119: The Smiling Madame Beudet (a.k.a. La souriante Madame Beudet)

            I spent some time yesterday evening agonizing over whether or not to write this review.  As I’m sure my readers (there are some of you reading this right?) have noticed, as of late I’ve been finding a significant portion of the films I review online.  I’m not conflicted about this.  I have to see these movies (or so the 1001 text tells me) and many are unavailable in other formats.  In many cases with older films, rights have expired and they are unavailable on DVD, so finding them on youtube.com is neither amoral nor drastic.  It’s simply the only viable option.  In any case I am nevertheless, youtube or otherwise, always conflicted when I don’t see the cut of the movie that the director intended me to see.  In the case of The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922), I don’t know if the 54-minute version that the text denotes still exists, or if that was even the version its director, Germaine Dulac, intended for my eyes.  I begrudgingly accepted the 40-minute version streaming on the massive “broadcast yourself” website.  After reading multiple reviews, it doesn’t appear that this version is lacking any of the notable elements, but still…  

            I don’t know if it was guilt but something this evening prompted me to dig a bit deeper in my research for this review.  Madame Beudet is hailed in the text and in many other sources as both an early and shining example of feminist cinema.  Indeed it is chronologically the first film to make the 1001 cut by a female director.  This got me wondering how many of the directors to have films canonized are women, and what percentage of the 1001 do their films make up.  Thus I did what any list obsessive would do.  I made a list.  Using the director index at the back of the text, I wrote down the name of every credited director that I was not absolutely sure to be a man.  In the case of foreign names I was especially careful to list them all, even in cases where I was “almost sure,” because I’ve never quite gotten the gendered names and objects aspect of foreign language down pat.  In one particular case this practice served me well, as I had mistakenly assumed one male director was a woman for some time now.

            Anyway, after creating a list of nearly 150 names, I searched each name individually on the Internet Movie Database, sometimes using additional sources, for photographic or literary proof of each name’s gender.  Through this process I was left making an “educated guess” a total of one time. The whole effort took me more than three hours, almost five times the length of Madame Beudet.  I speculated that I wouldn’t find many female directors, and it turned out I was right.  Of the approximately 550 directors (remember some are doubles) listed in the index, only 27 were female.  That’s less than five percent.  Those 27 women accounted for a total of 33 titles in the 1025 listed in my revised edition of 1001.  That’s about three percent.  I dug deeper.  There are almost 35 male directors listed who have at least five pictures on the list.  Drop that criterion to four listers, and that number doubles.  There are only five women with multiple entries, and only one with three films (Agnes Varda). 

            So what does all of this mean?  Well, to begin with it means that I’m an even bigger nerd than I had already assumed for doing such a statistical analysis. That’s a given.  It must be the professor in me.  Other than that I’m not sure that it means anything.  These numbers, though I don’t have industry figures in front of me, likely represent a strong correlation with historical numbers of female directors.  This is changing of course, but it will be a while before those numbers even out.  I also suspect, though I’m much too tired to figure it up, that these numbers might bear some resemblance to the gender divide amongst the 1001 contributors, though they might not be this uneven.  Film has been a boys club for most of its history, and I didn’t need numbers to know that. 

            So what of the film that inspired this impromptu statscapade?  It’s a good one, though to me for reasons that are superfluous to its feminist agenda.  Dulac was shooting the film in her native France, but as a silent film it required only changed title cards to play all over Europe.  The youtube.com version featured dual title cards with German and French I believe, as well as the English subtitles for their text.  It had also been scored by Manfred Knaak as recently as 2005.  It’s encouraging that there is still an interest in scoring silent films, and conversely amazing how many people assume that you actually watch them in silence.  This is a shame.  To view silent cinema, especially a piece as good as Madame Beudet, is to see the language of the medium literally develop before your eyes.

            Here we have breathtaking exteriors that set up locations, double exposures that denote daydream sequences, and editing that creates a true sense of pace and even anticipation.  All of this without dialogue.  Ebert says that silent films, while they can require a bit more attention, also allow us all the more opportunity to do some daydreaming ourselves.  Because we know that these effects are crude and likely created in the camera, we aren’t as critical of them.  We don’t scrutinize them the way we do CGI.  We allow them to engender the whimsy that they were intended to and to wow us for what they are.

            Madame Beudet does contain a bold statement about repressed feminine existence; one that is all the more shocking based on its year of release. It is a cry for change in the gender politics of domesticity and much more.  While this aspect certainly makes it culturally relevant, I was more drawn in by an element I did not see noted in any of the material I read.   As Madame and her domineering husband reconcile in an ironic and melancholy conclusion, puppets appear in a faux mirror and mimic their actions.  Dulac may have been channeling both Shakespeare and future generations who fought against stereotyped gender roles with this almost hidden “all the world’s a stage” note.

Language: Silent (English Subtitles for Cards)

Runtime: 54 minutes (listed), 40 minutes (online)

Available @ Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off