The Cigarette (1919)

Dulac’s earliest extant title, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband who believes she is having an affair–speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity in France. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association, building tension between modernity/antiquity, life/death, and masculinity/femininity through cinematic-specific techniques, editing, and more.
Germaine Dulac
Andrée Brabant, Gabriel Signoret, Jules Raucourt, Genevieve Williams
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