Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923) and the Film Scores by Arthur Kleiner and Manfred Knaak

Abstract

Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) must have been an uncommonly impressive figure: a DVD released in 2007 introduces her as ‘a chain smoker with short hair, a theater and film critic, feminist, film producer, silent movie director, cinematic theorist, head of the French Film Club Federation and a leading member of the Committee against Film Censorship’ — and, I might add, a musical connoisseur with a performance degree in piano. After her death during World War II, she was long consigned to oblivion, only to resurface in the final decades of the 20th century as a feminist and a major avant-garde film director. True, there is still not a trace of her to be found in Germany’s Lexikon des Internationalen Films (2002), but three of the many films she made in France between 1915 and 1929 have become established ‘classics’: first and foremost La Souriante Madame Beudet (The smiling Madame Beudet, 1923, 38’), now considered the ‘first feminist film‘; then L’Invitation au voyage (The invitation to a journey, 1927, 39’); and finally the surrealist La Coquille et le clergyman (The seashell and the clergyman, 1928, 40’), already legendary at the time of its creation because of the quarrels that ensued between Dulac and screenwriter Antonin Artaud. Thanks to Germany’s Second Broadcasting Corporation (ZDF) and Arte (ARTE Edition), all three films have now been restored and released on DVD (Absolut Medien) with newly composed music.