Germaine Dulac par Maryann De Julio (review)

Reviewed by: Germaine Dulac par Maryann De Julio Emily Wieder De Julio, Maryann. Germaine Dulac. Manchester UP, 2022. ISBN 978-0-7190-7794-4. Pp. x + 157. Presenting Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) to people in gender, cinema, and French and Francophone studies, Maryann De Julio synthesizes scholarship on the filmmaker. Her original analyses will also appeal to Dulacian enthusiasts. After a concise biography, three chronologically and thematically organized chapters explore Dulac's œuvre. The division into psychological, pure, and documentary films parallel Dulac's own conception of cinema. Further attesting to De Julio's careful investigation is the end matter, which contains a filmography with the English translation of titles and an annotated bibliography. Within the text, De Julio summarizes the plot, symbols, and camerawork of each film. The first chapter addresses Dulac's post-World-War-I productions, known as her impressionist or "psychological" films. Ten plates illustrate her sensual, highly visual approach, including two from the difficult-to-stream Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (1935). These images provide a transition into the "pure cinema" chapter, which elucidates Dulac's relation to Dada and Surrealism. La coquille et le clergyman (1927) has been recognized as the first Surrealist film, yet, as De Julio underscores, Dulac herself credited this achievement to Dalí and Buñuel for their short film Un chien andalou (1929) (65). This precision highlights that although Dulac shared proclivities with the Avant-Garde, such as an interest in dreams and unconventional portrayals of reality, she did not align with any movement (91). Her letters and conference presentations, which are amply cited, attest to her creative independence. Due to this integrity, Dulac left a subtle signature on La coquille, whose scenario Antonin Artaud wrote. De Julio originally links the motif of women at work in this film to the discussions in chapters one and three (75). Likewise building on a well-known Dulacian trait, that of music, De Julio then details the specific instruments and tempo in L'invitation au voyage (1927) (83). Harmonies persist even in Dulac's newsreels. Unlike the previous sections, which favor a chronological organization, this third chapter arranges films by genre. It exposes her newsreels, "compilation histories" (99, De Julio borrows the term from Siân Reynolds), and scientific films, all of which appeared in the final decade of Dulac's life. Forever devoted to storytelling through impressions rather than rational discourse, Dulac crafted her newsreels around rhythm and working-class subjects. Her Retour à la vie (1936) signifies not only this thematic continuity but Dulac's ideological consistency as well. Created in collaboration with the Socialist film group Mai '36, Retour à la vie echoes Dulac's journalistic debuts at La Française: journal du progrès féminin where she elevated professional women (7). De Julio concludes by placing Dulac in relation to her contemporary and fellow woman filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, effectively demonstrating the coincidental social liberation that facilitated these End Page 166 women's careers. Dulac's bourgeois upbringing granted her financial advantages compared to Blaché, yet both women pioneered cinematographic techniques to their own merit. With its succinct analyses and accessible language, this book achieves its goal of "understanding how crucial and innovative a figure Germaine Dulac was" (135). End Page 167 Emily Wieder The University of Iowa Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French