Germaine Dulac Double Bill Accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra This Saturday at Webster University

This Saturday, March 10^th at 7pm, The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra  will provide music for a Germaine Dulac Silent Double Bill: The Cigarette (1919) and The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923). Tickets are $15 for this special event which takes place at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). Tickets can be purchased in advance HERE

There’s nothing better than silent films accompanied by live music! The Rats and People is a treasure and St. Louis is lucky to have them here. I’ve seen them perform with silent films several times, often at The St. Louis International Film Festival, and usually at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium and it’s always a stunning good time at the movies. You’ll have the chance to see them perform their magic this Saturday, March 10th at the Germaine Dulac Double Bill.

A pioneering filmmaker and feminist, Germaine Dulac toggled between commercial and avant-garde modes, with one of her most famous works, “The Seashell and the Clergyman” (1928), prefiguring surrealism. Dulac’s earliest extant title, “The Cigarette” concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association. Considered one of Dulac’s most feminist films, “The Smiling Madame Beudet” is also a crucial step in her continuing de-emphasis of traditional narrative structures in favor of visual association. The film offers a bleak portrait of marriage and its constraining effects on the woman, while vividly externalizing her dreams of liberation.

In her monograph “Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations,” scholar Tami Williams notes that the filmmaker “played a founding role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. History has overlooked her importance as a pioneer of the 1920s French avant-garde, and as an innovator of a modern cinema. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac directed more than thirty fiction films, many marking new cinematic tendencies, from impressionist to abstract. She made an equivalent number of newsreels and several documentaries, whose discreet, unobtrusive approach to filming daily life had an important impact on the evolution of nonfiction filmmaking in France.”

First up is The Cigarette (1919) :A Parisian museum director believes his wife has lost interest in him and so places a poisoned cigarette in the box on his desk – thus allowing chance to decide the moment of his death.

Next is The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923): One of the first feminist movies, The Smiling Madame Beudet is the story of an intelligent woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Her husband is used to playing a stupid practical joke in which he puts an empty revolver to his head and threatens to shoot himself. One day, while the husband is away, she puts bullets in the revolver. However, she is stricken with remorse and tries to retrieve the bullets the next morning. Her husband gets to the revolver first only this time he points the revolver at her.