It is hard to know exactly how solid Luis Buñuel’s cultural capital is these days. The economy of film’s memory is shifting under our feet, and sometimes to be too well remembered can mean one is already half-forgotten. Luckily, Buñuel has reached that point at which he becomes grist for adaptations, something that always buoys one’s reputation.
There are no doubt a number of reasons why the name Germaine Dulac is not as immediately familiar to most folks, including cinephiles, as her contemporaries Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, or her collaborator-turned-detractor Antonin Artaud. Here are two: the casual misogyny of the Surrealist Boy’s Club, and the fact that Dulac’s films don’t really fit the Surrealist mold very well in the first place.
There has perhaps never been a time when so many of us have uncomfortably pondered, or angrily debated, the relationship between art and artist in mainstream cultural production. Polanski and Allen loom large, but recent events have brought us Parker and Affleck, and an ever-growing menagerie of alleged (and almost certainly guilty) shitheels besides.