Event | Cinema Mon 13 Jan 2025
19:00 – 20:45

Genre: Biopic
Year: 2015
Country of origin: France
Running time: 1 h 47 min
Director: Fabrice Maze
Production: Aube & Oona Elléouet Breton – Seven Doc

Synopsis: Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob) is an independent woman, emancipated, an income earner, a non-militant homosexual, a ‘wandering writer’, a versatile artist, a revolutionary, an anti-fascist, an individualist, an atypical surrealist, in a word, unclassifiable. Out of all conformism, out of a perpetual concern for differentiation and a ‘mania for the exceptional’, she produced an innovative and disconcerting body of photographic work in which she portrayed herself with the help of her partner, Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe), with whom she shared her entire life. A mythical couple, often overshadowed, despite their many collective works. ‘All creation is self-creation’, wrote Claude Cahun, rebelling against any form of identification and for whom ‘labels are detestable’. Her desire was ‘to travel only on the bow of oneself’.

+ about artists

I am your life’s work’ wrote Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob) to her partner Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) in 1914. Sisters by marriage and lovers since adolescence, the two artists produced a body of photographic and literary work for almost forty years, always signed with Cahun’s name alone. Originally from Nantes, and close to the Surrealist community in Paris in the 1920s, they forged a highly personal path that questioned both artistic and sexual identity. Their cooperation, based on complementary skills, was expressed as much in publishing as in experimental theatre during the inter-war period. They joined the Resistance on the island of Jersey during the Occupation, and their political commitment bears witness to a relationship that was always marked by collective anonymity. (source here)

The exhibition ‘La Haute Note Jaune’ presents 5 photographs by Claude Cahun.
The Foundation would like to thank Jersey Heritage Collections for lending the works.