Germaine Dulac: Dream, Nature, and Pure Cinema
December 2024

“We experience the world in such interior, private, ways,” Betzy Bromberg said as she comfortably stood, swaying before the screen in pink flared tights and a striped, turtlenecked shirt-dress after the screening of her film, Divinity Gratis. Made in 1997, the 5-part visual symphony spans from the archaic beginnings of the universe, the Trinity test site of the atomic bomb, to a naked woman dancing on a desert roadside, all ultimately evoking the feeling of being alive at the eve of the turning of a century. 

From the back rows of 2220 Art & Archive’s theater, a woman with an English accent, around the same age as Bromberg, raised her hand to tell us of her personal resonance with the film. “It’s so deeply different,” she mused along with Bromberg about life before and after Y2K. 

As the hosts at 2220 who had introduced the film 59 minutes earlier had said, no explanation of Bromberg’s work feels right compared to the sensation of watching one of her films in their duration. This feeling places Bromberg’s work in what French filmmaker Germaine Dulac once called the “school of the ungraspable” in her 1933 essay on her theory of le cinéma intégral, or pure cinema.

“Was not cinema potentially capable of grasping with its lenses the infinitely large and infinitely small?” Dulac asks. A central organ of the early avant-garde silent film scene, Dulac walked a line between narrative and surrealism throughout her career. She was of the first to suggest that cinema isn’t defined by theatrics or plot, rather that we should we go beyond narrative in order to “latch onto suggestive impression and expression … because it envelop(s) the viewer in a network, not of events to follow, but of sensations to experience and to feel.”

In Dulac’s 1922 film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet), she “tried to render a psychological state objectively by inserting a ‘sensitive commentary’” in the image, as film scholar Sandy Flitterman wrote. Flitterman notes the way that Dulac uses light and shadow to “evoke the spiritual state of mind of the character.” She cites Dulac’s intention for this “visual evocation” to be as “equal in intensity and cadence to the value of the psychological and moral ambience.” (S. Flitterman)

In one of the first scenes of the film, we’re shown how Madame Beudet feels trapped in her marriage and seeks to escape through an imaginative dream world. She is seen looking through pages of a magazine, interrupted intermittently by her loud husband snapping her out of surreal imaginings; A car speeding through the clouds when she looks up from an advertisement for a new luxury car; or a slow-motion tennis player, theatrically spotlighted, when she turns the page to the sports section.

To express how these images are seen through Madame Beudet’s imagination, Dulac experimented with all the technical tricks of the time like superimpositions, heavy vignetting, slow motion, dynamic camera angles, etc. “In addition to this meticulous use of the subjective camera, Dulac concentrated on the use of specific detail to elaborate on the psychology of the characters.” (S. Flitterman) 

For example, in Gossette, Dulac’s 1923 film, she used a variety of interluding shots of nature along with her character-driven camera to create “a sort of ‘visual symphony’ which included shots of nature – fluttering leaves, sides, cutting wheat, shafts bending, etc.” (S. Flitterman)

Louis Delluc wrote of Dulac as having “the touch, the sensitivity, the sensitive distillation, sort of style, which makes you think of Manet at his best.”

“Her fingers made up of rings, her adored trinkets, and ankles circled with gold. She smokes, smokes. Her right hand, twisting with a zipper, her left anchored in the pocket of her suit, give conviction to what she does. At the studio, she knows people, hours, meals. Smokes, smokes. Vehemently she rushes about. Lashes herself forward, and spreads on, gives orders. She’s perfectly urbane… And smokes, and smokes,” said producer André Daven.

Her impressionistic, symbolist, manner in her work and her presentation, reminds one of a collage or a musical composition.

Having started her career as a writer, Dulac wrote extensively about film theory, technique, and history in relation to her work and others. In her aforementioned writings on The Avant Garde Cinema, she outlined her theory for what she called pure cinema.

Dulac was writing about and making work which employed these inceptive techniques at the very cutting edge of the Surrealist Cinema movement in France. Her awareness and intentionality of style was doubtlessly influential on major filmmakers of the time. René Clair’s Entr'acte, listed as one of the very first surrealist films, was made in 1924, two years after La Souriante Madame Beudet.

Buñuel’s 1930 film L'Age d'Or is a culmination of the mid to late ‘20s’ advancement of surrealist film language. It opens on a microscopic shot of two scorpions with intercut text with scientific facts of the scorpion's mating rituals as a metaphor of two characters’ affair. 

This choice is reflective of Dulac’s early writings…

“The essential givens of pure cinema might be found in certain scientific writings, those which discuss, for example, the formation of crystals, the trajectory of a bullet, the bursting of a bubble (a pure rhythm, and what moving one! Wonderful synthesis), the evolution of microbes, the expressiveness and lives of insects.” (G. Dulac)

Later in L'Age d'Or, a woman is ushering a large cow out of her bed annoyedly before sitting at her vanity mirror. The jangling of the cow’s bell receding from the other room seems to transport her into another world. Wind blows her hair, the flowers on her desk dance, and her mirror turns into a window in which clouds are seen.

“It seemed childish to place a character in a given situation without penetrating the secret domain of his inner life, and the active performance was annotated with the play of his thoughts and his visualized feelings.” Dulac wrote. The techniques the surrealists employ in their films to show these inner worlds go beyond just her innovative camera trickery, but as a way to think about film as a medium not for truth but for a rhythmic experience.

“Regarding truths,” Nietzsche wrote in The Artist's Sense of Truth, “the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober, simple methods and results. (…) He does not want to give up the most effective presumptions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic, (…) thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain.” (Neitzsche)

This idea, that truth is only possible when we speak about sensation and experience, is the basis for Dulac’s subjective style. Nietzsche theorized that there is no such thing as truth in any shape or form, that truth is an illusion that we’ve come up with to try to make sense of our reality. 

Heiddinger later suggests that there can be truth, but not in the way that Neitzsche supposed. Instead, a “primordial truth,” in which we can uncover a beingness through the aforementioned intentional observation of natural “things.”

We’re reminded of the scorpions in L'Age d'Or - “the evolution of microbes, the expressiveness and lives of insects” (G. Dulac) - or the “visual symphony” of fluttering leaves, cutting wheat, and bending shafts in Dulac’s Gossette.

“In ordinary experience we usually pass by things with little or no explicit awareness of the primordial truth that is making possible their showing;  for the most part, we miss the Being or thingliness of things,” scholar F. David Martin adds in relation to Heiddinger’s Being of Things and Aesthetic Education. 

To recall the 5th proof of pure cinema, that “that cinematic action must not be limited to the human person, but most is beyond into the realm of nature and dream.” Dream directly reminds us of the many moments of day-dreaming interludes in surrealist films, where the audience experiences the very sensations of the character’s inner life. And we can look to Heidingger to relate the importance of nature to the cinematic experience when he wrote about participative experiences of “beingness:”

“When, for example, we have a participative experience of a flower, we are not making a botanical observation or thinking of it as an object. If we did, the flower would pale into a mere instance of the appropriate scientific categories. The vivid impact of the flower would dim as the focus of our attention shifted in the direction of generality. In the participative experience, however, the concrete suchness of the object penetrates and permeates the participator’s consciousness to the point that consciousness is no longer self-conscious.” F. David Martin said of Heingger. 

Dulac and the surrealists believed in the cinema as capable of bringing this “participative experience” to a viewer. Her translations of these ideas to cinema come in the form using images of nature as both a metaphor - like Buñuel’s scorpions - and as interluding elements in the rhythm of a film as a way to guide the viewer through the experience being created. “Nature and objects as elements equal in importance to the action,” she said, “A light, a shadow, or a flower at first were meaningful reflections of a character's feeling or of a situation.” (G. Dulac)

Mubi described Glide of Transparency, Betzy Bromberg’s third experimental feature, as going “further into translucent abstraction while conveying the intimate feeling of being transported to a sublimated inner garden.” Bromberg used only macro visuals of flowers, all filmed on 16mm, metrically cutting at the same length of time. We glide though this inner gargen created by Bromberg through the very simple act of observing dream and nature.

Sources Cited
Divinity Gratis, directed by Betzy Bromberg, 1995
Glide of Transparency, directed by Betzy Bromberg, 2016
La Souriante Madame Beudet, directed by Germain Dulac, 1922
L’Age d’or,  directed by Lois Buñuel, 1930
Dulac, Germaine. “The Avant-Garde Cinema.” In Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed: Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, Meta Mazaj. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 653-657.
Martin, F. David. “Heidegger’s Being of Things and Aesthetic Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 8, no. 3, 1974, pp. 87–105. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3332155. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.
Flitterman, Sandy. 1974. “The Heart of the Avant Garde: Some Biographical Notes.” Women and Film no. 5-6, 58-61.
Chamarette, Jenny. “Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism, Phenomenology, Film Theory.” Signs, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp. 289–95. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/678144. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.
Beugnet, Martine. “Cinema and Sensation: Contemporary French Film and Cinematic Corporeality.” Paragraph, vol. 31, no. 2, 2008, pp. 173–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43151882. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” The Portable Nietzsche. 1954.