Germaine Dulac: Double Bill

Two short (40 odd minutes) from the French film theorist, involved in the surrealist movement.
The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922, France) is a slow and detached film. It is shot in two different styles; one with a Bunuel-ean conventionality, just normal framing and so on. But there is another aspect also, on occassion, at the piano for example, certain parts of the body and shapes are taken 'out of context', magnified, focussed on. Dulac has an uncanny ability to tell emotions, to draw one in, through this and other schemes. She puts us off balance, stirs us into the creation not just through the abovementioned technique but by drawing (for the time) uncharacteristically low key performances from her actors. Small movements, big affect. Yes, this piece is slow, but the mournful, fateful move (with a well done narrative continuity) towards the climax takes on a genuinely haunting, melancholy aspect. Dulac is able, through smart montage and precise knowledge of framing, to draw us in well. The surrealist 'special effects' also hold up well, they are not over intrusive but genuinely add.
The Seashell and The Clergyman (1928, France) is a masterpiece. It repeats the ability of the above to take the objects out of context, but it is really in the other tricks that it does that enables it to touch places so few other films can. It is fired with symbolism, throughout the connections are at best thematic, genuinely hallucinatory (achieved through montage and a high angle camera, giving a ghostly, mournful lighting, a half-life). It mirrors the true structure of a dream; the search, the taking away. The characters move in these wierd dialectical patterns, all excellent except for the slightly overdone lead. Again, Dulac understands narrative contuinity and we at once follow the vicar (repression, release, loss....) and keep at an arms length, genuinely like one has oneself in a dream. This is the perfect example of that so rare ability ('In The City Of Sylvia'?), a genuinely Proustian cinema. The recurring of tmemory that was never experienced, the float that digs and digs but always comes for air. It is slow, curious, often difficult. It makes no clear sense. It is a genuinely spiritual experience at the cinema. We look forward to returning to this great (and, though not unknown, perhaps underapreciated) work.