“Life is producing cinema all the time. The cinema needs to start producing life.” ~ Louis Delluc.
DE L’IMPRESSIONISME AU CINEMA PUR is a nice little documentary about Delluc, Dulac, Epstein, L’Herbier, and all that groovy crowd. Sadly, my man Kirsanoff doesn’t get a look-in due probably to the fact that the structuring device of the documentary is the connections between the different film-makers, their meetings and cross-pollination, a sort of Avant-Garde Family Tree. And Kirsanoff didn’t really mingle. Though his wife, being an actress, did form connections with other directors, as we shall see in Thursday’s edition of The Forgotten.
Incidentally, many accounts of Germaine Dulac’s career have her ceasing her filmmaking activities at the end of the twenties, when Louis Dulac died. But the IMDb intrigues with one more short, JE N’AI PLUS RIEN, from 1934, and it’s a Pathe-Natan production, interestingly enough. Natan was investing in shorts, and he also seems to have had a memory — unusually for a movie exec, he could recall filmmakers who were no longer active and “hot,” and would sometimes employ them.
So I would *love* to see JE N’AI PLUS RIEN if anyone has it.
Germaine Dulac’s THEMES ET VARIATIONS
“The total film which we all dream of making is a visual symphony made of images given rhythm to, and which are ordained and cast onto the screen by the artist’s single emotion.” ~ Germaine Dulac
Intertitle from LA FEMME DE NUL PART by Louis Delluc.
shadowplay 