Fernand Léger and cinema.

In the midst of the First World War, while on leave with Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Léger discovered Charlie Chaplin in 1916, which was a true revelation for the painter. From 1919 onwards, Fernand Léger's works reflected the influence of cinematographic images on his artistic work: for example, the illustrated books produced in collaboration with the poets Blaise Cendrars and Yvan Goll played with the vocabulary of cinema by introducing close-ups, typographical research and kinetic effects.
In 1924, he made his first film, Ballet mécanique, the result of a collaborative artistic effort with Man Ray, Dudley Murphy, and composer Georges Antheil. Completely devoid of a script, this avant-garde film animates and alternates, in a rapid and jerky montage, everyday objects, people, and geometric figures, creating striking visual contrasts. Today, Ballet mécanique is still considered a founding masterpiece of experimental cinema.
Other cinematographic projects, both successful and unsuccessful, followed in the 1930s before the collective adventure, strongly influenced by surrealist aesthetics, of the film Dreams That Money Can Buy, directed in 1947 by the painter and filmmaker Hans Richter, to which the artists Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder also contributed.
This catalogue presents for the first time, and in an exhaustive manner, all of Léger's cinema projects, thus highlighting the strong and lasting relationships that the painter maintained throughout his career with the seventh art.

Exhibition at the Belfort Museum of Modern Art from November 6, 2021 to February 6, 2022
Exhibition at the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot from June 11 to September 19, 2022