From: French Avant-Garde
The Smiling Madame Beudet
1923 · Directed by Germaine Dulac
Germaine Dulac's quietly devastating portrait of a bourgeois marriage suffocating under its own propriety — and one of the earliest films directed by a woman that survives in good condition. Madame Beudet is intelligent, sensitive, and desperately unhappy, trapped with a boorish, insensitive husband whose one theatrical gesture — pretending to shoot himself with an unloaded revolver — she decides to turn real by loading the gun. Dulac uses Impressionist techniques — slow motion, superimposition, distorted lenses — to externalize Beudet's inner life, her fantasies of escape and her simmering rage, creating a visual language for female subjectivity that was decades ahead of its time. At just forty minutes, it's a concentrated, brilliant study of the quiet violence of domestic confinement. A landmark of feminist cinema.
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From: Early Hitchcock
The Farmer's Wife
1928 · Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock's warmest and funniest film — a gentle rural comedy that reveals a side of the Master of Suspense that audiences rarely got to see. After his wife's death, a prosperous middle-aged farmer decides to remarry, drawing up a list of eligible women in the district and proposing to each in turn, only to be rejected with escalating comedy and diminishing dignity. Hitchcock mines the humor from English rural manners with affectionate precision, and the performances — particularly Gordon Harker as the dry, long-suffering handyman — are delightful. The film moves at a leisurely, countrified pace that couldn't be further from the thrillers that made Hitchcock famous, and that's precisely its charm. A reminder that the man who gave us Psycho and The Birds could also observe ordinary English life with warmth, humor, and genuine tenderness.
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