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The Seashell and the Clergyman
La Coquille et le Clergyman
Based on a screenplay by Antonin Artaud, this film tells the story of a clergyman who falls madly in love with a beautiful woman, but must defeat an equally eager rival. Obsessed, the man of God has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism. Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman was arguably the first surrealist film ever made.
Dulac’s films eschew convention in favour of dreamlike logic. Though a story is present, in the form of a tormented clergyman pursuing a woman who is involved with a military officer, Dulac herself encourages her audience to disengage from the narrative. In 1928, she proclaimed that “the future belongs to the film that cannot be told”, and all her films speak completely to this sentiment.
Bio Germaine Dulac
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).
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025