Tami Williams (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
In spite of its bumpy, collaborative production history, Delluc and Dulac’s La Fête espagnole (1920) has been widely credited as the film that launched France’s first narrative avant-garde : cinematic Impressionism. Yet, the varied accounts and reasons behind this assessment are less universal and less clear. Arguably La Fête espagnole’s status as the first impressionist film owes as much to Delluc’s writings and his role as a trailblazing film critic and torchbearer of France’s first art cinema—the film’s collaborative authorship notwithstanding— as it does to the film itself, with its difficult production history, its early destruction / disintegration, and its fragmented history. A brief historiographic look at the film, the conditions of its production, its reception and recent restoration, along with a reconsideration of its place in the longer history of cinematic Impressionism (its influences, and is legacy), shed light on the trailblazing critical vision that helped shape not only a pivotal historic movement, but arguably a vital mode of filmmaking that continues to this day.
CV:
Tami M. Williams (PhD, UCLA) is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and President of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. Her books as author/editor/coeditor include Provenance and Early Cinema (2021), 2020 CNC Prix du Livre de Cinéma recipient Germaine Dulac’s What is Cinema? (2019), Global Cinema Networks (2018), The Moving Image special issue, 16.1: Early Cinema and the Archives (2016), Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), and Performing New Media, 1895-1915 (2014). She has a passion for early cinema and the archive, and the diverse intersections of wordlessness, gesture, and symbolist aesthetics in the performance arts, French cinematic impressionism, and the films of global women directors.