Avis des critiques

Drenched with hyperpoetic imagery and a fierce spirit of experimentation, the film is marked by animated heads cracked open before our eyes. Reality slips away as our focus is blurred and corrupted, and dancers swirl and twirl in an almost violent, nightmarish frenzy.

Through an exploration of feminist themes supported by experimental filmmaking techniques, Dulac put the issue of gender at the forefront of her film, narratively, formally, and through her own role as director. Her work demonstrated the potential of Artaud’s later theories on cruelty, in a manner tied intrinsically to the gender politics of her film.

The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), a crucial early work of surrealist cinema, assails the hypocrisies of the church and the military through potent symbols and the slippery logic and chronology of dreams.

As a director and theoretician of experimental film, Germaine Dulac proclaimed her goal to make “pure” cinema, which she spoke of as “musically constructed” films or “films made according to the rules of visual music.” At the heart of Dulac’s controversial collaboration with Antonin Artaud, La coquille et le clergyman, source of fabulous misunderstandings with the Surrealists, lies Dulac’s revolutionary poetics.