Tami Williams has produced an authoritative, scholarly survey of one of France’s pioneer female filmmakers. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (University of Illinois Press) is a fascinating text for cinephiles and Francophiles alike. It may render any subsequent biographical attempts at Dulac as redundant when compared to such a comprehensive study.
An assistant professor at UW-Milwaukee, Williams took exceptional advantage of Dulac’s archives for her definitive account of a polymorphous career as playwright, theater critic and filmmaker, as well as a film lecturer and essayist. She was also a life-long lover of music and a feminist activist.
Williams also makes clear the importance of her book’s title. A Cinema of Sensations is an essential to Dulac’s filmic philosophy, as she identified her movies as a “visual symphony” and stressed an inherent rhythm of images informed by her deep reverence for music. As one of the first avant-garde filmmakers, she captured the lifeblood of cinema through movement and naturalistic settings, all the while avoiding the iron-fisted template of the conventional narrative form. Dulac inspired and helped shepherd forth the work of new filmmakers into the avant-garde, including Jean Vigo who went on to make the renowned L’Atalante (1934), which many consider to be one of the best films ever made.
Dulac was an adamant activist both socially and in the world of cinema. She was prominent in the prestigious film club movement and strove to protect French cinema from the tides of American import in an attempt to preserve a national identity. She also identified auteurism almost a hundred years ago, beating Andrew Sarris to the punch by a country mile.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
But circumstances dictated a rather abbreviated career for her fiction filmmaking, remembered best in The Seashell and the Clergyman (1927). By the early ’30s she was producing newsreels.
The density of Dulac’s life is apparent and she made clear in her overall philosophy: “Let’s learn to watch, to see, to feel—have something to say, and…eyes wide open, not on reflections, but on life itself.”
