La Cigarette

Germaine Dulac’s earliest extant film, La Cigarette concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband, who believes she is having an affair - speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity in France. Through understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realist tendencies with impressionistic visual association while exploring the tensions between modernity and antiquity, life and death, and masculinity and femininity. (Criterion)