The Seashell and the Clergyman

Germaine Dulac (17 November 1882, Amiens, France – 20 July 1942, Paris) was a French film director and early film theorist. Famously, she directed The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), based on a scenario by Antonin Artaud. This film has been credited as the first surrealist film, released shortly before Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. However, other scholars, including Ephraim Katz, consider her an Impressionist filmmaker.

In 1920, at the height of the film Avant-Garde movement, its only female member Germaine Dulac released her tenth film La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which she wrote in collaboration with her friend Irene Hillel-Erlanger, a surrealist poet also known as Claude Lorey. In Hillel-Erlanger’s words La Belle Dame Sans Merci is “une histoire comme il y en a dans la vie de chacun de nous… riche de ces chocs et mouvements intimes qui bouleversent les coeurs et les ames”. This definition is evocative of melodrama, a genre aiming precisely at shattering hearts and souls by means of stories rich in shocks. However, one should not expect to find in Dulac’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci the conventional structures of melodrama.

Dulac never stopped experimenting. This experimentation functioned on three imbricated levels: reworking genres. exploring the possibilities of film language and redefining the representation of subjectivity. Thus, whilst she did make serials, bourgeois melodramas, fantasy and fairy tale films, she did not allow them to rest safely within their generic modalities or molds. Working within these popular genres she would take their dominant discourses and extend, distort, subvert them even. In this way, the bourgeois melodrama as a sentimental narrative becomes reworked into a psychological and feminine subjective experience.

Her other films include La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922). —Wikipedia