“How to live without a cat” is the translation but this short television film is in French so the rest is a mystery unless you can understand the language. As with the Max Ernst film, language isn’t much of an issue when you have an opportunity to see La Fini and her many moggies. Leonor Fini was an obsessive cat owner and cat painter, and she could also look pretty feline herself on occasion. (A piece of typically Surrealist apocrypha has it that the pupils of her eyes were cat-like until she was 4 years old.) The Fini website lists a number of European documentaries about the artist and her work but most remain frustratingly elusive. This one is an official release to YouTube from the Ina.fr archives. At the end of the film there’s a shot of the painting below; Fini’s cats are always very self-possessed.
Sunday Afternoon (1980) by Leonor Fini.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
• The art of Leonor Fini, 1907–1996
• Surrealist women
Amazing. If Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman had retired with her moggies, this is what it would look like. Thanks to this find I also stumbled across this fantastic footage of Fini in Corsica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPLiAZtA1D4. I think this is what Curtis Harrington meant when he described Fini and friends partying “in their crumbling tower by the sea” (although he thought it was located in Italy).
Heh, I was thinking just the same about her resemblance to Eartha’s Catwoman. And I almost made the Corsica one the subject of the post but the other film won out for quality and feline contingent. Fingers crossed that more of this scarce footage turns up eventually.