This captivating symbolist portrait of a passionate love between two gypsies is one of the most unique and overlooked Dulac’s masterworks. According to her longtime companion Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville, Dulac considered La Folie des vaillants to be her film roi (‘king film’). For Dulac, who officially joined the S.F.I.O. (French Socialist Party) in 1925, the year she made this film – and for whom social equality had always been fundamental – Gorkij’s tale of two gypsies (ideal socialists, rebellious, hence naturally radical and anti-capitalist) provided an apt framework in which to consider an alternative construction of gender roles. By reversing the terms of contemporary marital power relationships, La Folie des vaillants would have had special resonance for those with feminist ideals in France of the mid-1920s. In 1925, feminists had launched a proposal to revise the Napoleonic Code, which severely curbed women’s access to their own finances, institutionalized spousal inequality, and restricted parental authority. Dulac’s film cast into sharp relief the injustice of those provisions that so constrained women’s freedoms. Despite the film’s shoestring budget, a contract clause granted Dulac “complete artistic freedom”. Still, she was forced to negotiate the issue of moral conservatism and ‘public taste’ for the sake of commercial distribution. With customary artistic audacity and commercial prowess, she prepared multiple endings, the more radical ending here, and another, more commercial one which theater owners could order on demand. Above all, Dulac saw in this film an unprecedented opportunity to realize her conception of cinema as a “visual symphony”, made of “life”, “movement,” and “rhythm”. By maximizing the rhythmic association between the images and by minimizing the importance of acting, photography, plot, and décor, for Dulac and her feminist “cinema of suggestion”: La Folie des vaillants was “one step towards habituating the public to the visual symphony, where so-called ‘theatrical’ action would be nothing, and sensibility… everything”.

Tami Williams