The Smiling Madame Beudet

Germaine Dulac's short feature, adapted from the play by Denys Amiel and André Obey, is one of the first feminist films and a touchstone of early narrative avant-garde. Madame Beudet sits at the piano in a provincial house, trapped in a loveless marriage to a petty, boastful merchant who mocks her dreams and pretends to shoot himself with an unloaded revolver as a cruel joke. Dulac tells the story almost entirely from inside Madame Beudet's head, using superimpositions, distorted lenses, and repeated images of the piano and the empty revolver to render a woman's mental life on screen. Germaine Dermoz plays Madame Beudet with a still, inward sadness, and Alexandre Arquillière is the husband. The film was produced by Films Albatros, the Russian émigré studio in Paris, and was largely overlooked for decades before being reclaimed as a landmark of women's cinema. A 1923 work, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.