Germaine Dulac was the first feminist filmmaker and a key figure in the development of the French avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. In the early 1900s, she was a photographer and writer for two feminist journals, La Fronde and Le Française. Her first films were standard melodramas. In 1917, she and theoretician Louis Delluc teamed up to launch French impressionism, also known as the French avant-garde movement, which was composed of intellectuals and filmmakers devoted to promoting film as the seventh art. Dulac was fascinated with movement, as her abstract films reflect. Dulac was also known for her abiding commitment to women’s rights, as seen in her more traditional and best-known film, La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923).
