Reconstruction of a drama

In 1929, the Irish designer Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici built a summer house on the Côte d'Azur: E.1027, a cryptic combination of her initials and those of Badovici, to whom she left it just a few years later. When Le Corbusier discovered the house, he was fascinated. He later covered the walls with murals and published photos of them, and E.1027 became famous – as his work. Le Corbusier never corrected the mistake; instead, he erected his Cabanon in the immediate vicinity of the building. Gray, on the other hand, labelled his paintings as vandalism and demanded that they be taken back. Gray and Le Corbusier most probably never met directly.

The film ‘E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea’ by Swiss director Beatrice Minger, together with Christoph Schaub, is a cinematic journey into the world of Eileen Gray's thoughts. The film reconstructs the dramatic story of an avant-garde designer and her breathtakingly beautiful house. The design icon Eileen Gray was also the direct inspiration for the design of the film, which is reflected in clear lines, special colour schemes and shapes.

Simone Kraft: Christoph Schaub, you have already realised numerous architecture films, such as ‘Bird's Nest – Herzog & De Meuron In China’ and ‘Architecture of Infinity’, Beatrice Minger, this is your first feature-length film. How did your joint project come about?

Christoph Schaub: There was actually an external impetus here, the producer Philip Delaquis approached me about the subject of Le Corbusier. At first I was a bit sceptical, but then I sat down with Bea, we did some research and came across the story of Eileen Gray, which is highly topical, not least because of the gender issue. We convinced the producer – this film or no film!

Beatrice Minger: Then we started our work with intensive research and discussions with experts on Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. The story about the house, about E.1027, is told in very different ways. There are different perspectives on it, everyone tells a slightly different version. In general, Eileen Gray is a very mysterious figure about whom little is known. She destroyed, had destroyed, all her personal documents, notes and correspondence shortly before her death. There are very large gaps and I have tried to fill them through many conversations.

Christoph Schaub: Incidentally, there are almost no witnesses left who knew her.

Beatrice Minger: The topic is interesting precisely because there are so many gaps. There is a relatively large scope for interpretation. E.1027 reveals many discourses of modernism that were very topical in the 1920s and that are still relevant today, around 100 years later, but are also viewed from a new perspective. Approaching these stories and discourses that are contained in the building and that can be told was a very exciting process.

Rather unusually for a documentary film, a very precisely written script was developed, almost like for a fictional film. The result is a ‘docufiction’. What were the considerations and decisions behind telling the film in this way?

Christoph Schaub: We've taken fictionalisation quite far in this film, we're working in a hybrid form – with archive images and old footage, but also with scenic elements, with scripts, with staging, with rehearsals. There are several levels in the film. This is a development in documentary film that has been happening a lot recently.

Beatrice Minger: We experimented a lot. I'm one of those authors who are always writing, who never actually stop writing. It goes on until just before the scenes are shot, things are still being changed because you gain a lot of new insights during the process – for example, in the collaboration with Natalie Radmall-Quirke, our leading actress, who has worked very intensively on this character.

Christoph Schaub: In the classic sense, we collected a lot of material from the architecture, the mood, the atmosphere on site, the landscape, the garden, the surroundings, which was then edited into the narrative. Our aim was not to make a film just about this artist, but about her and her work, or rather: about her work and her. The aim was to open our eyes on location, so to speak, in order to capture a living architecture.

There is already a lot about Gray and the subject matter surrounding E.1027, there are films, graphic novels et cetera. What did you focus on in your film? What new facets do you want to show?

Beatrice Minger: Right, there's ‘Gray Matters’, a great documentary from 2014, ‘The Price of Desire’, already a fictional film from 2015, and of course ‘Invitation to a Journey’ by Jörg Bundschuh. It's not completely new material and we wanted to see what new things we could add here. That's why we decided there would be no interviews with experts, no off-screen text explaining everything, we wanted to find a physical approach to the architecture, but also to the figure of Eileen Gray. How might she have experienced all this, what might Le Corbusier's assault on her architecture have meant to her? We wanted to make Gray's perspective tangible on film – as a possible point of view. This resulted in the studio space as a ‘space of possibility’ in which the actors meet and debate with each other about theoretical, but also very emotional questions. In addition to the scenes in the house itself, this was intended to be a changeable space that can appear both abstract and almost realistic when you get closer with the camera. We wanted to say ‘this is how it could have been’, but also to say at the last moment: we are not telling the truth, there are many different truths. We show a space of possibilities.

Christoph Schaub: That's why we don't show a floor plan in the film. It's about an interpretation of the space, which is always a subjective experience. Plans don't help, they appeal to the intellectual.

You filmed on location in House E.1027. What was it like – in practical terms, but also in terms of your personal experience?

Christoph Schaub: As is so often the case with documentary films, this was indeed a somewhat complicated terrain, from a purely legal and insurance point of view. The E.1027 is now owned by the French state and the building is a museum, so we had to work very carefully on location. It was therefore not cheap to shoot there. In addition, there were relatively many constraints in this respect – but often enough, the special thing comes from finding solutions in the reduction.

Beatrice Minger: At the same time, the museum was very supportive. In addition to the strict conditions, which made a lot of sense to us - they serve to preserve the building! -, they were very, very open and made many things possible. We didn't want to film a museum space, but rather a place where someone lives. The décor varies slightly between the time when Eileen Gray lives there and the time when Badovici is there alone, when there is more partying, when there is more disorganisation. You should see that, feel the space like that. Because this is precisely Eileen Gray's main theme – a space changes when people use it and live in it. A house is not a machine. Incidentally, it was particularly touching when we were filming on location with the actors – of course we shot a lot of ‘empty’ footage on location – and ‘she’, Natalie Radmall-Quirke as Eileen Gray, was finally there. The museum women, who spend almost every day in the house, had tears in their eyes and told us that this was exactly how they had imagined Eileen Gray, that it was so touching that she had now ‘come back’, so to speak.

What was your impression of the house when you were there for the first time? Have you formed an inner image through the preparations?

Beatrice Minger: Impressive! We were on site around 12 times during the project and the experience was different every time. Especially when we were allowed to be there alone, without tourists.

Christoph Schaub: I have to be honest – I was surprised the first time I saw it. And that's because the house is really very small. It's a two-person house that has about 100 square metres in total. How are we supposed to film here, how can we fill it with stories?

And how was the experience of seeing Le Corbusier's murals in E.1027? Surely a certain expectation had formed there too?

Christoph Schaub: I think they are interesting images in themselves if you look at them in isolation, for example in a book. For me, they express a very aggressive basic attitude, which may seem even more aggressive, more offensive in our context. That's what makes this conflict so exciting, whether the paintings ‘fit’ or not. Because you can't say, ‘These are terrible pictures and that's why it's a mess’. It's the context that makes the whole issue interesting.

Beatrice Minger: Yes, I would say the same. I don't find the paintings incredibly great, nor do I find them incredibly terrible. In the context of this house and the fact that they completely destroy the effect of the architecture, they have a destructive effect. I had a goosebump moment when I saw the rooms digitally for the first time – we edited several images with computer technology for the film and removed the murals - and you could see how the room looks without the paintings. When you spend so much time in the house, you can't imagine it without the paintings, it has grown together into a whole. Seeing the effect of the walls ‘pure’ was very, very impressive, and you could feel Le Corbusier's intervention all the more strongly. How might Eileen Gray have felt about this? What might her pain have been related to, what might have hurt her about this painterly intervention? We wanted to explore these questions. After all, she did not die in great bitterness and did not think of anything other than this encroachment until the end of her long life.

The house and the painting have become one unit, the perception of the building and not least its preservation is very much linked to Le Corbusier. Your film also began with the figure of Le Corbusier. You first come across Eileen Gray via ‘Corbu’, the top dog. How do you deal with allowing this person to come into her own without forcing her into the role of victim?

Christoph Schaub: In recent years, since the 1970s, this conflict has become very important. Le Corbusier as a dominant type who takes care of his own documentation, Eileen Gray as a personality who withdraws, who withdraws into the private sphere. This has also covered up her work. We hope that our film will help to bring some of this back from the background.

Beatrice Minger: Gray deliberately withdrew from the house, she left it entirely to Badovici. It was important for us to tell the story in this way: She wasn't driven out, she made this decision herself quite consciously. It is also important to place this story in the context of the times, as it is also a portrait of contemporary history. We have two very different artistic personalities, we must not lose sight of that: Eileen Gray, the, as I said, very, very private personality who always chooses freedom in order to be as artistically free as possible without having to make compromises – and you have to make compromises when you come into contact with the public, especially as a woman, for example when you join groups of female artists, when you exhibit and make yourself accessible to a market. Gray very, very often decided not to make these compromises. Le Corbusier stands diametrically on the other side of the spectrum, so to speak. He developed his own ‘brand’ from the very beginning, publicised very consciously, developed slogans and published manifestos, had photographers with him and made sure that he was filmed. As we understand it today, he was actually a very modern artist. And is therefore also incredibly well documented. Not Eileen Gray at all. I think that also helps to understand why this house was somehow unpleasant for him, why he felt the need to intervene there, to destroy E.1027. Because Gray couldn't actually take anything away from it, he was already the star of the architecture scene in the 1920s? If you look closely and let all these moments stand on their own, a multi-layered view of this conflict emerges.

E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the house by the sea
Director: Beatrice Minger
Co-director: Christoph Schaub
Screenplay: Beatrice Minger in collaboration with Christoph Schaub
Switzerland 2024, 89 min., colour
Language: English, French
Subtitles: German