Veronica Project Space Presents: Four Films by Germaine Dulac [In-Person Only]

Sat Apr 12: 7.00pm PDT

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About
(Germaine Dulac, 1927-1929, France, 62 min)

Veronica Project Space is pleased to present four silent films by Germaine Dulac on 16mm at Northwest Film Forum, curated by Aurora San Miguel.

Germaine Dulac is perhaps best known as an early feminist, socialist filmmaker whose bold experimentation helped legitimize cinema as an art form. In the late 1920s, Dulac embarked on an intense period of radical aesthetic exploration, implementing some of the theories and techniques she had been writing about in her essays on the avant-garde. La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), in which Dulacs direction meets Antonin Artauds script, leaves realist plot behind as the films three figures-the clergyman, the officer, and the woman-play out a complex dance of desire, fantasy, and frustration (sometimes interpreted, including by Dulac herself, as an Oedipal drama). Occasionally hailed as the first Surrealist film, its premiere caused a riot by Surrealists who ostensibly criticized it for taming the violence of Artauds text. For Dulac it was the cadences and visual orchestration that were crucial, as in her more abstract shorts Thèmes et variations, Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, and Disque 957 in the following years.

Synopsis:

Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque / 1929 / 7 00

A visual structure composed of variations on the arabesque: arcs of light, waterspouts, spider webs, tree buds, flowers and foliage, womens smiles, and arms moving the rhythm of a rocking chair.

Disque 957 / 1928 / 6 00

Disque 957, is conceived of as a visual impression in listening to Frédéric Chopins Preludes n. 5 and 6.

Thèmes et variations / 1928 / 9 00

I evoke a dancing woman. A woman? No. A bouncing line with harmonious rhythm. I evoke a luminous projection on veils! Precise matter! No. Fluid rhythms. Why should one disregard, on screen, the pleasure that movement brings us in the theatre? Harmony of lines. Harmony of light. Lines, surfaces, volumes evolving directly, without the artifice of evocation, in the logic of its forms, dispossessed of any overly human sense, allowing an elevation towards the abstract, thus giving more space to sensations and to dreams: integral cinema.

Germaine Dulac

La Coquille et le Clergyman / 1927 / 40 00

So cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.

British Board of Film Censors