Recently, I was assessing the many valuable gifts presented to the world by France. What comes to mind first is food, artists, fashion. But what about architects?
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) is unquestionably the most significant. Seventeen of his buildings, across seven continents, are UNESCO World Heritage sites, according to an exceptionally long entry on Wikipedia. Starting small, with private houses dotted around Europe, he flirted with painting in the Cubist style of Picasso; but soon returned to architecture, commissioned to design ever more ambitious modernist buildings, from the United Nations in New York to national assemblies and high courts in India and Japan. It was a great surprise to see this famous man, naked, painting a colourful mural on a white wall inside a house designed by Eileen Gray in Cap-Martin, on the French Mediterranean, in “E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea” (Modern Films), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
That whole part of France is full of high-end tourism these days. Passing along the southern coast of France, east from Nice, towards the Italian border, Cap-Martin is beyond Monaco, jutting out a little way into the sea. Particularly welcome was a sequence in the film explaining how this area garnered its reputation. Black and white films from the time show us a flood of artists and money from inherited wealth arriving in the Côte d’Azur during the the 1930s. The Promenade des Anglais in Nice, with its rather uninviting pebble beach, is beautifully filmed, full of rich people covered head-to-toe with dark clothing to avoid a suntan.
Eileen Gray, an aristocratic Irish citizen, emigrated to France with a female romantic partner when she was 24, initially constructing unusual furniture using materials such as stainless steel and plexiglass. At the time, chairs, say, were thought of as being symmetrical, with the right arm and the left arm exactly matching. She broke the mould by creating a chair which, say, had one arm much bigger than the other. Her segue into architecture, building her dream house, which she named E.1027, and quickly being evicted from it, was as a result of meeting Jean Badovici, a younger male Romanian journalist, who liked her work and fell in love with her.
“E.1027” plays about with Eileen’s unconventionality, raising it to the level of a filmed stage-play. Imagine going to see a standard drama from National Theatre Live at the Playhouse one evening. The actors would be talking to each other. In “E. 1027,” the three actors, one each playing Eileen, Jean and Le Corbusier (Corbu), mostly speak in monologue, whilst being on the stage at the same time. And instead of choosing one unitary language, the film is bilingual throughout, switching effectively between English and subtitled-French. This creates an illusion that the film is based on an autobiography. It also tends to highlight Eileen’s isolation and make her seem more remote.
Corbu’s flirtation with Cubist painting creates the controversy which fills the film’s second half. In the scenes before she creates E.1027, Eileen tells us that architecture has become too mechanistic, intellectual. She wants to build her dream “from the inside.” At times, after it has been completed, Eileen talks to the house, creating a surreal impression that she thought of it as alive, enabling it with strange ideas such as, “you don’t just barge into a house,” and believing that she “belongs” to the house rather than, say, the community or local town. The white walls she designed can be thought of, then, as relatively more important because they are on the inside, and the interest expressed by Corbu implying “barging in,” unwanted intrusion or invasion.
But Eileen had put the house in Jean’s name, so that when they split up, having only lived in the completed property together for a couple of years, he remained whilst she moved into her second home inland. There are heavy hints of a gay relationship between Jean and Corbu, during electrically-charged scenes as Corbu paints his colourful murals over the white. Whether the walls are better with murals on them or not is a matter of taste. I think the idea is that the murals represents an allegory for male power: women’s creative work is subordinate, and men simply ignore women’s artistic choices as they regard women as the weaker sex. One powerful scene later on shows the two men arguing and Eileen standing to the side, listening, her opinion was not wanted—she had no voice. There is also a sense that the “barging in” was violent: when the Nazis occupied the house during the Second World War, they cut down all the trees.
Peter Scherer’s score is beautiful, especially the solo piano after the move to Burgundy (he also plays the piano). Like a quilt, the film is sewn together from three different types of image: conventional colour-camera, black-and-white film, either new or from archive material, and old photographs. At the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, full-length film is commonly shown as part of an exhibition, and “E.1027” feels like this kind of work—installation, play, biography, mixing and recombining styles.
More than likely, Le Corbusier’s biographers could comment on whether he is faithfully represented by the filmmakers. Certainly, we can buy that he was a powerful man who tended to take what he wanted and that his fame is a symptom of the seductive but false “great man” theory of history. At the very close of the film, we cut to a clip from an early–1970s documentary in which 96-year old Eileen is interviewed. It’s possible that much of the tape has been lost, but one wonders if more of this interview could have been used to hear Eileen speak directly. After all, isn’t that what she wanted?
Adam Poole
17 May 2025
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