Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac was a French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic who was born in Amiens and moved to Paris in early childhood. She studied music, painting and theater and developed an interest in socialism and feminism. She married Louis-Albert Dulac, an agricultural engineer, in 1905 and started writing for feminist magazines such as La Française and La Fronde. She also pursued her interest in still photography, which led her to filmmaking. With the help of her husband and friend, she founded a film company and directed a few commercial works before slowly moving into Impressionist and Surrealist territory. She is best known today for her Impressionist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madam Beudet, 1922,23), and her Surrealist experiment, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928). Her films explored themes such as gender, sexuality, psychology and social critique. She also wrote extensively on film esthetics and advocated for cinema as an independent art form. Her career as a filmmaker suffered after the introduction of sound film and she spent the last decade of her life working on newsreels for Pathé and Gaumont. She also became the president of the Fédération des ciné-clubs, a group that promoted and presented the work of new young filmmakers, such as Joris Ivens and Jean Vigo. She also taught film courses at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie on the rue de Vaugirard. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris in 1942. She was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. She is regarded as one of the pioneers of French avant-garde cinema and a major figure in feminist cinema history.