Eileen Gray, the house and Le Corbusier: the film that reopens one of modernism’s most controversial stories

There is a moment in the film E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea when two armchairs become a car. There is no bodywork, no road, no windshield. Only the sound of a door closing, a steering wheel held in the hands, and, behind, the landscape sliding past in transparency. It is in that instant that the film declares its nature: not to reconstruct, but to evoke; not to document, but to embody.

To stage the life and works of Eileen Gray, the great designer and architect of Irish origin who died in 1976 at the age of 98, directors Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub choose to escape the three usual cages of the biographical narrative—the fictional biopic, the testimonial documentary, the archival montage—and invent an entirely new approach: an abstract, black, mental theatrical space. An interior reduced to its essentials, which recalls in its radicality the scenography of Dogville by Lars von Trier, where walls are unnecessary because their outline on the floor is enough to make them exist. Here, the herringbone parquet of the Paris apartment on Rue Bonaparte, a white boiserie, a work table, and a few objects suffice. And the body of Eileen.

The body, in fact, is the film’s true sensitive surface. Upon it are projected fragments of À propos de Nice by Jean Vigo, Ballet Mécanique by Léger, Emak-Bakia by Man Ray, expressionist shadows that recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

The twentieth century passes across her skin. She herself says she has always felt her body in one place and her mind elsewhere: here the two poles recombine. The body becomes a screen, the mind a filter. Biography is not a succession of events but a condensation of images.
 

And then there is the house. A white frame on the cliff of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The tubular handrail in front of the cypresses. Windows framing the sea like moving paintings. The folding glass walls. The staircase descending straight into the water. The pebbles aligned on the windowsill. The white, light curtain like a mosquito net stretched between steel cables. A bed with white sheets and cushions striped in pink, salmon, and cream. A stylized kite on her shoulder.

“Thanks to this house I found something I did not know I was missing,” says Eileen. E.1027 is not just a dwelling. It is a refuge, a sanctuary, a body. A shell that both protects and extends, a spiritual extension of the person who inhabits it.

Modern architecture, for her, cannot be just a machine: it must have a soul. If for Le Corbusier the house is “a machine for living in,” for Eileen Gray it is a sensitive organism, built around gestures, rhythms, light, and habits. Functions and actions are written on the walls with a normograph—“enter slowly,” “light things,” “forbidden to laugh”—but there is nothing didactic about it. It is a way of remembering that space arises from use and not from abstraction.

Gray arrives at architecture through lacquer, through screens, through natural-fiber carpets, through metal tubes and plexiglass. Her hands fill with skin eruptions, but she persists. She opens a workshop, experiments, exhibits in 1923 at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs the famous Boudoir de Monte-Carlo: too bold, too disturbing, too modern. The criticism is fierce. An Irish aristocrat, a lesbian in an era when homosexuality was persecuted, Gray dares to enter the male territory of architecture. And she does so without asking permission.

E.1027 is born with Jean Badovici—E for Eileen, 10 for the J of Jean, 2 for the B of Badovici, 7 for the G of Gray—as a house for two. But also as a laboratory for a different idea of modernity. No monumentality, no rhetoric: a small white house, built with wheelbarrows in a place without a road, close to the sea, where “a single wave would be enough to wash existence away.”

Then Le Corbusier enters the scene. He falls in love with the house. Or perhaps with its power. Or perhaps with the fact that that power is not his. When Gray no longer lives there, with the consent of Badovici—who declares that painting can be a complement to architecture or a detonating bomb—he paints several murals on the white walls. He says they are a gift. That they animate a dull white cube. Eileen Gray instead considers them an act of violence. An act of vandalism. A rape.

The film does not simplify, but poses the question directly: is it legitimate to appropriate someone else’s vision, even if the house is no longer inhabited? Is it acceptable to overwrite a work in the name of one’s artistic authority? In that gesture, Le Corbusier is not only the brilliant architect: he is the “Zeus” of modernism who reasserts a hierarchy. The woman who dared to enter his field is symbolically pushed back indoors, toward decoration, toward mural painting—but this time painted by him.

The story is well known: photographs of the frescoes are published, the house is progressively attributed to Badovici, Gray’s name slips to the margins. Le Corbusier builds his Cabanon twenty meters away. Modernist historiography consolidates the misunderstanding. Only in 1968, with a publication in Domus, does the name of Eileen Gray re-emerge. The furniture returns to production. Her architecture is recognized as one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.

But the film is not a historical trial. It is an emotional drama. There is a shot of Eileen on the terrace: she looks at the sea and understands that the place she was searching for may not exist elsewhere. She liked making things, but she hated owning them. Memories are tied to objects, and objects can be wounded. When she discovers the murals, she asks that the walls be returned to white. That the spirit of the house be restored. But once violated, can a spirit truly return?

A suspended feeling remains in the finale. Eileen will never return to her home. Not because of the frescoes or Le Corbusier, perhaps, but because the much sought-after place has now moved elsewhere. In the imagination.

E.1027 is a political film without slogans. It is a film about genre, authorship, ownership, but also about the status of images. By choosing theatrical abstraction, the filmmakers interrogate the past instead of didactically reconstructing it. And in doing so they restore to Eileen Gray something that history had taken from her: not just the signature of a house, but the complexity of a mind that wanted to "invent a new world" when the old one was falling apart.

Maybe the real scandal is not Le Corbusier's murals. It is the fact that, for almost a century, we have agreed to look at them without wondering who erased whom.