The Smiling Madame Beudet

Obsessed with a general's woman, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.

Dulac's earliest extant title, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair--speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity in France. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association, building tension between modernity/antiquity, life/death, and masculinity/femininity through cinematic-specific techniques, editing, and more.

Carmencita Garcia, a Spanish flamenco dancer, performs two dances.

A serial in six episodes: 1) La seconde Marquise de Sombreuse; 2) Le Chateau maudit; 3) Folle; 4) L'Exilee; 5) La Danseuse inconnue; 6) Hallucination et realite. Set in modern day France in a chateau thought to be haunted since the Revolution, a Marquis and his daughter Irene (granddaughter of Marie Antoinette's lady companion) are preyed upon by Latin seductress, Lola, and her brother, Pedro. (Summary by Tami Williams, from the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato film program)

Brazen embrace of fashionable costume and glamour creates a witty celebration of Orientalism and cinema itself.

Germaine Dulac shot a film in 1935 that she entitled “Le Cinéma au service de l’histoire” – a panoramic perspective on the history of Europe between 1895 and 1930 and an exhilarating archival montage

A symbolist portrait of two gypsies in love, this captivating film finds Dulac deconstructing onscreen gender roles and striving to achieve her idea of cinema as a “visual symphony,” emphasizing rhythmic editing over acting to achieve a “cinema of suggestion.”