 1918 at age fifty-five.3 While 11 prior accounts suggest that Dulac’s parents passed away at the turn of the century, leading her to seek out a new life in Paris, archival records indicate that they lived through World War I and suggest that she distanced herself from them during her...