The Brooklyn Rail

Perched on a rocky bluff along the southern coast of France, the modernist villa E-1027 occupies a singular position in architectural history—both a paradigmatic work of early modernism and a site of erasure, appropriation, and contested authorship. It is this highly charged architectural and historiographic terrain that Beatrice Minger (in collaboration with Christoph Schaub) explores in her 2024 film, E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Rejecting the conventions of both documentary and biographical drama, Minger adopts a hybrid cinematic form that deliberately destabilizes linear narrative and documentary authority by interweaving archival materials, found footage, and stylized re-enactments. The film foregrounds the mediated nature of historical knowledge, particularly as it pertains to architecture and its representation. Minger reframes the villa not simply as a static object of study, but as a site of narrative contestation where issues of authorship, cultural memory, and spatial politics intersect. The result is a hybrid film that doesn’t just recount history, but interrogates it, posing a central question: how might cinema reconstruct the past without perpetuating the myth of objective historical truth?

E.1027 unfolds as a captivating chronicle of passion, love, and violence. In the avant-garde milieu of post-World War I Paris, the visionary Irish artist and designer Eileen Gray becomes romantically entangled with charismatic Romanian architect and journalist Jean Badovici. Seeking sanctuary, they relocate to the Côte d’Azur, where Gray, alongside Badovici, meticulously crafts E-1027, a modernist home perched above the Mediterranean. The house was completed in 1929. When their love fades, the legendary architect Le Corbusier enters the scene, enthralled by the house’s innovative design. In a controversial act, he adorns Gray’s serene interiors with vivid, polychromy frescos, igniting a fierce debate about artistic ownership. Later, the house weathers Nazi occupation, endures neglect, and witnesses a grisly murder of its hedonistic owner within its walls. After decades of misattribution and decay, E-1027 was painstakingly restored in 2021 by Association Cap Moderne, finally emerging as a museum that celebrates Gray’s groundbreaking vision, reclaiming her rightful place in the history of modernist architecture.

Christened with an enigmatic alphanumeric code combining Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici’s initials, E-1027 stands as a testament to Badovici and Gray’s intertwined creative spirits. The house harmoniously fuses Corbusian design principles—pilotis (columns), a free floor plan, a free facade, horizontal windows, and a roof garden—with which Badovici was enamored, with Gray’s intuitive, idiosyncratic, and human-centric vision. The house seems to unfold from inside out: Gray’s tubular steel chairs with unexpected asymmetries, her wheeled side tables with shelves that unfurl like shells, her bold geometric rugs and lacquered screens with adjustable panels breathe life into the interior and animate it from within. These dynamic furnishings inform the building’s exterior with its undulating, asymmetric facade, clever hinged apertures that open to the sea, modular and adaptable fixtures, and a bold geometric language that challenges conventional form. The camera lingers on the house, capturing its design and its precarious site on the edge of the Mediterranean sea. This positioning reinforces the house’s ship-like qualities. Indeed, nautical references abound, from its name—mirroring the identification codes of local fishing vessels—to its crisp white exterior rising like a ship’s hull; to its gangway-esque external staircase; and to the life-float centered on its deck. Inside, block-printed signs, like those found on ships, adorn the walls with playful witty directives—“entrez lentement” [enter slowly], “chose légrès” [light things], “défense de rire” [laughing forbidden], and “sens interdit” [no entry/wrong way].

While the film highlights the creative synergy between Gray and Badovici, it somewhat underrepresents their playfulness and wit. The actors’ performances—minimalist and deliberately rigid—contrast with the house’s spirited atmosphere. Three lead actors portray Gray, Badovici, and Le Corbusier, with the intermittent appearance of Gray’s maid, Louise. Dialogue is minimal, with the story primarily unfolding through Gray’s voice-over monologues, derived from primary sources. The actors move with self-conscious precision—constructed representations rather than fully inhabited personas, their performances creating a distance that resists our emotional immersion.

Minger further disrupts conventional narrative coherence by juxtaposing theatrical scenes staged in two contrasting locations: a stark black box theater, reminiscent of the stylized chiaroscuro of German-Expressionist cinema, is juxtaposed with the sunlit interior and natural setting of E-1027. These sequences alternate with a rich collage of found footage, archival photographs, paintings, and Gray’s personal sketches. The interplay between media and setting creates a compelling visual tableau through which Minger approximates Gray’s world and surroundings. In the black box theater, for instance, Minger creates representative sets that resemble Gray’s various domains: her Parisian workshop, her Rue Bonaparte apartment, and even her beloved automobile, Totor, on which she and Badovici mime-drive through Paris seated side-by-side like players in a thespian improvisation game. There’s also a set recreation of E-1027, upon which Le Corbusier, nude, defiles the walls with his own painted frescos—an act that was documented in an original historical photograph. While the cuts between the black box theater and E-1027 feel jarring and arbitrary at times, this very disconnect could be Minger’s intent. That is, to evoke the sense of displacement and dislocation that Gray herself must have endured after being forcibly excised from her home, never to return. Isn’t there also some dark irony in E-1027’s nautical allusions? After all, a ship is a vessel predicated on movement and displacement, unlike the rooted site-specificity of a house. Perhaps this tension is a metaphor for a central modernist dilemma: the contradiction between universality and functionality on one hand, and the inherently personal and contextual nature of human habitation and individual identity on the other. In light of this, we may be able to reflect with greater clarity on the documentary segment on Le Corbusier’s participation in an architectural conference of 1933, which took place, quite fittingly, aboard a ship.

Many of Minger’s directorial decisions are decidedly self-conscious. In moving between shooting locales and inserting found footage, the film operates as if we are witness to the filmmaker’s process, as she culls together disparate primary sources in pursuit of an enigmatic story. Indeed, some of the most compelling moments fuse the actors’ performances with found footage in the black box theater, where the performer is both the character and a surrogate for the director herself. One striking scene repeats three times throughout the film, featuring a series of overlapping vertical scrims displaying a collage of moving images, paintings, archival footage, and films from the period that contextualize and historicize the narrative. These architectonic scrim installations are visually compelling, reminiscent of the reflective glass sliding doors of E-1027 and Gray’s lacquered hinged screens. Gray, the character, strides through this forest of scrims reflecting on time and place, the self-reflexive tenor of her voice-overs amplifying the distance between the actor personifying Gray and the real Gray (who appears towards the end of the film in a clip from a television interview in the 1970s). This fusion of performance and meta-cinematic elements transforms the actor into a kind of bard, framing and contextualizing the unfolding drama alongside primary sources, much like Minger herself.

We might even venture to say that Minger’s use of meta-cinematic techniques are Vertovian. The term refers to the Soviet director, Dziga Vertov, who pioneered a revolutionary filmmaking style in the 1920s known as “Kino-Eye” films. Vertov’s concept sought to expose the constructed nature of filmic reality by employing montage, superimposition, and split screens to create a “third image” that transcends ordinary perception. This approach is exemplified in Vertov’s 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera—released the same year as the completion of E-1027—which follows a camera operator through the dizzying landscapes of Soviet urban life, foregrounding the constructed nature of the cinematic representation. Similarly, Minger’s pairing of scrim installations with Gray’s self-reflexive voiceovers creates a distancing effect, disrupting linear storytelling and compelling us, the viewer, to confront the artifice of filmic representation. If Vertov’s fragmented, collage-like montages and film camera operator challenged conventional narrative structures to reveal the contrived nature of moving images, Minger’s scrim sequences prompt us to question the constructed nature of cinema, by blurring the lines between documentary and historical drama.

Ultimately, we may view Minger’s film as an extension of Vertov’s inquiry. That is, how can the cinematic medium be leveraged to reveal deeper truths when architecture, broadly, and the saga of E-1027, specifically are at stake? By foregrounding the construction of the filmic narrative through diverse media, architectonic form, and theatricality, Minger’s work prompts reflection on the roles of both cinema and the built environment in shaping and reifying historical knowledge.