Fernand Léger’s Cinema of Pictorial Equivalence (and the Return to Disorder)

Abstract

When Fernand Léger returned to Paris on furlough from the Front in August 1916, his friend and fellow poilu Guillaume Apollinaire, also on leave, talked him into going to the movies. Wholly disinterested in cinema generally and Hollywood specifically, Léger took some convincing. ‘All the same, Apollinaire said to me, there is something here. Come see’. The film in question turned out to be by Charlie Chaplin – ‘Charlot’ as the French call him – and watching it Léger experienced something of an epiphany. ‘We were of the opinion that everything was happening “over there”’, recalls Léger, ‘that life was collected on the “lines”, that the civilian zone was boredom and death …. I saw CHARLOT; uncontestably it was something since it helped me cope with the enormous spectacle I had just left for seven days’.1 Finding life in the slaughter of the Argonne and death in the civilian...