The
Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le clergyman)
  
Director: Germaine Dulac
Based on a screenplay by: Antonin Artaud
Director of Photography: Paul Parguel
Assistant Director: Louis Ronjat
Camera Operator: Paul Guichard
Cast:
Alex Allin (clergyman)
Génica Athanasiou (woman)
Lucien Bataille (officer)
France 1928
39 mins
Germaine Dulac was
born on 17 November 1882 into a cultured, haute bourgeois environment: her
father was a cavalry officer, her mother a sophisticated and intelligent
woman with a lively appreciation of the arts. When her parents died she moved
to Paris and combined her interests in socialism and feminism with a career
in journalism. From 1909 to 1913 she worked on the staff of one of France’s
first feminist publications, La Française (founded in 1906), where
she interviewed accomplished women artists and wrote drama criticism.
Dulac also pursued
her interest in still photography and by 1910 was convinced of the evocative
power of the art, of its capability to do much more than simply reproduce
objective reality. ‘Little by little my camera was perfected, the lenses were
made more precise, and I arrived at the observation that it isn’t enough
simply to capture reality; something else is necessary in order to respect it
entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere and to make its moral meaning
perceptible through the care taken with angles and framing.’ She began to be
interested in moving images ‘not for what they were at the time, but with the
intuition of what they could become.’
In 1918 Dulac
directed Ames de fous, a four-hour film divided into six episodes.
The film seeks to reconcile two contradictory modes of thought and two
conflicting images of woman. The film posits a reciprocity between two
notions of ‘the feminine’: between ‘woman’ as a metaphor for the past and
future, and ‘woman’ as a social construction, composed of varied social
discourses on femininity. It is this kind of reflection that would be most
fully achieved in the film that takes explorations of femininity as its
central concern, The Seashell and the Clergyman. For Dulac, the
ideal film would use character merely as a starting point; the real material
of the film was to be pure sensation: ‘The visual symphony which I dream of
creating someday will use fewer characters; it will go further in terms of
the play of light, the clash or the union of objects and fleeting
expressions. It will escape all literary logic in order to work, as a
musician does, only with feelings.’
Dulac made The
Seashell and the Clergyman in 1927. Based on a screenplay by Antonin
Artaud, the film was an attempt to give concrete, objective form to human
thought processes and fantasies through a studied organisation of images
which evolved their own logic: a logic unconstrained by the conventions of
narrative coherence and free to explore the evocative powers of the image.
Artaud wanted to create a film that emphasized the visual: ‘It is a film of
pure images. The meaning must emerge from the very impact of these images.
There is no psychoanalytical, metaphysical, or even human meaning underlying
them. The film describes true states of mind without any attempt at
clarification or demonstration.’
Too much has been
made of Artaud’s dissatisfaction with Dulac’s cinematic execution of his
scenario. The famous ‘Madame Dulac is a cow’ episode, which occurred during
the film’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on 9 February 1928, seems to
be a rather quixotic myth that grew up around the incident itself, partly out
of a confusion of memories, partly out of an inability to deal with the
film’s revolutionary poetics, partly out of a largely misconstrued clash of
personalities. Georges Sadoul’s about-face regarding the film is indicative
of this ambiguity. His vehement participation in the riot turned out to be
mistaken; some 35 years later he admitted that he had thought the protest was
directed against Artaud rather than Dulac. Having discredited the film for a
long time on the basis of the ‘Ursulines riot,’ Sadoul was forced to reverse
his judgment upon seeing the film in 1962: ‘The film has aged quite well, has
acquired power with the passage of time, and deserves its place among the
classics of Surrealist cinema.’
During this time
Dulac conceived and edited the journal Schémas, whose single issue
bears the publication date of February 1927. Through it she continued her
pursuit of ‘pure cinema’ by working on the theoretical front; each article
that she chose deals with the problems and aesthetics of a cinema from a
slightly different perspective. Dulac herself wrote one piece, and produced a
running editorial commentary to unify the separate discussions. Articles were
contributed by filmmakers, artists, theorists, historians, and critics,
including Miklos N. Bandi on Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale.
Dulac also taught
film courses and was an inspiring teacher. Henri Fescourt, a close friend of
Dulac’s at the time, describes how even those who were sceptical about the
medium ‘became taken with the charm of her tender and assured words.’ In
appreciation of the energy and devotion that seem so characteristic of Dulac
he said, ‘If those who go to the movies today are not simply enlightened
professionals, curious amateurs or snobs, it is because Germaine Dulac
prepared the way.’
Sandy
Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema
(Columbia University Press, 1990)
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