WEBVTT

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[soft music]

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Lucy Schwob, Suzanne Malherbe.

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Lucy Schwob was a writer, a poet, and a photographer.

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But she was also Claude Cahun.

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A multifaceted activist-artist

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whose career is hard to categorize.

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Suzanne Malherbe was an illustrator,

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graphic designer, and photographer.

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But she was also Marcel Moore.

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Two women with extraordinary personalities:

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resistance fighters, lesbians, and surrealists.

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Lucy and Suzanne.

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This is the story of an intense love

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of two women destined to be heroes,

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united in life, and in death.

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[whimsical music]

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[bird cawing]

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1944.

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Jersey, the British island in the heart

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of the English Channel was occupied by the Germans.

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From the beginning of the war on this remote island,

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resistance pamphlets, signed by \"The Soldier With No Name,\"

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had been distributed.

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The pamphlets sought to demoralize the Nazi enemy,

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and even encourage some of them to desert.

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The increasingly edgy Germans tried, in vain,

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to track down the resistance fighters behind the propaganda.

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But they failed, with good reason.

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Because the leaflets were not the work of a group of men,

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but rather two women.

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Suzanne Malherbe and Claude Cahun.

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Behind the thick walls of their house,

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the women were fighting the German invasion.

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Their only weapons were their drawings,

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words, and creativity.

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With the collages all prepared,

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we were heading back into town.

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As I bought the latest magazines,

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I leafed through them,

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slipping in my propaganda leaflets.

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It wasn\'t easy under the eyes of the customers and traders.

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[banging on door]

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[solemn music]

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In July 1944,

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the Gestapo finally tracked them down.

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The Gestapo had been searching for four years,

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in vain.

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Even with all the evidence before them,

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they couldn\'t believe their eyes.

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Realizing we were women, and thus inferior beings.

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who in Jersey had the reputation

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of being peaceful and middle-class.

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On July 25th 1944,

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the two resistance fighters were arrested and jailed.

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[metal door clanking]

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From her prison cell,

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separated for the first time from Suzanne,

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Claude Cahun pondered her youth,

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a time when she was still known as Lucy Schwob.

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[singing in foreign language]

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Nantes, 1909.

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Lucy and Suzanne, two inseparable young high-school girls

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from respectable families,

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were fueling each other\'s vivid imaginations.

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[singing in foreign language]

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[girl laughing]

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The two friends employed all manner of ruses

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so as not to be kept apart.

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And away from prying eyes,

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they revealed feelings

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of a rather special kind for one another.

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Lucy and Suzanne were quite simply in love.

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Suzanne and I had to overcome many hurdles

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that are best left to your imagination

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on the sly in the countryside,

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and openly at each other\'s houses, preferably mine,

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where we would be alone.

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Their affair had to be kept secret.

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But no matter.

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The girls could not escape their feelings.

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In Nantes, 19-year-old Suzanne,

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enjoyed an outstanding education.

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She was fluent in both English and German.

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With a bright mind,

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Suzanne also demonstrated a flair for drawing.

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[cat meowing]

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Lucy, 17, was bored to death

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in a family environment that took its toll on her.

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With books her refuge,

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and photography a reflection of her imagination,

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she was determined to become a writer.

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In 1910, a drawing entitled \"They Love Each Other\"

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featured their intertwined initials,

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Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe.

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The drawing\'s double signature

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marked the beginning of their artistic collaboration,

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and affirmed their secret love in black and white.

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[thunder cracks]

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[lighting zaps]

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[light music]

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The two young girls had an advantage

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in their efforts to deflect suspicion.

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Albert Malherbe, Suzanne\'s father was a doctor.

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Maurice Schwob, Lucy\'s father,

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was the proprietor of Nantes\'s biggest newspaper:

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Le Phare de la Loire.

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The two men and their families spent a lot of time together.

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Mingling with the literati and cultured intellectuals,

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everything seemed perfectly normal.

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[soft moaning]

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[dark music]

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Nantes, 1913.

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Lucy fell ill.

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She was in a particularly weak state.

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My thinness caused much dismay,

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I weighed 23 kilos, and my lung was damaged.

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The diagnosis was delivered, Lucy was anorexic.

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[breathes heavily]

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From early childhood,

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she had sought to escape an unbearable reality.

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[train chugging]

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As a little girl,

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she regularly witnessed her mother\'s attacks of dementia.

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I can sense the attacks coming on.

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She kicks me in the lower back.

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I go down.

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She falls to her knees beside me and begins to wail.

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Her mother was eventually interned.

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Her father filed for divorce,

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raising his daughter alone in a repressive atmosphere.

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Possessive and demanding, he was himself far from stable.

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With irresponsibly fertile,

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freak parents, better a child be stillborn.

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[happy music]
[children giggling]

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As Lucy grew up, creativity, writing,

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and especially Suzanne, became her escape routes.

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Her father resolved to accept the offer

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of Dr. Malherbe to entrust her to his daughter.

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Suzanne\'s presence could be nothing but beneficial.

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[soft piano music]

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A few months later,

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the two girls began contributing to the local daily,

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Le Phare de la Loire.

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Lucy wrote pieces for the fashion column,

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which Suzanne illustrated.

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In simple ink line drawings,

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she sketched out women who were androgynous, and strong,

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but also sensual.

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Together, they began to capture on paper

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their early libertarian principles.

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Never, under any circumstances,

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allow yourself to be held back.

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Demand freedom of movement.

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A female suit is a strolling uniform.

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Believe me, Madame!

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It is the distortion of male fashions

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that feminizes your suits.

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The two girls were closer than ever,

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increasingly in tune with one another and committed.

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In 1917, Suzanne, 25 and Lucy, 23,

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prepared for a rather unusual event.

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[people clapping]
[man whistling]

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Marie-Eugenie Malherbe, Suzanne\'s mother,

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a widow of two years,

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took as her husband Lucy\'s father Maurice Schwob.

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It was a fresh start for the newlyweds,

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and for their respective daughters.

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Lucy and Suzanne were now half-sisters.

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The strange coincidence

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that has brought us together as a family

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seems to have worked out for the best.

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It was agreed that the apartment on the fourth floor

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would be ours, along with a cook and a cleaning lady,

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separated from theirs on the third floor by a staircase

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and locked doors that met with not the slightest protest.

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[light quirky music]

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1919.

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Suzanne, fresh out of the School of Fine Arts in Nantes,

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was demonstrating her mastery of the art of drawing

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in her illustrations.

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Lucy, for her part,

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did not want for words to express her convictions.

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The two girls published their first joint work,

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Vues et Visions.

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[soft music]

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Suzanne\'s sublime modernist drawings

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captured the 25 \"symbolist\" poems composed by Lucy.

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The two artists broke down the barriers

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separating visual images from the written word;

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their work overlapped, each complementing the other.

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Dressed in jewels and silk,

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two courtesans traverse the Suburra.

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White sky, white stone, in the sunlight.

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Dressed in jewels and silk,

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they draw closer to each other,

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and despite the vast open space,

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brush against one another other as they pass.

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To facilitate publication of their work,

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they came up with a ruse.

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For her drawings, Suzanne Malherbe became Marcel Moore.

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For her writings, Lucy Schwob became Claude Cahun.

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The two women hid behind androgynous names,

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inventing a whole new gender, far from any enforced norm.

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Masculine?

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Feminine.

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It depends on the situation.

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Neuter is the only gender that suits me.

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Lucy adopted the name Claude

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for the rest of her life.

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1920.

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The faces of the post-war period

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were no longer quite the same.

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Modern women with short hair and sleek figures,

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displayed their freedom.

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And in their ranks were many lesbians.

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In 1922, Claude and Suzanne moved to Paris,

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to an apartment in Rue Notre Dame des Champs,

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in Montparnasse, a Mecca of artistic creativity.

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[glasses clinking]

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There, in a city experiencing radical upheaval,

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all things seemed possible.

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The two women opened themselves up to new experiences.

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Claude knowingly cultivated her sexual ambivalence,

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hugely enjoying the ambiguity.

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Suzanne tackled the illustrations for a collection of poems:

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\"Oya insula ou l\'enfant a la conque.\"

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Influenced by the decorative arts,

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her drawings were pared down, stripped of all superfluity.

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The use of repetitive graphic patterns

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gave her pictures the illusion of movement.

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The drawings, imbued with Symbolist poetry,

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conjured up figures with an androgynous identity,

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and more importantly, a free spirit.

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[light music]

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The two artists held their own salon

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in their Paris apartment,

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a private, singular and autonomous setting.

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A microcosm where intellectual friends of the avant-garde

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shared cultural, social and sexual mores.

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It was a place where they could experiment freely

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and express their feelings of otherness

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and taste for cross-dressing.

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Under the knowing gaze of her partner,

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Claude Cahun underwent something of a metamorphosis.

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She put on make-up, employing a range of ingenious tricks,

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then froze in front of the lens.

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In this enigmatic role-play, a masked Claude Cahun advances,

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clouding the issue of identity.

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[electricity zapping]

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[ominous music]

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1928.

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The father of Claude Cahun died.

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Her radical emotions were captured in her artistic approach.

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With head and eyebrows shaved,

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gaze fixed provocatively on the lens,

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she fashions a direct and powerful image.

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The nakedness of her skull seems more provocative

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than that of any other part of her body.

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The Human Frontier portrait

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reflects the endless exploration of her being.

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Lesbian, woman, artist.

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She felt apart, alone.

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Conjuring up the face of her twin

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brought a flood of surreal photographs.

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Throughout my life,

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I have always been exactly what I am:

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essentially a surrealist.

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As much as one can be without killing oneself

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or falling under the spell of alienists.

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[groovy jazzy music]

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In May 1930, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe

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prepared to enter the unique world of Parisian surrealism.

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Together they published \"Disavowals,\"

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an autobiographical book-object,

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the culmination of the couple\'s collaborative approach.

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Suzanne signed the first plate alone,

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using her assumed name, Moore.

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In their photographic laboratory,

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Claude pushed back the boundaries of image manipulation.

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Superimposed images, masking, inserts,

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overprints, double exposure.

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She even used an X-ray of her lungs.

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Becoming her own subject,

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she undertook a veritable dissection of her being,

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as can be seen in her makeover games,

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the plurality of identity.

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In \"Disavowals\" I strove, in vain,

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through black humor, provocation, and defiance,

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to drag my contemporaries out of their smug conformism.

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Paris, early 1930s.

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The party mood had dissipated.

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With the rise of fascism, lesbian couples seemed to deviate

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from the course of women\'s emancipation.

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Claude Cahun\'s photographic quest continued unabated.

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Employing natural scenery,

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she transposed her role playing by staging objects.

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Her photographs, with their plastic dimension,

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underpinned her surrealist experimentation,

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exploiting her unconscious.

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[light music]

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1932.

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For Claude, it was a consecration.

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Surrealist poet Andre Breton came into her life.

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He turned to her for texts and exhibitions,

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showing great faith in her.

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At his side, the two women were part of the union

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of revolutionary intellectuals.

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For them, the desire to act artistically

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against the rise of fascism

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was becoming a matter of urgency.

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But now, Claude had a feeling

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that her calling was somewhere else.

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The plan began to take shape in late 1936.

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We had friends, a stable, easy and happy life.

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Suzanne had no desire to leave, she doesn\'t like to move.

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I suggested Jersey, knowing full well

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that I wouldn\'t be able to drag her any further.

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[camera shutter snapping]

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[woman giggling]

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Gentle spray, salty skin,

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the sound of the wind.

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Unfortunately, their idyllic island existence

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would be a fleeting one.

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The German occupation cut short their freedom.

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[soft music]

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[singing in foreign language]

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Imprisoned for their resistance activities

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and judged by a German military court,

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the women narrowly escaped a death sentence.

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On May 9th 1945, when Jersey was liberated,

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Claude and Suzanne finally returned home.

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But their photographs and archives

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had for the most part been destroyed or stolen.

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Claude\'s health deteriorated.

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Suffering impaired vision,

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she produced a series of eight self-portraits

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entitled \"The Way of Cats.\"

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Under the gaze of Suzanne,

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she imagined herself

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walking blind on the edge of a precipice.

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Guided by her cat, she advances into the unknown.

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Claude Cahun died in 1954 of a heart attack.

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She was 58 years old.

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[cat meowing]

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Suzanne remained in Jersey,

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cutting herself off from the world.

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I am happy;

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the quiet, negative happiness of someone

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who hopes for nothing, dreads nothing, has few desires.

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I do not fear anything because I am alone,

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and I take great care to remain that way.

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She ended her life at the age of 80.

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The two inseparable women found in one another,

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a unique collaboration, a consummate partner,

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and most of all, the love of their lives.

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They lie in rest in Jersey\'s silent little cemetery,

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side by side for eternity.

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Some words are not meant to be understood,

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but rather felt.

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What is the point in saying I love you?

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I want only to be able to think it a lot,

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close to you, in silence.

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[whimsical music]