Negotiating Art and Industry in the Postwar Context
Negotiating Art and Industry in the Postwar Context
This chapter studies several of Dulac's early narrative Impressionist films, and her ideal of cinema as a spatiotemporally complex universe of symbols—one in which meaning is created through an intertextual network of figurative associations, such as pictorial and rhythmic gesture. Dulac's integral approach, based on life, movement, and rhythm, exemplified in a surviving extract of what is considered the first Impressionist film, La Fête espagnole (1920), is used in a particularly innovative and feminist manner in one of her earliest extant films, La Belle Dame sans merci (1921). Dulac's use of dance as a discursive metaphor disrupts a heteronormative, monogamous, and linear narrative structure, creating a queer subtext in her later films, both commercial and avant-garde.
Keywords: Germaine Dulac, Impressionist films, pictorial gesture, rhythmic gesture, La Fête espagnole, La Belle Dame sans merci, queer subtext, avant-garde films, feminism
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
