A tennis champion steps out of a magazine
The Smiling Madame Beudet is widely cited as one of the first feminist films and a landmark of French avant-garde cinema, using superimposition, slow motion, and distorting lenses to put a trapped housewife's fantasy life directly on screen decades before that kind of subjective imagery became common. Germaine Dulac was one of the first major women directors in film history, at a time when the role was almost entirely closed to women, and she later became a leading theorist of what she called pure or 'integral' cinema.