Germaine Dulac was a filmmaker, theorist and journalist who made a number of advertising films before venturing into more impressionistic and also surrealistic work. Especially her surrealist experiment La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928) remains well known among critics and cinephiles today.

The dark comedy La Cigarette is Dulac’s earliest surviving film, and although on the surface it follows the classic pattern of a domestic farce (a couple breaks up because of a misunderstanding and spends the rest of the film trying to patch up the pieces), something dark dances underneath it. Everything is bathed in a willfully unreal atmosphere, built around an imagined infidelity. La Cigarette is one of the first films that uses the psychology of the image quite explicitly.