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The three films you are going to see tonight are all historically significant projects in the ongoing search for a cinematic language capable of expressing female desire. The first two, (Germalne Dulac's The Smiling Madame Beudet and Maya Derrinàs At Land) have been cited by the maker of the third, Sally Potter, as seminal influences on her own film work.
All three films were made by intellectual and artistic women who came to film after a training in other artforms: music and journalism In the case of Dulac; poetry and dance in the case of Deren; dance and performance in the case of Potter.
Apart from a common concern
with film language, female subjectivity and female desire, these three filmmakers
are also linked (or linkable) by a French connection. Dulac was a Frenchwoman,
a French suffragette who edited the feminist journal La Francais prior
to becoming a member of the first French film avant-garde (which included the
Epsteins, L'Herbier and Abel Gance) She went on to direct the surrealist film
The Seashell and the Clergyman from a script by Artaud, and conduct further
experiments in film form. With the coming of sound, she 'retired' from film
production to become head of Gaumont newsreels, a position she held until her
death in 1942. The Smiling Madame Beudet, based on a contemporary French
stage play, has references to French symbolist poetry (Baudelaire's Fleurs
du mal) and French opera (Gounod's Faust). In addition, the situation
of its heroine is reminiscent of Mme Bovary, the central character of Flaubert's
eponymous novel, a classic work of the 19th century French realist movement.
So Dulac has exemplary French credentials.
The daughter of Russian jewish emigres who settled in the United States in the
20s, Maya Deren was not French, but she studied French symbolist poetry at university
and seems to have been influenced by the symbolist somnambulism, if not the
scatological surrealism, of the French avant-garde cinema of the 20s and 30s.
Though made in Britain by an Englishwoman, Thriller uses Potter's psycholanalytic and feminist theory - Lacan, Kristeva and Cixous, in particular - and casts a Frenchwoman (with a pronounced French accent) in the dual roles of investigative heroine and Mimi, the tragic French heroine of the opera, La Boheme, which is set in Paris and based on a French novel.
Despite this criss-cross of French cultural connections, and despite the temptation to track a feminist filmmaking narrative trajectory from their co-presence on the same MIMA programme - to construct a celebratory history according to which Dulac is the first feminist filmmaker, Deren the founding mother of the postwar American avant-garde, and Thriller the culmination and long-sought 'good object' of 70s feminist film theory - I want also to stress end sketch out some of the differences between these three films and their makers.
Firstly, the three films belong to quite different genres. The Smiling Madame Beudet is a melodrama, not far from Griffith, made for commercial release. Its interest lies precisely In the way it uses the conventions of relatively primitive film melodrama and yet finds spaces for feminist interventions by dramatically representing the romantic and murderous fantasies of its heroine: by supplying a final deadly ironic twist to its expected climax; and by slugging us with a cruelly realist epilogue.
At Land is an avant-garde film made completely outside The commercial film circuit. It is a 'trance' film in the tradition of Cocteau's Blood of the Poet, in which the protagonist passes invisibly among people, through dramatic landscapes, on a journey of self-discovery, In marked difference to the Dulac and Potter films, the protagonist is played by the filmmaker herself - giving the film an especially personaal edge. Chronologically placed between the 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon and The 1946 Ritual in Transfigured Time - Deren's two more widely distributed films, it is utterly silent, lacking the the shrleky flute and discordant percussion of Meshes soundtrack which, along with the fluidly floating, darkly subjective camera work of Sasha Hamid, had given that film a claustrophobic, nightmerish look and mood, ëAt Landà is more abstract, more 'objective', less oppressive in camera style. And the proliferation of symbolic objects in Meshes (shadows, flowers, keys, knives, mirrors, telephones, sea, gramophone record, eye), which tease the interpreter in us all and tend themselves so readily to Freudian readings, have been reduced in number to a spare few (the sea, rocks, sand, forest, chess pieces) which cannot be reduced to purely Freudien symbols. But the narrative element of the personal journey remains strong, in contrast to the later Ritual, which is more choreographic than narrative.
Finally, Thriller is a polemical theory film which appropriates some fictional motifs (such as snatches of Bernard Herrmann suspense music and an investigative heroine dedicated to uncovering who-dun-it). boldly and resolutely, it sets out to expose the patriarchal plot to remove woman from the scene of art and replace her with a romantic fantasy figure. In line with 70às feminist theory, it eschews visual narrative pleasure (contaminated by patriarchal ideology) and gives priority to the sound track, on which the literal voices of women speak, sing and erupt m Medusan laughter.
In rhetorical strategies, too, the three films are very different. The Smiling Madame Beudet tells the tale of a refined cultured wife trapped in an unhappy marriage to a brute of a husband. There is no tragic or comic resolution to her plight, despite all the pointers to both possibilities; no way out, except in fantasy. However, Dulac does not claim that all women are oppressed, That Mme Beudet represents 'woman'. Certainly. Deren's film is more optimistic. Her heroine is more active in her quest: she resolutely continues her journey, loves them and leaves them, steals chess pieces and leaves clear footprints in the sand behind her, after she's gone. But Deren, too, does not ~oclaim to speak for her sex, her heroine is an individual woman, not a representative woman.
In contrast, Thriller is a film overtly committed to a feminist politics based on the unity and solidarity of women. It reveals and bemoans the suppression of female experience in patriarchal text, using the opera La Boheme as a representative case study it wields the theory as a polemical weapon of attack and also employs humour (in-jokes) to engender a conspiratorial sense of knowingness, complicity and solidarity among fellow feminists. But most of the jokes are lost on those unfamiliar with the intellectually fashionable writings of the 70's, such as the debate around the Lacanian theory of the mirror phase, around subjectivity and aro~lnd feminine v. feminist writing.
© Freda Freiberg