Film can be a vehicle for feelings and emotions, just like music.
A visual impression of listening to the 5th and 6th Preludes by Frederic Chopin.
In the late 1920s, Dulac embarked on an intense period of radical aesthetic exploration, implementing some of the ideas she had been writing about in her essays on the avant-garde. The Seashell and the Clergyman, in which Dulac's direction meets Antonin Artaud's script, leaves realist plot behind as the film's three figures—the clergyman, the officer, and the woman—play out a complex dance of desire, fantasy, and frustration (sometimes interpreted, including by Dulac herself, as an Oedipal drama). Occasionally hailed as the first Surrealist film, its premiere caused a riot by Surrealists who ostensibly criticized it for taming the violence of Artaud's text. For Dulac it was the cadences and visual orchestration that were crucial, as in her more abstract shorts Thèmes et variations, Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, and Disque 957. While sometimes inspired by pieces of music and using often recognizable imagery—mechanical, organic, and human forms in motion—the focus in these films was on rhythms, light, and movement. In Dulac's words: "Lines, surfaces, volumes evolving directly, without the artifice of evocations, in the logic of their forms, freed from any too human meaning to better elevate themselves to abstraction and to give more space to sensations and dreams: integral cinema."