“How I Became a Film Director”

This chapter explores Germaine Dulac's family background, drawing on personal records, memoirs, and correspondence. Her early upbringing and encounters with certain people, events, and tendencies during France's Belle Époque later impacted Dulac's political and aesthetic views and the many alternatives and choices that shaped her film career. These include the influence of moderate socialism on her views of class, gender, sexuality, and national politics, and the impact of nineteenth-century symbolist and naturalist tendencies on her inventive rhetorical and representational strategies as they contributed to her filmmaking and activism. The chapter examines Dulac's “women's portraits,” as well as her early political activities and nonfiction writings as a pacifist and feminist from 1906 to 1913.