The cinema is a medium that made women's hair a privileged motif for its aesthetics and its mythology. Heir to painting and literature, it protracted this fascination for women's hair and its associated gestures. From the very beginning, film-makers and their directors of photography realised the full potential of the form and matter of hair which could be exploited in the luminous construction of their shots. They appropriated the pictorial and mythological richness of hair and bestowed it, for the very first time, with the excitement of motion. The great immortalisers of women's hair (Hitchcock, Mizoguchi, Buñuel, Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Lynch, Fassbinder and others) are intersected by the singular emotion aroused in them by women's hair, which holds a part of the mystery that makes their creativity so remarkable and intimate.

The interest of cinema for hair also crossed the path of the key events and darkest hours of modern History. Each region of civilisation (the Mediterranean, the Nordic countries, Asia, Africa, the Arab world, India) has developed its own cinematographic poetry around hair, to reflect its cultural and religious identity and artistic tradition. In the Western countries, the 20th century was also the era of mass media, of which cinema was the principle matrix. It was cinema that compiled and broadcast the central models with regard to women's hair. Film stars were the leading icons of the time in this respect. Under the control of the major studios, they imposed styles of femininity that often guided the fashion of entire generations: the short bob of the 1920s (Louise Brooks); the platinum blonde of the 1930s (Jean Harlow); long wavy locks in the 1940s (Veronika Lake); the flowing tresses of Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s, the androgynous cut of Jean Seberg in the 1960s and so forth.

Built on links opened to the subjectivity of the visitor, this exhibition will lead you to original and secret passages between cinema, painting, photography, history and mythology in the representation of women's hair.

Alain Bergala
Brune/Blonde Exhibition Manager

The online exhibition Brune/Blonde is an extension to the temporary exhibition Brune/Blonde, an Arts and Cinema exhibition (at the Cinémathèque française from 6 October 2010 to 16 January 2011).

In addition to a selection of works, the exhibition includes film clips, audiovisual archives, critiques, comments and "echoes" for a playful and educational exploration.

Not to mention exclusive interviews with Alain Bergala, Exhibition Manager, and Nathalie Crinière, stage designer, and artists such as visual artist Alice Anderson, director Bertrand Bonello, photographer Bernard Plossu, colorist Christophe Robin...

Visit an exhibition where Rodin's Danaid communicates with Truffaut's Jules et Jim or Edvard Munch's Vampyr, Akerman's La Captive with Hitchcock's Vertigo, Bertrand Bonello with Cindy Sherman, Warhol with Lio and more.

Marion Langlois
Online publishing