La Coquille et le clergyman (1928) - film review

A clergyman experiences a bizarre sequence of fantasies that torment him and test his faith to the limit.  He has fallen for a beautiful woman, the wife of a proud general, and this obsession provokes image after image in his increasingly heated brain.  He sees himself kill the general; he sees himself chase after the beautiful woman.  The dream becomes ever more fantastic and terrifying, until, at its climax, the clergyman seizes a giant shell and thirstily drains its contents…

A likely candidate for the most bewildering film in the history of cinema, La Coquille et le clergyman was the product of two mutually incompatible creative talents of the 1920s – the writer Antonin Artaud and the feminist Germaine Dulac.  Coming a year before Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), La Coquille et le clergyman must have come as a shock to the censors and any audience it attracted (by comparison, Buñuel’s film actually seems rather coherent).  In 1927, the British Board of Film Censors banned this film, citing that “if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable”.

Whilst it is a struggle to make sense of much of this film, there’s no real doubt about its general thrust.  It’s all about sex – in particular, one man’s inner battle against his lustful thoughts.  The images range from the explicit (a wide-eyed priest tearing off a woman’s bra to reveal a heaving female bosom) to the obvious Freudian metaphorical (a man unlocking an endless series of doors) to the bewildering yet suggestive (a head split open, a suddenly expanding cassock, etc.).  Even today, the film appears daring and occasionally shocking.  When it was released, its portrayal of a man of the church as a turbo-charged bra-fondling lecher could only have been seen as dangerously subversive, anti-Clerical feminist propaganda of the worst kind.

When he saw the film, its writer Antonin Artaud was furious and openly criticized Dulac for the way in which she had effectively massacred his script.  Dulac’s approach to filmmaking was one that was prevalent among the experimentalists of the 1920s, and one that would assume paramount importance in the late 1950s with the arrival of the French New Wave.  Her philosophy was that the real creative force behind a film was its director – not the actors, not the writer.  What we see on the screen is the vision as conceived by the director; it is he or she who is the auteur.  And Dulac’s vision for La Coquille et le clergyman was an unfalteringly surrealist and provocative one.

After Alice Guy, Germaine Dulac is famously only the second woman in history to have made a career as a filmmaker.  Her films were, in the main, experimental shorts, part of the same avant-garde tradition which includes Jean Epstein and Abel Gance.  Because of her controversial views, but most probably because she was a woman, Dulac’s contribution to cinema has been overshadowed and all but forgotten.  The recent restoration of this, her most celebrated work, should help to redress the balance.

© James Travers 2005

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This first surreal film was the beginning of numerous film techniques which have had a tremendous influence on present day film makers throughout the globe.
Parthajit Baruah (India, Assam Nagaon)

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