Hilde D’haeyere & Steven Jacobs: Sonia Delaunay on Film (introduction, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, 2023)

Lizica Codreanu as the poster girl at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone 2023. From: Le p'tit Parigot (FR 1926). The Pierrot Éclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay. Based on a photo from: La bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Sonia Delaunay programme curated by Hilde D’haeyere and Steven Jacobs.

Hilde D’haeyere & Steven Jacobs (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Catalog, 2023):

" The artist Sonia Delaunay (Sarah Elievna Stern, 1885-1979) was active across multiple artistic media in her long and successful career. Born in Odessa (then part of the Russian Empire), she was educated as a painter in Russia and Germany before moving to France, where she co-founded, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, the Orphist art movement, which is characterized by dynamic arrangements of contrasting colors and geometric shapes. In Paris and Madrid during the First World War, she expanded her practice to costume designs, textiles, and fashion. Between 1925 and 1929, Sonia Delaunay also collaborated on several film projects, including feature films and a so-called “fashion reel”. Her involvement in these efforts was closely related to her work in fashion and fabric design as well as to her paintings. Expanding her artistic practice to film comes as no surprise, as her “Orphist” or “Simultanéist” canvases, as well as those made by her husband Robert Delaunay, seem to possess “cinematic” qualities: their kaleidoscopic compositions, shifting perspectives, and color vibrations evoke the dynamism of the film medium and the flickering of images across the big screen. These cinematic affinities were no doubt triggered by the cinephile circles in which the Delaunays found themselves in early 20th-century Paris, which included many artists – among them, Fernand Léger, a painter who later made films, and poets such as Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Ricciotto Canudo, who all became leading film critics. "

" However, the Delaunays did not only explore the cinematic potentials of modernist painting; they also actively contributed to various film projects. Robert Delaunay, for  instance, served as a décorateur on films in the 1920s. Sonia Delaunay, too, contributed to films that feature her dress designs, furnishing textiles, and paintings, while incorporating pictorial strategies. In 1926 she was involved in at least three film projects: the fashion reel L’Elélégance, shot in natural color in the Keller-Dorian process; Marcel L’Herbier’s feature Le Vertige; and the serial Le P’tit Parigot by René Le Somptier. In the late 1920s she also designed set furniture for Parce que je t’aime (Hewitt Claypoole Grantham-Hayes, 1929), of which only a fragment seems to survive. In the feature film and the serial Delaunay designed striking costumes, textiles, and objects connected to specific characters, which evoke an upperclass lifestyle marked by an interest in modern painting, sculpture, dance, furniture, and fashion. "

" These close connections between painting, fabric design, fashion, color, and cinema in Sonia Delaunay’s oeuvre were part of a wide-reaching trans-media experiment, as her film projects were closely related to her ongoing work as a fabric and fashion designer. Her experiments with cinema not only brought her painting to wider audiences, they also animated her pictorial work, giving it a lasting quality. Additionally, her film experiments inspired a similarly visual dynamic in her dress designs, which could be described as “paintings in motion.” Unmistakably, her activities as a fashion designer triggered her interest in film, enabling her to “project” abstract color patterns onto living models, which is specifically the rationale behind the fashion reel L’Elélégance. "

This text is an adapted version of an essay to be published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” to be held at Bard Graduate Center, New York, from 23 February to 7 July 2024. Hilde D’haeyere & Steven Jacobs

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Catalog, 2023