Film Review
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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Film Synopsis
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…
© James Travers
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