L'invitation au voyage (1927)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Germaine Dulac

Writers:

Charles Baudelaire (poem)
Germaine Dulac (writer)

Release Date:

December 1927 (France)

Genre:

Short

Cast

Emma Gynt	...	La Femme
Raymond Dubreuil	...	Le Marin
Robert Mirfeuil	...	Le Fetard
Paul Lorbert	...	Le Matelot
Tania Daleyme	...	La Fille
Djemil Anik
Lucien Bataille

Also Known As:

Invitation to a Journey (USA) (literal English title)

Runtime:

36 min | 39 min

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Silent

Movie Connections:

Featured in Paris Was a Woman (1995)

"Pure cinema"

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.

And now, if you allow me, I will leave you momentarily, because this Germanic Count has discovered, after a night of merrymaking in a port bar, that he has tattooed on his aristocratic arm an anchor!!!... a scandal that has to be fixed immediately.