Film Series: “Germaine Dulac,” Film Society of Lincoln Center, August 24-30, 2018

Germaine Dulac

Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY

August 24-30, 2018

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center website:

“The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York announce Germaine Dulac, a survey of work by the pioneering figure of the French avant-garde and queer cinema, August 24-30.

A feminist and socialist artist and thinker of the 1920s and ’30s, Germaine Dulac directed close to 30 fiction films in her lifetime, playing with narration, montage, and visual effects, and making the case, in both films and writing, for a “pure cinema” approach that took full advantage of the medium’s unique properties.

Despite being frequently overlooked in film history, Dulac’s bold experimentation helped legitimize cinema as an art form that would be on the same footing as painting, dance, theater, and music. For Dulac, only cinema was up to the task of capturing the spirit of a generation of people scarred by World War I who were emancipated by the new freedoms of the 1920s and whose daily lives had been shaped irreversibly by industrialization and social and cultural modernity.

A queer woman, Dulac made films that both explicitly employ and implicitly embody queer aesthetics. Her films such as L’Invitation au voyage and Princesse Mandane use dance and symbolism to subvert gender expectations and explore queerness, a socially taboo topic in the 1920s.    

The survey will feature Dulac’s early work, including the proto-impressionist La Cigarette; the riot-inducing The Seashell and the Clergyman, considered the first surrealist film; the feminist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet; as well as Dulac’s final commercial feature and one of her most explicitly queer films, Princesse Mandane. The series will also include a free talk with Dulac expert Tami Williams to discuss Dulac’s place in the history of cinema.”

For the full line up, click here!