The Art Deco style was first given its name at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, and this year it marks its centenary. We invite you to look at its history through the prism of cinema—an art form that instantly embraced the language of Art Deco, weaving it into its own visual vocabulary.
At once chic and populist, radical yet conformist—Art Deco seems, in its apparent contradictions, to resonate with the intonations and rhetoric of the new ’20s, the decade we inhabit today. Its former grandeur once again strikes a chord with something in the air. If so, perhaps this is the moment to turn to films that in one way or another embody the spirit of Art Deco. Today, these stories can be seen anew, rendered acutely contemporary, allowing us to discern the diverse ways filmmakers across decades—from the 1920s to the revisionist 1980s— engaged with the style.
The programme is loosely divided into two chapters. The first explores the flowering of on-screen Art Deco in the 1920s and 1930s.
L’Inhumaine by Marcel L’Herbier is a cinematic manifesto of Art Deco, where set designs by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger are not mere backdrops but the very core and spectacle of the film, still striking in its scale and precision.
The Kiss by Jacques Feyder exemplifies the style’s migration to American studio cinema. Elegant interiors, glossy surfaces, and soft, flowing lines become natural extensions of the movements, gestures, and glances of Greta Garbo, the quintessential cinematic icon of Art Deco.
The Women by George Cukor is a comedy brought to life by an extraordinary cast of classic Hollywood actresses, and stands as one of the ultimate embodiments of Art Deco in 1930s American cinema.
The second chapter focuses on Art Deco’s revival in the 1970s and 1980s, now in a spectral, fragile, and unsettling guise.
La Paloma by Daniel Schmid is a neo-baroque fantasy performed by Peter Kern and Ingrid Caven—singer, actress, Fassbinder’s companion and Yves Saint Laurent’s muse. Here, the once-thriving style’s sumptuous interiors become the source of macabre hallucinations.
Chinese Roulette by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a claustrophobic family drama designed as a mirrored trap. Art Deco blooms once more in all its vibrancy—no longer as a symbol of past festivities, but as the glimmer of a shameful and deeply buried secret.
Mélo by Alain Resnais is an adaptation of Henri Bernstein’s 1929 play—a tale of two old friends reunited, their meeting sliding into a stream of melancholic confessions that trigger events charged with either passion or calculated chill.
As a postscript to the programme, the 2024 film E.1027 – Eileen Gray And the House by the Sea revisits the modernist house designed by the great Eileen Gray in an attempt to transcend Art Deco that instead became a stage for her stylistic and intimate conflicts.
Alongside the screenings, the Festival has prepared a series of related events “We live in Art Deco”.
Maxim Seleznev