Lucie Derain
French film journalist
Lucie Derain (born Lucienne Antoinette Louise Déchorain, 1902–1977) was a French film journalist, filmmaker and author. She co-founded the Ciné-club de la femme in the 1930s, and worked with a young Henri Langlois, who went on to found the Cinémathèque Française. Derain's career encompassed many aspects of cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, from titling newsreels to writing screenplays to directing films, as well as reviewing for the major film periodicals in France.
Career
Lucie Derain began her career in film as a subtitler for newsreels in 1919. She went on to work for Films Albatros, a production company in Paris mainly run by Russian émigrés. In the 1920s she wrote the French subtitles for American films distributed in France, and some screenplays of her own. She was a contributor to various film journals and magazines including Cinéa and Cinémonde, sometimes writing in praise of the Albatros filmmakers.
Among the short films Derain directed was the only example of a city symphony film made by a woman, Harmonies de Paris (1927). This 25-minute 35mm film, photographed by Nicolas Rudakoff, was made to screen as part of the programme for René Clair's Les Deux Timides (1928), and went on to be shown in Britain alongside Clair's La Tour (1928). Her short Désordre (1927, 16mm, now lost) was screened in Paris in 1930 alongside films by Mack Sennett and William Wyler.
“Lucie Derain” enters the record as french film journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lucie, Derain and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q67197558. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1977, 1919 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lucie Derain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.