the shell refuses to sing into the male ear
by
Douglas Messerli
Antonin Artaud (scenario),
Germaine Dulac (director) La Coquille et
le clergyman (The Seashell and the
Clergyman) 1928
Often
described as the first Surrealist film, released a year before Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí Un chien andalou, Dulac’s
The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)
is also far more radical, both as a kind of feminist diatribe and as a
statement of the writer’s and director’s complete dismissal and satire of the
church, the military, and almost anything else that reeks of class privilege.
In its jumble and overlays of images it
is not always possible to see where this short film is going, but we can easily
perceive the evil machinations of the lustful priest dying to get his hands on
the wife of a highly-medaled French general. It is hard to know which figure,
the hallucinating priest or the self-important military husband are more detestable,
but both, it is clear, are not worthy of the beautiful heroine. If the general
is buoyed by his pomp and circumstance, the obsessed priest is a lecherous would-be
rapist who even attempts, at one point, to kidnap her.
As film critic Jillian Olivier writes:
Throughout the film,
we feel the oppressive power of the state and
religion, with the state
represented by the general, and religion
represented by, you guessed it, the clergyman. The woman seems
caught between
the two, as she’s protected by the general
and
accosted by the clergyman. But she’s more than just an object
to protect. In fact,
she manages to skirt under the protection of Dulac
as the clergyman
attempts to capture her attention and body.
In addition to
showing us the deepest desires of the clergyman’s
mind, Dulac manages to empower
her female character by allowing
her to avoid the lecherous eyes of the audience,
as well as the
clergyman. She does this by not allowing the camera to settle
for
very long on the woman’s naked body. When the clergyman
tears her clothing
away from her chest, we get a clear view, then
the scene quickly turns out of
focus as the woman evades both the
clergyman and the men in the audience.
Evidently, upon its first showing
basically misogynistic Surrealist audience, spurned on by Artaud’s own
criticism of Dulac’s interpretation of his scenario, caused a minor riot. The
British Board of Film Censors later declared: “the film is so cryptic as to be
almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.”
Yet for all that, this work has survived
simply through the audacity of its subject and the amazing power of its images—purposely
blurred German Expressionist-like depictions of the hallucinated male gaze of
the clergyman, sharply split images of one of the villains with a spear of
black contorting his face to reveal his monstrousness, momentary nudity, and
gestures right out of melodramatic theater of the day. As an openly lesbian
director, Duluc threw out almost all the previous conventions, revealing the
power of early cinematic works even before the other Surrealists got to it.
Los Angeles, May 25, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (May 2019).
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