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I've only proofed this son of a bitch once...but whatever. I cranked most of this thing out VERY quickly and I think that (if you've seen the film...which I doubt many have, since it's impossibly rare after having been banned in several countries upon its release and even being disowned by the determinedly masculinist Surreal-elite) it reads pretty well, so I'm going to put up the "fresh" version. Slightly less academic, believe it or not, than the final version promises to be...!
La Coquille et le clergyman: Violence, Gender Boundaries, Germaine Dulac, and the Shoreline of Surreal Feminism
In Le Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman; 1927), director Germaine Dulac uses the framework of the Surrealist movement to emphasize the importance of more fluid gender boundaries and to criticize a constrictive set of gender limitations (so-called “traditional” gender roles–the expressly “masculine” and “feminine”). By closely examining the film, particularly a key early sequence, Dulac’s argumentative tactics emerge. In order for the criticisms and encouragements to take hold, Dulac regularly illuminates the violence she sees as inherent in the maintenance of rigid gender boundaries while she fragments or disturbs images of men and women (and masculinity and femininity), distorts eroticism within the non-standard realm of the surreal, and uses the motif of water as a way to visually code her vision of increased gender fluidity. Ultimately, the Surrealist belief in the inherent truth in supposedly intuitive (and thus, they argued, closer to the “truth”) images and constructions lends Dulac’s arguments a theoretical capital which Surrealist beliefs dictated could not otherwise be achieved. In a way, the film can be read as a simultaneous oblique criticism of traditional artistic/cinematic principles and a more focused direct attack upon established notions of gender (cinematic and otherwise).
The individual sequence which best encapsulates the issues at hand comes early in the film, when the Officer enters the room in which the Clergyman is filling bottles with the dark liquid from the seashell. The sequence ends with the watery images of the Officer’s now-distorted sword in profile, an effect achieved through the use of a homemade gelatine filter (Williams, 153). In this sequence, the Officer epitomizes stereotypical masculinity–he is stern, authoritative, large, and even dressed in military garb (complete with a large, insistently phallic sword). The feminine is represented in this particular sequence by the archetypal seashell (as well as its referent, the ocean) and later by the Woman who appears through much of the film. The Clergyman, however, does not fit well within either of these categories; ultimately, his presence and his identity (and, due to his ties to the church, one neither determinedly masculine nor feminine and one which does not readily embrace violence due) both demonstrate the shortcomings of prescriptive gender roles and the perversion of the self which a forced adherence to these conceptions entails.
The fragmentation and disturbance of the human form permits the film (and, in turn, the audience) to question the forms, themselves; additionally, the fragmentation which Dulac employs is regularly aggressive, overstated, and cinematically violent, so to speak. Looking at the sequence, we first see the Officer enter in slow-motion. While this technique does not fracture his image in any way, it does disturb the image–this is not, after all, how we see a person walk into a room. This slow-motion photography encourages the viewer to interrogate the image in an effort to understand it. This disturbance of the Officer’s image as he walks around (and, of course, the concurrent and exaggerated stereotypes contained therein) occurs several times in the sequence, and sometimes in lengthy takes. In the end, we ideally do not just ask ourselves why the image is in slow-motion, but also what this image is and what it means–it makes no sense, Dulac seems to argue, not because of the unnatural speed, but because the role itself (and the violence suggested by the mere look and attitude the man) does not make sense. At one point, the Officer is also photographed from a high angle, a camera position which not only subverts and questions his guise of authority, but also again encourages us (since we assume a privileged vantage point) to further question the on-screen image.
Distorted camera angles also much more overtly fragment the image of the Clergyman, early in this sequence. The camera forcefully obscures the Clergyman’s physical presence, shooting him from behind in extremely tight, isolating close-ups, often again from slightly elevated angles. It takes some effort even to recognize the totality of his person. When we first see the Clergyman, he is filling bottles with a dark liquid from the seashell and, for some reason, immediately dropping them to the ground where they shatter; the bottles are visually coded as phallic, and this phallic image is destroyed along with the bottles. In his pouring of the shell’s liquid into the bottles, the Clergyman has provided a symbolic unification of polarized gender identities (the archetypally feminine seashell has filled the phallic bottles); still, this fusion cannot exist, for the bottles must immediately be discarded and destroyed. Despite his care, the Clergyman’s work is doomed–the rules seem to dictate that this fusion cannot be.
Dulac intercuts shots of the Officer with this back-and-forth of fusion and subsequent destruction. He is portrayed crouching, upside down, at the peak of an archway, and he is repeatedly seen immobilized, floating still in the air as he slowly rotates, entirely unable to move. Dulac works on several levels with this series of shots, as she first of all underscores the irrationality of focused maintenance of these rigid gender identifications; the Clergyman’s actions, after all, are drawn out, repetitious, and ultimately fruitless. Nothing, the film suggests, can possibly be accomplished in this climate. This perspective only finds more textual support when the Officer forcibly wrests the seashell away from the helpless Clergyman, whose outsider status (as a member of the church, he is expressly forbidden to have a traditional gender role–arguably, he is forced into genderlessness) and inability or refusal to violently retaliate effectively marginalize and disempower him. Violence is essential for him to hold his own, and in a sadistic world such as this one, his non-violence hurts rather than helps him.
When the Officer takes hold of the shell, Dulac introduces the distorted eroticism already hinted at. In a long shot of the Officer in profile, we see him raise his lengthy sword in slow-motion as he prepares to strike the seashell. The movement of the Officer, especially as Dulac shoots him in profile, is undeniably eroticized; the phallic presence of the sword is impossible to overlook. At the same time, the slow-motion photography makes the action’s duration seem unnaturally long; in turn, Dulac successfully disturbs the erotic symbolization at play. The incident can be read as a play on the sexual act (the sword meeting the seashell), but it does not function in a comfortable way. Instead, the slow-motion photography contrasts greatly with the following low-angle shot of the Officer actually striking the seashell with the sword. The transition is jarring and unnatural, and any potential eroticism is overshadowed by what feels like an at once uncomfortable (the slow-motion) and aggressively violent (the standard speed) action. This relationship between the rigidly masculine and feminine becomes perverse and otherworldly, here.
The otherworldliness only intensifies in response to the Officer’s attackl, as Dulac’s gelatine filter shows a succession of images which flutter, distort, and assume a water-like visual fluidity. The final image we see is the Officer’s sword; it is heavily distorted, just as is its phallic consonance. The sword warps strangely as the filter deforms it, and this distortion resonates strongly in that it immediately follows the Officer’s violent action. Dulac’s images alone, without any intertitles, show us that violence cannot enforce these boundaries, though it is the only method which is remotely successful–the seashell has fallen, yes, but it has not broken and has not been conquered; it will return later. Similarly, the very power which the Officer’s violent action sought to uphold is eventually undercut by that very same violence; the image, rather than favoring the Officer’s rigid, unflinching masculinity, instead subverts it. He has visually rendered himself impotent, as his sword becomes flaccid and useless.
By looking at the ways in which Dulac uses these various techniques to analyze the two male figures, the viewer begins to understand how she puts the pieces of her feminist puzzle together. Essentially, she views rigid gender constructions as problematic in and of themselves (equally problematic, of course, is the elision by these constructions of so-called “alternate” gender identities), and views the violence inherent in their maintenance as just as, if not more, problematic. This violence only confuses an already mis-informed reality, but her film does not stop there. The Woman also factors into many examples of Dulac’s position.
The female form indeed endures fragmentation in the film, and this fragmentation also encompasses the distorted eroticism already examined. Dulac isolates various parts of the Woman’s body and manipulates them and the way they are presented to reinforce her position. At one point, the Clergyman attempts to assume the masculine position by using violence in order to make the Woman subservient; this action in and of itself perverts the formerly helpless Clergyman, demonstrating how personally damaging these boundaries can be. A “good” man has resorted to violence to fit into a gender system which excludes him; like the Officer, though, he will fail. His attempt to control the woman through a violent display informed by the notion of masculine superiority, just as he will later fail in his attempts to chase, capture, hurt, and even strangle the Woman. In this particular and initial attempt, the Clergyman tears the Woman’s top off, exposing her breasts; Dulac presents the Woman’s breasts in a tight close-up, but a bra fashioned of seashells materializes to cover the breasts from the Clergyman’s hands and his gaze. The Clergyman has acted in violence, but he has failed entirely to establish dominance over even this fragmented image of femininity.
Likewise, Dulac shows an image of the Woman suggestively undulating her tongue near the end of the film. The image has overt sexual connotations, but Dulac distorts this eroticism by again using (to even greater effect) her gelatine filter–the image is grossly distorted and assumes an almost monstrous quality in its metamorphosis and constant shape-shifting. In this instance, the camera itself has aggressively (violently, one could argue) attempted to fragment or isolate the female form in seeking to view and control it (for the image itself cannot resist our gaze), but Dulac has taken the bottom out from underneath this attempt at control. She herself has appropriated a violent cinematic technique and effectively demonstrated that it cannot succeed–she manipulates the image to grossly alter our own gaze. Most importantly, this subversion of the violent or aggressive gaze does not merely distort the image of the fragmented woman. At the same time, the image becomes so grossly unnatural that in order to understand and engage with the text, the audience must actively examine and interpret the images displayed on the screen. Our own interpretations and considerations must become as fluid as the image.
This proves to be the most important aspect of the film’s assault upon rigid gender categorization. The film is so surreal, so unnatural, so fractured, and so confrontational in addition to being so committed to its goals by way of fragmentation, distorted eroticism, and the water motif, that it coerces the audience to reconsider everything it has seen–of course, nearly everything we’ve seen concerns gender. Our gaze (regardless of sex or gender, because Dulac is not after a “masculine” or “feminine” gaze, but after the principles which inform our general way of perceiving the world) has been confused, just as has all we use it to view; this confusion seeks to reveal the inadequacy of the gender principles which inform our gaze and our world. Dulac uses these three characters and her wealth of cinematic capital to show us the situation as she sees it, to assault that situation, and finally to encourage us to do the very same thing. The Surrealist notion of the inherent truth in the irrational or dream-like perfectly underpins the otherworldly strangeness of this film–it does not look like the truth that we are supposed to recognize in the modern world, but its truth remains unbound by the principles we would use to judge our world. It is dreamlike and, for a Surrealist like Dulac, closer to the truth–the “traditional” system of gender prescriptivism cannot, should not, and will not stand in the presence of not just a new artistic movement, but a new (and theoretically more accurate) way of viewing, interpreting, and understanding the world.
La Coquille et le clergyman: Violence, Gender Boundaries, Germaine Dulac, and the Shoreline of Surreal Feminism
In Le Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman; 1927), director Germaine Dulac uses the framework of the Surrealist movement to emphasize the importance of more fluid gender boundaries and to criticize a constrictive set of gender limitations (so-called “traditional” gender roles–the expressly “masculine” and “feminine”). By closely examining the film, particularly a key early sequence, Dulac’s argumentative tactics emerge. In order for the criticisms and encouragements to take hold, Dulac regularly illuminates the violence she sees as inherent in the maintenance of rigid gender boundaries while she fragments or disturbs images of men and women (and masculinity and femininity), distorts eroticism within the non-standard realm of the surreal, and uses the motif of water as a way to visually code her vision of increased gender fluidity. Ultimately, the Surrealist belief in the inherent truth in supposedly intuitive (and thus, they argued, closer to the “truth”) images and constructions lends Dulac’s arguments a theoretical capital which Surrealist beliefs dictated could not otherwise be achieved. In a way, the film can be read as a simultaneous oblique criticism of traditional artistic/cinematic principles and a more focused direct attack upon established notions of gender (cinematic and otherwise).
The individual sequence which best encapsulates the issues at hand comes early in the film, when the Officer enters the room in which the Clergyman is filling bottles with the dark liquid from the seashell. The sequence ends with the watery images of the Officer’s now-distorted sword in profile, an effect achieved through the use of a homemade gelatine filter (Williams, 153). In this sequence, the Officer epitomizes stereotypical masculinity–he is stern, authoritative, large, and even dressed in military garb (complete with a large, insistently phallic sword). The feminine is represented in this particular sequence by the archetypal seashell (as well as its referent, the ocean) and later by the Woman who appears through much of the film. The Clergyman, however, does not fit well within either of these categories; ultimately, his presence and his identity (and, due to his ties to the church, one neither determinedly masculine nor feminine and one which does not readily embrace violence due) both demonstrate the shortcomings of prescriptive gender roles and the perversion of the self which a forced adherence to these conceptions entails.
The fragmentation and disturbance of the human form permits the film (and, in turn, the audience) to question the forms, themselves; additionally, the fragmentation which Dulac employs is regularly aggressive, overstated, and cinematically violent, so to speak. Looking at the sequence, we first see the Officer enter in slow-motion. While this technique does not fracture his image in any way, it does disturb the image–this is not, after all, how we see a person walk into a room. This slow-motion photography encourages the viewer to interrogate the image in an effort to understand it. This disturbance of the Officer’s image as he walks around (and, of course, the concurrent and exaggerated stereotypes contained therein) occurs several times in the sequence, and sometimes in lengthy takes. In the end, we ideally do not just ask ourselves why the image is in slow-motion, but also what this image is and what it means–it makes no sense, Dulac seems to argue, not because of the unnatural speed, but because the role itself (and the violence suggested by the mere look and attitude the man) does not make sense. At one point, the Officer is also photographed from a high angle, a camera position which not only subverts and questions his guise of authority, but also again encourages us (since we assume a privileged vantage point) to further question the on-screen image.
Distorted camera angles also much more overtly fragment the image of the Clergyman, early in this sequence. The camera forcefully obscures the Clergyman’s physical presence, shooting him from behind in extremely tight, isolating close-ups, often again from slightly elevated angles. It takes some effort even to recognize the totality of his person. When we first see the Clergyman, he is filling bottles with a dark liquid from the seashell and, for some reason, immediately dropping them to the ground where they shatter; the bottles are visually coded as phallic, and this phallic image is destroyed along with the bottles. In his pouring of the shell’s liquid into the bottles, the Clergyman has provided a symbolic unification of polarized gender identities (the archetypally feminine seashell has filled the phallic bottles); still, this fusion cannot exist, for the bottles must immediately be discarded and destroyed. Despite his care, the Clergyman’s work is doomed–the rules seem to dictate that this fusion cannot be.
Dulac intercuts shots of the Officer with this back-and-forth of fusion and subsequent destruction. He is portrayed crouching, upside down, at the peak of an archway, and he is repeatedly seen immobilized, floating still in the air as he slowly rotates, entirely unable to move. Dulac works on several levels with this series of shots, as she first of all underscores the irrationality of focused maintenance of these rigid gender identifications; the Clergyman’s actions, after all, are drawn out, repetitious, and ultimately fruitless. Nothing, the film suggests, can possibly be accomplished in this climate. This perspective only finds more textual support when the Officer forcibly wrests the seashell away from the helpless Clergyman, whose outsider status (as a member of the church, he is expressly forbidden to have a traditional gender role–arguably, he is forced into genderlessness) and inability or refusal to violently retaliate effectively marginalize and disempower him. Violence is essential for him to hold his own, and in a sadistic world such as this one, his non-violence hurts rather than helps him.
When the Officer takes hold of the shell, Dulac introduces the distorted eroticism already hinted at. In a long shot of the Officer in profile, we see him raise his lengthy sword in slow-motion as he prepares to strike the seashell. The movement of the Officer, especially as Dulac shoots him in profile, is undeniably eroticized; the phallic presence of the sword is impossible to overlook. At the same time, the slow-motion photography makes the action’s duration seem unnaturally long; in turn, Dulac successfully disturbs the erotic symbolization at play. The incident can be read as a play on the sexual act (the sword meeting the seashell), but it does not function in a comfortable way. Instead, the slow-motion photography contrasts greatly with the following low-angle shot of the Officer actually striking the seashell with the sword. The transition is jarring and unnatural, and any potential eroticism is overshadowed by what feels like an at once uncomfortable (the slow-motion) and aggressively violent (the standard speed) action. This relationship between the rigidly masculine and feminine becomes perverse and otherworldly, here.
The otherworldliness only intensifies in response to the Officer’s attackl, as Dulac’s gelatine filter shows a succession of images which flutter, distort, and assume a water-like visual fluidity. The final image we see is the Officer’s sword; it is heavily distorted, just as is its phallic consonance. The sword warps strangely as the filter deforms it, and this distortion resonates strongly in that it immediately follows the Officer’s violent action. Dulac’s images alone, without any intertitles, show us that violence cannot enforce these boundaries, though it is the only method which is remotely successful–the seashell has fallen, yes, but it has not broken and has not been conquered; it will return later. Similarly, the very power which the Officer’s violent action sought to uphold is eventually undercut by that very same violence; the image, rather than favoring the Officer’s rigid, unflinching masculinity, instead subverts it. He has visually rendered himself impotent, as his sword becomes flaccid and useless.
By looking at the ways in which Dulac uses these various techniques to analyze the two male figures, the viewer begins to understand how she puts the pieces of her feminist puzzle together. Essentially, she views rigid gender constructions as problematic in and of themselves (equally problematic, of course, is the elision by these constructions of so-called “alternate” gender identities), and views the violence inherent in their maintenance as just as, if not more, problematic. This violence only confuses an already mis-informed reality, but her film does not stop there. The Woman also factors into many examples of Dulac’s position.
The female form indeed endures fragmentation in the film, and this fragmentation also encompasses the distorted eroticism already examined. Dulac isolates various parts of the Woman’s body and manipulates them and the way they are presented to reinforce her position. At one point, the Clergyman attempts to assume the masculine position by using violence in order to make the Woman subservient; this action in and of itself perverts the formerly helpless Clergyman, demonstrating how personally damaging these boundaries can be. A “good” man has resorted to violence to fit into a gender system which excludes him; like the Officer, though, he will fail. His attempt to control the woman through a violent display informed by the notion of masculine superiority, just as he will later fail in his attempts to chase, capture, hurt, and even strangle the Woman. In this particular and initial attempt, the Clergyman tears the Woman’s top off, exposing her breasts; Dulac presents the Woman’s breasts in a tight close-up, but a bra fashioned of seashells materializes to cover the breasts from the Clergyman’s hands and his gaze. The Clergyman has acted in violence, but he has failed entirely to establish dominance over even this fragmented image of femininity.
Likewise, Dulac shows an image of the Woman suggestively undulating her tongue near the end of the film. The image has overt sexual connotations, but Dulac distorts this eroticism by again using (to even greater effect) her gelatine filter–the image is grossly distorted and assumes an almost monstrous quality in its metamorphosis and constant shape-shifting. In this instance, the camera itself has aggressively (violently, one could argue) attempted to fragment or isolate the female form in seeking to view and control it (for the image itself cannot resist our gaze), but Dulac has taken the bottom out from underneath this attempt at control. She herself has appropriated a violent cinematic technique and effectively demonstrated that it cannot succeed–she manipulates the image to grossly alter our own gaze. Most importantly, this subversion of the violent or aggressive gaze does not merely distort the image of the fragmented woman. At the same time, the image becomes so grossly unnatural that in order to understand and engage with the text, the audience must actively examine and interpret the images displayed on the screen. Our own interpretations and considerations must become as fluid as the image.
This proves to be the most important aspect of the film’s assault upon rigid gender categorization. The film is so surreal, so unnatural, so fractured, and so confrontational in addition to being so committed to its goals by way of fragmentation, distorted eroticism, and the water motif, that it coerces the audience to reconsider everything it has seen–of course, nearly everything we’ve seen concerns gender. Our gaze (regardless of sex or gender, because Dulac is not after a “masculine” or “feminine” gaze, but after the principles which inform our general way of perceiving the world) has been confused, just as has all we use it to view; this confusion seeks to reveal the inadequacy of the gender principles which inform our gaze and our world. Dulac uses these three characters and her wealth of cinematic capital to show us the situation as she sees it, to assault that situation, and finally to encourage us to do the very same thing. The Surrealist notion of the inherent truth in the irrational or dream-like perfectly underpins the otherworldly strangeness of this film–it does not look like the truth that we are supposed to recognize in the modern world, but its truth remains unbound by the principles we would use to judge our world. It is dreamlike and, for a Surrealist like Dulac, closer to the truth–the “traditional” system of gender prescriptivism cannot, should not, and will not stand in the presence of not just a new artistic movement, but a new (and theoretically more accurate) way of viewing, interpreting, and understanding the world.
