ABSTRACT
Feminist, Socialist, and pioneer filmmaker of the 1920s French avant-garde, Germaine Dulac played a founding role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and as social practice. Germaine Dulac's work of the 1930s has long been dismissed as a radical departure from her earlier days as an avant-garde filmmaker. Dulac had directed her last fiction films in 1930, a year that marked the French film industry's total conversion to sound. Dulac's approach to the newsreel can be seen as a synthesis of her conceptions of a 'pure' and 'expanded' cinema, already present in embryonic form in her avant-garde films of the 1920s, and in her idea of an 'objective' cinema. During the two wars, and even in the years between them, the newsreel almost always adopted the point of view of the ruling power, and its subject matter generally reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie and of the private industries and government institutions that owned it.
