When we talk about avant-garde cinema, we tend to think of names like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, or our own Luis Buñuel and his Andalusian Dog. But just as happened in other artistic movements, there were also women dreaming, imagining, and, above all, creating. And it's curious because, although many were recognized—and appreciated—in their time, almost a hundred years have had to pass for other women to come and recover their work and legacy.
This is the case that concerns us, that of Germaine Dulac, to whom the director of the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona, Imma Prieto, along with film critic and university professor, Imma Merino, dedicate a retrospective that is more a re-reading of the cinematographic canon from a gender and dissidence perspective. A journey towards a gaze that was silenced, but that never stopped challenging the present.
And it is that in an era when cinema was barely learning to speak, Germaine Dulac was already demanding a soul from it. Her camera not only recorded images, but breathed thought, desire, and revolution. One hundred years later, her work returns to light in Germaine Dulac. Je n'ai plus rien, the first monographic exhibition in Europe dedicated to the French filmmaker (Amiens, 1882 – Paris, 1942), a key figure in experimental cinema, cinematographic impressionism, and 20th-century feminist thought.
In the 1920s, when male avant-gardes dictated the limits of art, Dulac broke the frame. Against the dominance of theater or painting, she defended the autonomy of cinema as its own language, capable of expressing movement, rhythm, light, and emotion without the need for words. "Cinema," she said, "should be music for the eyes."
Her work explores the folds of interiority and human desires through innovative visual resources, with superimpositions, blurs, altered rhythms, or fragmented frames. With this, she anticipated the aesthetics of later poetic and experimental cinema, and opened the door to a new sensibility that understood the image as a sensory and spiritual experience.
Films like La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923), La Fête espagnole (1920), L'Invitation au voyage (1927) or La Coquille et le clergyman (1928) —considered the first surrealist film in history before Un chien andalou— reveal her courage to challenge formal conventions and the politics of desire. And all of this, from a different point of view, from the blind field of the frame. In her films, women cease to be the object of desire to become the active subject who thinks, dreams, desires, and rebels. In a world of silence, Dulac sets in motion the rebellion of the female gaze.
Because her cinema is not just an aesthetic matter, but also a political one. In every shot, she seems to ask how the image can free the viewer from dominant discourses. And in her time, this attitude was profoundly subversive, and her camera, her way of looking was, in itself, a form of insubordination.
Between 1915 and 1935, Germaine Dulac developed an intense and diverse career. She was a director, screenwriter, theorist, and producer, and also one of the few women who ran their own studios in interwar France. Her feminist activism led her to associate with movements for gender equality and with associations of women journalists and artists.
In collaboration with the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the project is expanded with a screening seriesHer collaboration with other creators such as filmmaker Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville —who was also her partner for more than twenty years—, or writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, allowed her to weave feminist networks in 1920s Paris, where art became a space of resistance. Dulac conceived cinema not only as a means of expression, but as a tool to questionhierarchies of power, the patriarchal gaze and sexual normativity.
The exhibition at the Museu Tàpies recovers this political and affective dimension of her cinema, and proposes a journey where her films dialogue with unreleased materials, original scripts, correspondence, and theoretical essays that reflect her critical thinking on representation, authorship, and creative freedom.
The enormous research work of the two curators of the exhibition, which is structured around several thematic axes, deserves mention. The first, Cinema as an Art of Movement, focuses on Dulac's formal innovations and her role within the so-called French cinematographic impressionism, alongside figures such as Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, and Marcel L'Herbier.
The second, The Body and Desire, explores her treatment of the female body as a territory of experience, in contrast to the objectifying gaze of cinema of her time. This section includes an audiovisual piece by contemporary filmmaker Mercedes Álvarez, which captures and highlights the major themes in Dulac's work, establishing a dialogue between past and present that never ceases to surprise us, as female will and desire are the central core.
For its part, the third axis, Cinema and History, addresses her political dimension, with special attention to Le Cinéma au service de l'Histoire (1935), a documentary that reflects on European dictatorships and the dangers of nationalism. Its lucidity is unsettling, not only because of the moment it was produced ---before Hitler's rise to power--- but because almost a century later it remains fiercely relevant in the current political context.
The title of the exhibition, Je n'ai plus rien (I have nothing left), comes from the last letter Dulac wrote before her death in 1942. However, far from resignation, that phrase resonates as a poetic affirmation of independence: to shed everything to be free.
The wonderful thing about this project piloted by the Museu Tàpies is that it is not limited to the exhibition halls. In collaboration with the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the project is expanded with a series of screenings that will take place from October 1 to November 23, where the author's essential filmography will be presented. Both institutions offer discounted cross-tickets to foster dialogue between museum and cinema.
And they also co-edit with the Wunderkammer publishing house the volume Germaine Dulac. What is cinema?, which brings together for the first time in Spanish the texts and lectures of the director, translated from the French edition by Tami Williams and Clément Lafite. The book features a prologue by Imma Prieto and Imma Merino, and its Catalan version will be published as a non-commercial publication within the exhibition framework.
Likewise, the Museu Tàpies will accompany the exhibition with an extensive program of public and educational activities, notably the debate "The rebellious image. Germaine Dulac and the feminine imaginary of surrealism" (February 3, 2026), with researchers Tami Williams, Elena Castro Córdoba, and Lucía Ramírez Blanco, and Mal Pelo's corporal conference (February 4, 2026), a dialogue between dance, body, and image inspired by the filmmaker's legacy.
"Holding Germaine Dulac's first monographic exhibition in Spain ---the curators state--- implies showing the diversity of natures that her cinema addresses: formal experimentation, avant-garde narrative, and a committed documentary gaze." And the exhibition not only recovers a forgotten author but also proposes a critical review of the role of women in the history of cinema and art.
The exhibition, therefore, is the necessary recovery of Germaine Dulac's rebellious gaze more than a century later. What does it mean to film, look, and desire in freedom? Who fears a woman's desire? She continues to ask, with the same urgency as in the 1920s, to make us realize that her legacy does not belong to the past, but to a present that needs to be re-imagined.