As an artist, Leonor Fini has never received as much attention as her contemporary and near namesake Leonora Carrington but this didn’t stop film-makers calling at Fini’s door in later life. The best of the ones I’ve seen to date (and probably the best of all) is the feature-length documentary made by Chris Vermorcken in 1987 but there are many other short ones, several of which were made for television. Fini worked as a costume designer for the theatre and later for film which may have helped stimulate interest from directors. Most of the shorts have yet to turn up anywhere but I keep looking from time to time.
Leonor Fini is a black-and-white short made in 1966 by Yvan Butler for Swiss TV. There was a copy circulating years ago but I seem to recall it was lacking subtitles, a problem rectified by the version linked here. Butler’s film is a portrait of the artist and her friends staging a private masquerade in the ruined monastery which Fini used as her summer residence. Shots of her paintings, the decayed building and the costume parades staged within its walls are attended by Fini’s lofty pronouncements: “Cats are the lost paradise of grace, of innocence, of total ease”; “People who are too masculine or too feminine are very limited”. She also refutes again the suggestion that she was a Surrealist artist even though she’s continually labelled as one. She admits to being friends with Max Ernst and Paul Éluard in Paris but kept her distance from the movement because “there were too many laws, constraints”. Wise woman.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Leonor Fini
• Leonor Fini: comment vivre sans chat
• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
• The art of Leonor Fini, 1907–1996