Dulac’s earliest surviving film, La Cigarette announces all of the elements of the Impressionist film movement that she helped launch soon after: location shooting, realist acting, symbolist iconography, associative montage, and musical analogy. Shot in the twilight of World War I (Fall 1918), the film also features one of the most patently liberated young heroines, as well as one of the most distressed and suicide-driven male heroes of her oeuvre. This unrestrained liberty in expressing progressive women’s roles, visible in its purest form here, gradually eroded in the face of post-war neo-natalist moral discourse. Dulac soon turned to “suggestion” in order to express certain notions of emancipation.

Tami Williams