Join us for an extended conversation as we discuss Dulac’s pioneering artistry, her films’ political context, and her pivotal place in the history of cinema.

This program features two of Dulac’s key works—The Seashell and the Clergyman, considered the first surrealist film, and La Folie des vaillants, a symbolist portrait of gypsy romance—and a series of abstract studies of the arabesque form.

This drama about a scientist trying to find a balance between her domestic responsibilities and her work at an orphanage for tubercular children uses an array of stylistic techniques to allegorize the plight of the modern woman after World War I.

Two of Dulac’s key works of formal experimentation and social inquiry, both The Smiling Madame Beudet and L’invitation au voyage mark historic attempts to render feminine subjectivity onscreen and criticize her contemporaries’ rigid conceptions of the role of women in society and romance.

This controversial and atmospheric film uses innovative cinematic techniques to tell the tale of an independent, sexually liberated woman who is torn between her husband and her lover.

This loose, gestural adaptation of a fantastic novel by Pierre Benoît was Dulac’s final commercial production and features one of the most explicitly sapphic moments in her cinema.

This program combines La Cigarette, one of Dulac’s earliest films, with a selection of her “illustrated records,” an early form of music video that focused on the daily lives of France’s working class.

This backstage comedy, about the relationship between a fragile, sensitive poet and an independent actress, is an important work in Dulac’s pursuit of a “pure cinema” that took full advantage of the medium’s eminently modern and expressive aesthetic tools.

Taking its title from John Keats’s early 19th-century poem, this highly personal melodrama, about a famous actress who vows to become a “merciless woman” after she is abandoned by a rich man, finds Dulac interrogating the archetype of the femme fatale.