Country: France
Language: French
Director:
Germaine Dulac
Writers: Charles
Baudelaire (poem), Germaine Dulac, Irène Hillel-Erlanger
Stars: Raymond
Dubreuil, Emma Gynt and Robert Mirfeuil
Release Date:
December 1927 (France)
Also known as:
Invitation to a Journey (USA)
Genres: Short
During the
younger times of this Germanic count, Damen Germaine Dulac was a complete
fräulein of strong character and independent spirit (even though she was
Frenchified); well, it is what we, the aristocrats, used to consider as
"dangerous longhaired youngsters", because Damen Germaine Dulac had
subversive and suspicious tendencies for the aristocracy, like being a
specialist in Opera (and to make things worse, she liked it), a radical
suffragist (those youngsters with revolutionary ideas), or theater and cinema
critic (this last thing is the worst, MEIN GOTT!). With such curriculum and
bizarre taste, it was inevitable that she started to get interested by
avant-garde film and became an exponent of it.
"L'Invitation
Au Voyage" was made some years before "La Coquille Et Le
Clergyman" (1928), her most well-known film which also maximizes her
restless cinematographic searches, a film that soon will be commented on by
this Germanic count. In "L'Invitation Au Voyage", she maintains a
transgressor spirit and her eagerness to get at what she considered the
"pure cinema", even though the film is less risky and more accessible
in its cinematographic proposals than "La Coquille Et Le Clergyman".
At the beginning of the film, the stylistic
intentions are very well defined when the director says that she expects with
her film "to expose her cinematographic idea without the help of
explicative signs", so the image value gets hold of it on this film based
on a Herr Baudelaire's poem. The movie shows us in a special and nonconformist
aesthetic and technique way, the frustrations and unrealized dreams of its main
character in a port establishment (a magnificent multicolour ambiance, a sea
cabaret), her dreams as a livelihood for a false and dull life. The search of a
chimera that even the main character is well aware of.
