The film’s visual structure is principally composed of variations on the arabesque: arcs of light, water spouts, spider webs, burgeoning trees, flowers and foliage, a woman’s smile, arms stretching, an arm giving rhythm to a rocking chair. It uses natural elements (light, mirrors, water, and wind) and photographic techniques (multiple exposures and lenses) to distort the various elements, or to intensify their design.
France France 
The most purely abstract of Germaine Dulac's musical shorts that I've seen. This one never approaches anything like an actual plot, like an actual series of events. Instead we get rhythmically edited shots of reflections on water, coupled with close-ups of bits and pieces of nature. A woman appears very briefly, but only in segments - a face, a foot. Music plays but is never specifically referred to by the visuals. The subjects of the shots are often identifiable, but never have any narrative meaning. Everything just shimmers to the music.
arabesque works through fragments of water, foliage, texture, and partial human presence, arranged as visual correspondences rather than narrative units. nothing develops in a conventional sense, since each shot exists as an interval tied to rhythm and variation instead of cause and effect.
7th Germaine Dulac (after The Smiling Madam Beudet, The Seashell and the Clergyman, The Cigarette, Themes and Variations, Spanish Fiesta and Disque 957)
Beautiful ripples of texture placed end to end, dissolves to blend the sensations together and hard cuts to distinguish them. Cinema as an evocation of something ethereal and something concrete. The rain is beautiful here.
Dulac in Order:
1. The Seashell and the Clergyman
2. The Cigarette
3. The Smiling Madame Beudet
4. Arabesque
5. Disque 957
6. Themes and Variations
7. Spanish Fiesta
Early Avant-Garde
Germaine Dulac: Part Three
In a certain sense, it just does what it says on the tin — it's an exploration of arabesque visual stylings in cinematic form, an answer to the question of whether one can make an abstract movie composed primarily of interlacing foliage etc. — but it's just as much a marvel of editing as of visual composition.
The juxtaposition of more traditionally arabesque images with naturalistic still lifes or with fractured, almost mechanical imagery changes the arabesque, enhancing certain characteristics and distorting others.
I struggle to find words for a lot of these abstract, experimental shorts because the point of the film is the images themselves, but what I personally get out of them beyond a series of beautiful shots beautifully knit together is a certain sense of tranquility as the images wash over me and a certain sense of wonder at the power of the cinematic medium.
A visual essay by French avant-gardist Germaine Dulac, creating a filmic companion to the literary movement of Symbolism, specifically (so the intertitles tell us) poet Albert Samain on the first days of spring. Dulac's interspersed images emulate the arabesque, which (so Encyclopedia Britannica tells us) is a "style of decoration characterized by intertwining plants and abstract curvilinear motifs." The result is not only beautiful and soothing, it is also bewitching and intelligent art. A masterpiece of silent-era motion picture modernism.
O problema de querer discutir os formalistas (i.e., formalismo enquanto teoria estética e abordagem crítica, não formalismo enquanto um estilo ou abordagem de fazer filme) e a questão da "forma" em Arte é que continuamos a insistir em pensá-la de modo equivocado.
"Forma" é tratado como um oposto a "conteúdo", emergindo como uma espécie de mero invólucro extrínseco e contingente. Isso se dá no fim por conta da dualidade que está em jogo. O oposto de conteúdo é o de "expressão", e passamos a tratar como se "forma" fosse "expressão". Isso é, que há um conteúdo (e essa noção dificilmente escapa um horizonte semântico, ele próprio enredado em uma série de questões metafísicas dificílimas) que irá ser expresso em um…
Essa busca por um “cinema puro” de Germaine Dulac encontra no ritmo do Arabesco (Dança, decoração, arquitetura) sua forma especialmente cinematográfica. Um filme de encontros sensíveis com os rostos e as coisas.
Definition of arabesque
1 : an ornament or style that employs flower, foliage, or fruit and sometimes animal and figural outlines to produce an intricate pattern of interlaced lines
Weird girl cottagecore energy
Completely unique to Germaine Dulac.
this one is a perfect sunday morning watch. the deep freeze that my little corner of upstate NY has been in finally broke a bit yesterday when the sun came out, and i took the dogs on a long walk, after, sadly, not really leaving the house for a few days. i didn't wear headphones, shockingly, so i actually heard birds chirping yesterday, and i hear them again in my office this morning. this short, with simple shots of light, flowers, water glittering like diamonds, reminds that the death of winter is not eternal. this was my first Germaine Dulac film, and i will certainly be watching more. reading thru other's write-ups, it seems clear this has resonated with a…
Just exquisite. Interested in a pure perceptual novelty from optical technology without following that fascination towards an overdetermined obviousness. The representational footage works to both provide a certain graphic contrast and to prompt an ontological affinity: what we’re seeing is still optical, mediated material rather than a work of some mimetic realism or capturing of life “as it is.” Always already mediated, always already optical, the optical lenses and effects as bared devices to point us to a subtler but more profound film theoretical conclusion.
A stream of glistening, kaleidoscopic imagery: rippling pools of water, droplets raining down on rough ground, nature and coruscating light reflected in a disco ball. Free of narrative, beautifully pure.
