Germaine Dulac, the filmmaker despised by the surrealists

BarcelonaThe revolution proclaimed by the surrealists remained in their works. They often behaved like gentlemen from head to toe. Filmmaker Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) released the first surrealist film, The shell gives you clergyman, in 1928, a year before the iconic An Andalusian dog, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. But instead of congratulations, he received insults and had to endure being told he was a "cow" by Louis Aragon and André Breton. And the author of the script, Antonin Artaud, complained that Dulac's work, whom the Tàpies Museum dedicated a pioneering exhibition until February 22, had distorted its text. In fact, before the film's premiere, the magazine Nouvelle Revue Françaisehad ignored her and had published that the film's director was Artaud. She wrote them a letter asking them to rectify her statement.

Dulac's difficulties didn't end there: "In the 1950s, critic Ado Kyrou still lamented that Dulac had directed Artaud's script and criticized the result for being 'too feminine,'" says Imma Prieto, director of the Musée Tàpies and curator of the exhibition with film critic Imma Merino. "The Surrealists totally underestimated her; they never accepted her films," says Prieto. A photograph in which Dulac is the only woman among a crowd of men from the film industry dressed in tails is very explicit in this regard.

The exhibition at the Museu Tàpies is entitled Germaine Dulac. Je en plus rien, and among the pieces on display is the anti-Hitler short film made with archive material Ce que il a finger: Ce que il a fait (1939), revealing how Hitler did the exact opposite of what he had said on issues such as respecting the Treaty of Versailles and not annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia. This is a little-known work that could be seen in theThe major retrospective that the French Cinematheque dedicated to Dulac in 2022"Dulac herself defined it as anti-nationalist and anti-Hitlerian. With the rise of the far right, which we are also experiencing, it couldn't be more relevant," says the director of the Museu Tàpies.

Ce que il a finger: Ce que il a fait It belongs to a third period in Dulac's career, in which he took a turn and considered cinema as "a tool of social awareness, or as a way of documenting history," as Prieto says. "As a tool to also transform society," he emphasizes. Before that short film, he finished the film The cinema in the service of history with the question "Which path will Europe take?" Curiously, in one of the chronologies included in one of the versions of the script, Dulac included the Asturian Revolution of 1934. But as can be seen in some of the documents on display, it was not easy for her either, because censorship pursued her from The shell gives you clergyman, where he had shown the sexual desire of a priest.

A pioneering feminist filmmaker

The daughter of a wealthy family, Dulac was also a transgressor in her personal life. After divorcing engineer Louis-Albert Dulac, she began a relationship with Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville. "In Dulac's work, the vindication of women's freedom is always very important," Prieto emphasizes. Thus, in her first short film, Les soeurs ennemies (1915), one sister reproaches the other for letting herself be overcome by convention. In addition, the protagonist of La fête espagnole (1919) is completely oblivious to two men who fight over her and die in a duel. And The smiling Madame Beudet (1923), the film for which she received her first recognition, is considered a pioneering feminist film because it denounces the oppression of the protagonist.

Throughout her career, Dulac directed some twenty films, which can be seen in a retrospective at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. She also pursued an intense career as a producer, screenwriter, critic, and theorist. Thus, coinciding with the exhibition, the publishing house Wunderkammer is publishing her writings in Catalan and Spanish. "Her work can be divided into three main blogs, although they are accessible, because there is a way of understanding movement and rhythm that appears in all of her films, especially in the first two blogs," says Prieto. These first two sections, which ran concurrently, reflect a certain impressionism and experimentation. In the latter, one can see how Dulac played with collage and the superimposition of images. "If we look at how he treated exteriors and movement, we can see, not so much beauty, but the fragility with which he captures the atmosphere, the environment. And within that, he adds some surreal twists, such as the appearance and disappearance of objects, or the capture of the object he wants you to focus on," says Prieto.