Currently screening as part of the 20th #Biografilm Festival in Bologna.
There is a subtle but decisive change taking place in contemporary cinema. As more women have the opportunity to make films, a distinct form of female narrative based on a particular #female gaze# and female sensitivity is being developed. Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet is at the moment the most celebrated example of this cinematic «écriture féminine» but the hybrid of documentary and fiction E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea by Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub which just premiered at the #CPH:DOX is a sign of this important change in the world of documentary and art cinema.
The house in Roquebrune Cap-Martin
«Maybe I could imagine a different house, and then I could conceive of a different world,» ponders at the beginning. #Eileen Gray#, the iconic modernist designer and architect who, between 1926 and 1929, together with Jean Badovici, created the E.1027. A splendid modernist villa in Roquebrune Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, right on the rocks above the Mediterranean Sea that now hosts a museum, is a protagonist of this hybrid documentary composed of the re-enacted scenes based on Gray’s memories and carefully selected archive material. Badovici was her lover at the time, and their liaison is cherished in the house’s name – E stands for Eileen, 10 for J in Jean, 2 for B in Badovici, and 7 for the first letter in Gray. «We found each other in our work,» says Gray. They remained friends all their lives, but their love lasted only a couple of years. Instead of marking the triumph of her creativity, the house transformed into a means through which she was hurt. Punished for wanting more than what she as a woman was permitted to achieve.
As more women have the opportunity to make films, a distinct form of female narrative based on a particular female gaze and female sensitivity is being developed.
Eileen Gray
Gray is known as the brilliant and innovative experimenter in furniture and interior design who introduced novel materials such as aluminium, celluloid, tubular steel, bakelite, and cork and who was the first to adopt the ancient oriental technique of lacquering mass-produced furniture. Nonconformist also in her customs, openly bisexual. The film introduces her while she is in Paris, articulating the scope of her work to «create a space for the woman who needs a room of her own,» a reference to the seminal feminist essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, first published the same year, 1929. Along with other like-minded women, she was searching «for new forms of expressions, forms in which we could recognise ourselves.» The critics considered her work bold, daring, strange, disturbing, and too futuristic. But not Badovici, the architect, critic, and editor of the important journal L’Architecture Vivante, who suggested that she build «a house for her furniture.»
Men’s world
She knew about the male idols of #modernist architecture#, from Mies van der Rohe to Rietveld and, of course, #Le Corbusier#. But, «I never heard of a woman architect.» Which, of course, leads to the key point. Since «men build the world to meet their own needs,» what if imagining a different house, we could conceive of a different world? The House by the Sea was an attempt to do so. And thanks to the directors and producers of this film, who reconstructed the house as it was originally built; in the film, we can see it in all its particular beauty. Because the house, in the way Eileen Gray conceived and built it, does not exist anymore.
«men build the world to meet their own needs»
Female gaze
When Beatrice Minger was invited to this project, it was supposed to be a film about Le Corbusier. As she obtained more info, she suggested making a film about Eileen Gray and the E.1027 instead. In the film, we are offered two different types of gaze: the female gaze, which represents the view by Gray, and the #male gaze#, which represents Badovici and Le Corbusier, who started living in the house after she left. From the female perspective, seeing used towels and half-empty plates all over the place perfectly explains why she had to leave.
But the film’s directors very convincingly presented another crucial point. We are accustomed to the discourse about the obstacles encountered by women in patriarchal society. We like to believe that society, tradition, culture, or, in any case, some completely alienated system from the outside is imposing the conditions in which women have been disadvantaged in practically all public spheres.
The film about Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea makes us see how this is not enough. An active, personal engagement of concrete, individual men, the men we often trust or even love, is needed for this patriarchal order to be kept in place and reproduced. Most of the time, they are nice and friendly. But they can be violent, too. E.1027 is a story about such violence.
E.1027 is a story about such violence.
Ornament and crime
The same path Grey took as she left the house, Le Corbusier, a friend of Badovici, took as he came into it. He was fascinated, and his words were full of praise: «This house is more than architecture. Its beauty is hurting me.» He sent a postcard to Gray that he would like to meet with her. But when he organized a World Congress of Modern Architecture, with 100 participants from 30 cities and 28 countries, he did not invite Eileen Gray. He kept visiting Badovici and eventually covered the plain white walls of the house with murals, published photos of these wall paintings, and never contradicted those who believed that he had built the house. Modernist architecture is based on the teaching of the Austrian architectural theorist #Adolf Loos#, who, in his notorious article Ornament and Crime, advocated against ornament and for simplicity in modern design and architecture. This already makes Le Corbusier’s argument that the empty walls in E.1027 were boring, suspicious at least.
There is a re-enacted scene where we see Gray asking Badovici to ask Le Corbusier to remove the paintings. He refused. We hear Gray say she perceives this as an act of violence, but we can feel it as well. He appropriated Gray’s house, in emotional, symbolic, and finally also in a material way. After Badovici, to whom Gray gave the house, died, legal battles followed, and Le Corbusier achieved that his gallerist bought it, thinking it was Le Corbusier who constructed it.
For my soul
The cinematography, acting, music, and everything in this film is superb. It is beautiful in a subtle, never-seen-before way. It will make you adore Eileen Gray (if you did not before) for her thorough reflections of her work, the objects, and the space, her nobel generosity with which she gives the house to Badovici and helps him till the end, and her openness in searching for a place she finally acknowledges it is a phantasmagoric, imaginary place. But this film is also a sign of hope that what earlier generations of women only imagined nowadays is gradually becoming real.
