Sarah Keller (University of Massachusetts Boston)
In the late 1910s and early 1920s, several influential observers and makers of cinema in France initiated modes for thinking about this nascent art form that would shape the production and reception of films. Among these observers were Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein, whose contributions to this moment overlap in multiple ways: each wrote about film, worked on scenarios for film, made films, and enthusiastically proselytized for cinema as a quintessential expressive medium. Each therefore explored practical, intellectual, and critical ways of conceiving of cinema’s purview and methods, and each generated public discourse on these matters alongside their own film fandom and film practice. In this paper, I explore their provocative mixture of engagements with cinemas as the vanguard for shaping French cinema in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In particular, I emphasize the relay of cross-medial approaches to moving images for these filmmakers, such that they consider it from every conceivable angle. To explore these angles, I turn to their writing about the unique qualities of the cinematic image—as well as all three cinéastes’ tendency to use specific, contemporary film texts as a way of grounding certain ideas they wish to elaborate in practical examples. Finally, the better to illustrate their conception of cinema, I focus on Germaine Dulac’s film La Fête espanole (1920), made with a scenario by Louis Delluc, to engage with a film from the center of this period that elaborates their sense of cinematic mobility, luminosity, and rhythm.
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Sarah Keller is professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She co-edited Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and her books include Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Columbia University Press, 2014), Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2020), and Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame (Wayne State University Press, 2021). She is founder and organizer of the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.