Dulac's earliest extant title, 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. With its understated acting and location shooting, Dulac fuses realistic tendencies with impressionistic visual association, building tension between modernity/antiquity, life/death, and masculinity/femininity through cinematic-specific techniques, editing, and more.
