For Dulac the cinema could teach, but it was above all an art. Dulac’s solid belief in the capacity of the camera, which she referred to as “that wide-open eye on life”, led her to believe that the documentary views recorded by the Lumière Brothers were more suitable than all other modes of expression for writing history. This led her to direct Le Cinéma au service de l’histoire, an attempt at a documentary writing of the past using newsreels (which she called “pages of living history”), without ever departing from the idea that this project should also be a veritable creation. Dulac’s montage film has an educational and political function (the film is conceived from a pacifist perspective, one of unifying peoples). Yet her goal is not so much that of illustrating historical events, than of revealing the potential of assembled images to account for and create an understanding of them. In other words, she is interested in how the Cinema allows us to think History. This is how her project sets itself apart from other archival films of the period. In keeping with her avant-garde approach of the 1920s, her search for a total emancipation of the cinema in many ways prefigures Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-89), while at the same time reusing the idea that the cinema, in its specificity and the traces that it leaves (images), is not only apt to make its own history, but also to give an original interpretation of what we’ve agreed to call History.

Laurent Véray, in Germaine Dulac, special issue of 1895, ed. Tami Williams, 2006