L’Invitation au voyage de Germaine Dulac: traduction intersémiotique?
Invitation to a Voyage by Germaine Dulac: Intersemiotic Translation?

Author(s): Aleksandra Stodolna
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: pure cinema; Germaine Dulac; Charles Baudelaire; intersemiotic translation;figures of translation
Summary/Abstract: The representatives of the French avant-garde, Germaine Dulac included, believed that the cinematography of their time was overly restricted by the rules of the narrative, making film a slavish ‘sub-genre’ of literature. Film had to free itself from these restrictions. For Dulac, the way to achieve this was ‘pure cinema’ – visualisation of thoughts, emotions and dreams. Seeking to break free from the shackles of the narrative, her experimental cinema turned to poetry as a new source of inspiration; she ‘was indebted to 19th-century Symbolist and Decadent poets’ [McCabe 2005: 8], but the only film by Dulac that can be considered an actual adaptation of a poem is L’Invitation au voyage, a short silent film released in 1927. If Dulac’s cinema aimed to “get rid of all narrative”, i.e. linguistic restrictions, would it be an exaggeration to call Dulac’s film an “adaptation” or even an intersemiotic “translation” of Baudelaire’s poem? And if not, what are the intersemiotic “translation strategies” or “figures of translation” that we can distinguish in the images composed by Dulac? In this article, we shall demonstrate the functioning of Jerzy Brzozowski’s translational tool by analysing three choices made by Dulac in the face of challenges posed to potential translators or adapters by the famous Baudelairean work.

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