Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac was a French filmmaker, film theorist, journalist and critic. She was born in Amiens and moved to Paris in early childhood. A few years after her marriage she embarked on a journalistic career in a feminist magazine, and later became interested in film. With the help of her husband and friend she founded a film company and directed a few commercial works before slowly moving into Impressionist and Surrealist territory. She is best known today for her Impressionist film, La Souriante Madame Beudet , and her Surrealist experiment, La Coquille et le Clergyman . Her career as filmmaker suffered after the introduction of sound film and she spent the last decade of her life working on newsreels for Path and Gaumont.

Germaine Dulac was born in Amiens, France into an uppermiddleclass family of a career military officer. Since her fathers job required the family to frequently move between small garrison towns, Germaine was sent to live with her grandmother in Paris. She soon became interested in art and studied music, painting, and theater. Following the death of her parents, Dulac moved to Paris and combined her growing interests in socialism and feminism with a career in journalism. In 1905 she married LouisAlbert Dulac, an agricultural engineer who also came from an upperclass family. Four years later she began writing for La Franaise, a feminist magazine edited by Jane Misme where she eventually became the drama critic. Dulac also found time to work on the editorial staff of La Fronde, a radical feminist journal of the time. She also began to pursue her interest in still photography, which preceded her initial entry into filmmaking. Dulac and her husband divorced in 1920.

Source: Wikipedia