One of the few women pioneers of cinema and a committed feminist, Germaine Dulac strongly believed that the public had a role to play in shaping the history of cinema and the kinds of films that filmmakers could make. This book draws on a wealth of archival material – both films and writing – to study Dulac’s ‘behind the scenes’ work on filmmaking and her social/political activism in the field of cinema. The biographical and historical introduction contextualises Dulac’s situation at the heart of the avant-garde. Three chapters organise her films and career around the kinds of cinema that she promoted: ‘psychological’, ‘pure’ and ‘documentary’. The conclusion contrasts Dulac’s contributions with those of Alice Guy Blaché, another early woman film pioneer, highlighting their differing paths to recognition.

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory. In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director’s work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women’s studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.

Explores impact of 3 women filmmakers on French films

"[The Woman at the Keyhole is one] of the most significant contributions to feminist film theory sin ce the 1970s." -- SubStance "... this intelligent, eminently readable volume puts women's filmmaking on the main stage.... serves at once as introduction and original contribution to the debates structuring the field. Erudite but never obscure, effectively argued but not polemical, The Woman at the Keyhole should prove to be a valuable text for courses on women and cinema." -- The Independent When we imagine a "woman" and a "keyhole," it is usually a woman on the other side of the keyhole, as the proverbial object of the look, that comes to mind. In this work the author is not necessarily reversing the conventional image, but rather asking what happens when women are situated on both sides of the keyhole. In all of the films discussed, the threshold between subject and object, between inside and outside, between virtually all opposing pairs, is a central figure for the reinvention of cinematic narrative.

The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history. By showing that the erasure of women's texts from literary and cultural history was not accidental but was ideologically motivated, the essays explicitly and implicitly contribute to debates surrounding canon formation. Other important topics are women's political activism during the period, antifascism, the contributions made by female journalists, the politics of literary production, genre, women's relationship with and contributions to the avant-garde, women's professional lives, and women's involvement in voluntary associations. In bringing together the work of scholars whose fields of expertise are diverse but whose interests converge on the inter-war period, the volume invites readers to make connections and comparisons across the whole spectrum of women's political, social, and cultural activities throughout Europe.

This book explores the creative women of the "Lost Generation" including painters, sculptors, film makers, writers, singers, composers, dancers, and impresarios who all pursued artistic careers in the years leading up to, during, and following World War I. These women’s stories, and the art they created, commissioned, mobilized as propaganda, and performed shed light on the shifting nature of gender norms during this period. With the combined knowledge and expertise from different contributors, chapters in this book consider how modernist practices continued their development in women’s hands during the war through networks forged by and for women artists in the absence of their male colleagues. These chapters also reflect on how, in many cases, the dissolution of these structures after the November 1918 armistice had detrimental consequences for their professional trajectories. This book challenges the place creative women currently hold in the historical record while also clarifying how these artists and impresarios contributed to wartime and post-war culture. This collection of essays will be of great value to scholars interested in social and gender history of the twentieth century, as well as historians of the arts through offering nuanced understanding of the essential work of female creative professionals, highlighting artistic women’s experiences of resistance, mourning, and reinvention in the shadow of the Great War.

An authoritative and much-needed overview of the main issues in the field of early cinema from over 30 leading international scholars in the field First collection of its kind to offer in one reference: original theory, new research, and reviews of existing studies in the field Features over 30 original essays from some of the leading scholars in early cinema and Film Studies, including Tom Gunning, Jane Gaines, Richard Abel, Thomas Elsaesser, and André Gaudreault Caters to renewed interest in film studies’ historical methods, with strict analysis of multiple and competing sources, providing a critical re-contextualization of films, printed material and technologies Covers a range of topics in early cinema, such as exhibition, promotion, industry, pre-cinema, and film criticism Broaches the latest research on the subject of archival practices, important particularly in the current digital context