Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship 12/28/07 9:53 PM

The Importance of Being a Film Author: Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship 12/28/07 9:53 PM contents great directors cteq annotations top tens about us links archive search The Importance of Being a Film Author: Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship by Rosanna Maule Rosanna Maule is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema Concordia University, La coquille et le clergyman Montréal. She has published articles on contemporary European film authorship, women's authorial film practices, recent Spanish authorial cinema, and reception practices in early Italian cinema. In November of 1927, Germaine Dulac wrote a letter to the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, to lament that, in publishing the scenario of La coquille et le clergyman—the film she had recently directed from a script by Antonin Artaud—the journal had omitted to mention her as the “author” (1). In her missive, Dulac stressed that she did not mean to attack the journal nor Artaud, who had on other occasions voiced his dissatisfaction with her adaptation and in this issue prefaced his script with an article that clarified his position in relation to the film (2). Her elegantly phrased complaint ended with a reminder about a conversation that she had had with the editor, in which both had hoped that “les intellectuels et le cinéastes se rapproches, or, ce sont des nuances de mots qui les séparent irrémédiablement” (the intellectuals and the filmmakers should develop a closer kinship to one another, for it is only nuances between words that irremediably keep them apart) (3). This letter addresses a concept—authorship—that was not prominent in French film discourse at the time. As such, Dulac's objection to the journal's omission of her authorial status points to a more general issue at the centre of her—and of other avant-garde filmmakers of the time—approach to cinema: how to translate subjective expression and account for an artist's creative input in a collective and mechanical art form such as cinema. This question—which ultimately stands at the origin of Dulac's disagreement with Artaud—is at the heart of auteur-oriented approaches to cinema and reveals the difficult articulation of authorship in film discourse. Indeed, Dulac's film theory and practice arguably anticipate some of the positions that some 1950s French critics developed: the auteur as a source of cinematic expression and a reference point for their aesthetic appreciation of films. Like these critics, Dulac conceived cinema as a cultural activity placed at the intersection of artistic and industrial interests, as well as different—although interconnected—film modes and movements. Moreover, like many auteur-informed filmmakers—the critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma who went on to become film directors, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/dulac.html Page 1 of 10 The Importance of Being a Film Author: Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship 12/28/07 9:53 PM including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut—Dulac was also a film critic and theorist, a cine-club patron, and a promoter of film events. In drawing this comparison, my purpose is less to suggest Dulac as an auteur- modelled theorist and filmmaker, than to place her within a long-standing tradition in French cinema, a continuity that Alan Williams and Susan Hayward, among others, have underscored (4). Dulac's preoccupation with defining the filmmaker as an auteur coincides with her effort to characterize cinema as the medium that allows a full expression of human emotions and experiences, as well as a direct rendition of reality. This view of the auteur also enables Dulac to disentangle the figure of the filmmaker-author from a system of representation and signification that identifies the auteur as an enunciative mark of subjective positions, a view that has, as Judith Mayne has remarked, distinctly patriarchal connotations (94). Dulac never proposed a feminist-oriented or a gender-specific model of the film auteur. However, her films and her writings propose a tactic of disengagement from the premises of the 1920s film and art contexts and offer a viable alternative to the patriarchal affiliation of auteurism with male-informed artistic practices and cultural contexts. My examination of Dulac from an authorial perspective is based on the analysis of some of her writings, which I would argue constitute a valuable complement to the scholarly discussion of Dulac as an important auteur of the French avant-garde (5). Inside/outside the French avant-garde Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has noted that Germaine Dulac's production, although characterized by its diversity in categories and genres, “is rooted in the profound unity of her theoretical conceptualizations about the cinema” (1984, 32). That Dulac participated in different film modes is also a result of her association with the French avant-garde, particularly the Impressionist Movement, and its participation in various film modes and circles. This multiple involvement in artistic and commercial film practices was also due to the situation of the French film industry at the time. Since the end of World War I, French cinema was hindered by an economic and institutional crisis, struggling to counteract Hollywood's emergence onto the international film scene. The fragmentation of France's film industry into various film companies, many of them small and independent, and the crisis of the national system of film distribution and exhibition coincided with the expansion of alternative circuits of film production and distribution by avant-garde filmmakers. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/dulac.html Page 2 of 10 The Importance of Being a Film Author: Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship 12/28/07 9:53 PM As Paolo Bertetto notes, Dulac's participation in the French avant-garde remains both external and internal. According to Bertetto, Dulac's conceptions and personal experimentations of “pure cinema” and “integral cinegraphy,” indicative of her rigorous commitment to the definition of a new film aesthetic and language, allowed her to play a part in different avant-garde projects and movements, without being exclusively associated with any of them (6). I argue that this internal/external role also identifies gender- specific possibilities of self-orientation within the cultural and professional environment of 1920s French cinema. The milieu of avant-garde film practices has proven favourable for the acknowledgement of female Germaine Dulac authorship in the cinema. Yet, the subordination of gender concerns to aesthetic imperatives within this context of film practices has raised some questions among feminist scholars. This situation reflects a more general quandary in feminist discourse: how to account for female subjectivity in social and cultural contexts where women have no position or voice and femininity is inflected by the concept of "otherness.” Feminist film theorists and filmmakers have come to terms with this epistemological deadlock in various ways. The first wave of feminist approaches and practices concentrated on the notion of "alterity" to explore oppositional models of aesthetic agency and forms of expression, situated in critical and subversive markers of enunciation or in feminine types of écriture. The spectre of essentialism has haunted and eventually prevailed over these inquiries, which implicitly validate the recognition of a dominant context or counterpart. In The Woman at the Keyhole Mayne notes that [w]hile virtually all feminist critics would agree that the works of Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Dorothy Arzner (to name the most frequently invoked “historical figures”) are important, there has been considerable reluctance to use any of them as privileged examples to theorize female authorship in the cinema, unless, that is, such theorizing affirms the difficulty of women's relationship to the cinematic apparatus. This reluctance reflects the current association of “theory” with “antiessentialism.” (90) (7). The patriarchal premises of auteurism and the peculiar development in which the concept of the auteur has been theorised in film studies have restrained many feminist film critics from discussing women in relation to auteurism. According to Mayne, “whether authorship constitutes a patriarchal and/or phallocentric notion in its own right raises the specter of the 'Franco-American dis-connection'”(95). Within this framework of discussion, American theorists consider authorship a form of feminist appropriation of cinematic culture, while French/Anglo theorists “would find 'authorship' and 'appropriation' equally complicitous in their mimicry of patriarchal self, expression, and representation” (95). From this perspective, auteurism has mostly encouraged symptomatic approaches to the female auteur, like, for instance, that of Claire Johnston to Dorothy Arzner (95-96). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/dulac.html Page 3 of 10 The Importance of Being a Film Author: Germaine Dulac and Female Authorship 12/28/07 9:53 PM In proposing Dulac as a prototypic auteur critic and filmmaker, I do not intend to suggest that she offers an oppositional or feminine version of auteurism, aligned with a female cultural tradition or a feminine sensibility (an argument which would implicitly place me in essentialist territory). My view of Dulac's position as an auteur within the cultural and professional environment of 1920s French cinema involves a notion of female agency in terms of dialectical

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