L'invitation au voyage

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.

In an introduction Germaine Dulac informs the viewer that this is her attempt to do a film without intertitles in the hope that the viewer will be able to follow it (such modesty), and lays out the scenario which is that of a woman who feels neglected by her husband, so one evening she goes to a bar where she is approached by a sailor whose interest in her suddenly seems to dwindle when he realizes that she is married.

What the 40-minute long 'Invitation to a Journey' offers indeed is more of a scenario than a story. More or less all the running time is spent in the bar (named L'invitation au voyage) that has some "cruise ship on the ocean" theme going on. We watch a band playing on stage, people dancing and drinking and men coming on to women. And in there we also have the protagonist (La Femme) who sits by herself at a table sipping a drink and of course it doesn't take long before the first suitor makes a pass on her.

Like Dulac's 'The Smiling Madame Beudet' it is a tiny "story" told impressionistically. And 'Invitation to a Journey' is nothing if not impressionistic. The film is so full of dissolves, superimpositions and split-screens that you almost have to look out to find any straight cuts. The function of this formal playfulness is, among other things, to show that while the characters are in the bar their minds are often somewhere else. Especially La Femme keeps fantasizing about being far away on a real ship, and seeing her little tête-à-tête with the sailor more romantically than it actually is. And the sailor too, who is less romantically inclined, can practically already see how his future-conquest offers herself and her naked chest to him in a cabin. La Femme also occasionally thinks back to situations at home and so we learn a bit about what the relationship between her and her husband is like.

An interesting thing to note is that the film plays a bit with gender roles, if not in the characters' actions than in their appearance. La Femme is a tall and quite masculine-looking woman while the men are all rather feminine in their appearance and mannerisms.