Turning and Unfurling: Sonia Delaunay’s 1926 Colour Film

Based on new archival findings, this essay zeroes in on Sonia Delaunay’s 1926 fashion and textile film, made in the now largely forgotten Keller-Dorian ‘natural’ colour process. Of vital interest in my analysis are two gestures or animating textiles – turning and unfurling – which are traced through the various scientific, technological and media histories converging in the film. It is through these gestures that the film effects a remarkable superimposition (and multiplication) of distinct conceptions of movement and colour, each of which has textile at its core: those of the textiles as objects moving across the surface of the screen, those produced on the retina by the textiles’ simultanist chromatic compositions, and those of Keller-Dorian colour cinema, itself based on a uniquely produced textile surface. The essay thus considers Sonia Delaunay's film beyond the scope of fashion film, highlighting its links to her and her husband Robert’s modernist research into colour and movement, as well as wider realms of optical science, textiles and film manufacture and popular spectacle.

The essay appears in the context of lavishly illustrated catalogue, accompanying Kunstmuseen Krefeld's major exhibition Maison Sonia: Sonia Delaunay and the Atelier Simultané (23 October 2022–26 February, 2023). It was published in English and German versions.