Four Films by Germaine Dulac
April 12th, 2025
Veronica is pleased to present four silent films on 16mm by Germaine Dulac at Northwest Film Forum. This program is curated by Aurora San Miguel.
Étude Cinégraphique sur une arabesque (1929)
Disque 957 (1928)
Thème et variations (1928)
La Coquille et le Clergyman (1927)
Germaine Dulac is perhaps best known as an early feminist, socialist filmmaker whose bold experimentation helped legitimize cinema as an art form. In the late 1920s, Dulac embarked on an intense period of radical aesthetic exploration, implementing some of the theories and techniques she had been writing about in her essays on the avant-garde. La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), in which Dulac's direction meets Antonin Artaud's script, leaves realist plot behind as the film's three figures-the clergyman, the officer, and the woman-play out a complex dance of desire, fantasy, and frustration (sometimes interpreted, including by Dulac herself, as an Oedipal drama). Occasionally hailed as the first Surrealist film, its premiere caused a riot by Surrealists who ostensibly criticized it for taming the violence of Artaud's text. For Dulac it was the cadences and visual orchestration that were crucial, as in her more abstract shorts Thèmes et variations, Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, and Disque 957 in the following years.
Synopsis
Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque / 1929 / 7’ 00
A visual structure composed of variations on the arabesque: arcs of light, waterspouts, spider webs, tree buds, flowers and foliage, women's smiles, and arms moving the rhythm of a rocking chair.
Disque 957 / 1928 / 6’ 00
Disque 957, is conceived of as a visual impression in listening to Frédéric Chopin’s Preludes n. 5 and 6.
Thèmes et variations / 1928 / 9’ 00
"I evoke a dancing woman. A woman? No. A bouncing line with harmonious rhythm. I evoke a luminous projection on veils! Precise matter! No. Fluid rhythms. Why should one disregard, on screen, the pleasure that movement brings us in the theatre? Harmony of lines. Harmony of light. Lines, surfaces, volumes evolving directly, without the artifice of evocation, in the logic of its forms, dispossessed of any overly human sense, allowing an elevation towards the abstract, thus giving more space to sensations and to dreams: integral cinema." – Germaine Dulac
La Coquille et le Clergyman / 1927 / 40’ 00
"So cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable." – British Board of Film Censors
Films and stills provided by Light Cone.
