Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac was the first feminist filmmaker (that we know of) and a key figure in the French avant-garde scene of the 1920s. During the early 1900s, she wrote for the two feminist periodicals, La Fronde and La Francaise. She was politically active and demanded her rights as a filmmaker. After experiencing difficulties in making the films she wanted to, she started her own production company, Delia Film. Dulac fought for film to be seen as its own art form – the seventh art – and coined her own terms, such as ‘The Integral Film’, ‘cinematic movement’, ‘rhythmic film’. Dulac felt that moving images could speak for themselves and she worked on a number of abstract silent films, Themes of Variations being one of them. Germaine Dulac was thrown out into the cold by the surrealist men after she made the film The Seashell and the Clergymen in 1927. All of these years of not showing her films. All of these years of her being unknown and forgotten.