Le Ballet Mecanique 1924 - Fernand Léger, Georges Antheil, Dudley Murphy, Man Ray

(France 1924, bw/color, 16m at 18 fps); director: Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy; screenplay: Fernand Léger; photography: Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, #Man Ray; music: Georges Antheil. #kikidemontparnasse #kiki Charlot, disarticulated silhouette, presents the mechanical ballet. A woman rocks on the swing in the garden. In a neutral space, objects burst: a straw hat, some numbers, bottles of wine, a white triangle. Kiki’s lips shine, as big as the frame. Discs and reflective spheres rotate and oscillate; the mirror surface returns the image of a man standing, and that of another behind the camera. Pendulum motorbike of Christmas tree balls; casseroles, cake molds, and other kitchen utensils come alive with a whirling motion. Two eyes in the foreground open wide, then the eyelids fall; therefore the eyelashes result in eyebrows, as before and vice versa. In the dance of objects emerges the head of a young man, then, in the most frenetic rhythm of bottles, connecting rods, triangles/circles, numbers and typewriter and sheets of paper, an eye is starved with wonder, which spins and winks. In an outdoor amusement park, a man slips, a car runs, a plunger in action, a giant hydraulic pump in the backlight. As an intermezzo, three whips in a dance number. A laundress laboriously climbs a ladder with her bundle of laundry, and when she has reached the top she finds herself again on the first step: for twenty-one times. A mouth smiles. Typographic characters fluctuate, chase each other, mask themselves and make turns. Kiki’s head like the face of a mannequin, while a phantom stares at it. Large kitchen parade battery, mannequin legs with a garter that perform a cancan, Kiki’s closed eyes, bottles tarantula from the assembly. Charlot, the same shape as the prologue, is dismantled and his limbs move on their own. The swing woman, still in the garden, sniffs a flower. Both in the history of cinema and in that of the plastic-figurative arts, it is generally believed that La roue by Abel Gance, or more precisely the version presented at the Salon Annuel de Cinéma in 1923, constitutes the filmic inspiration of Ballet mécanique. That version of the film was then ’reduced’, at the suggestion of the futurist Ricciotto Canudo, to what Fernand Léger called a “plastic emotion obtained through the simultaneous projection of fragments of the image at an accelerated rate“. Canudo was obsessed with the cinematic rhythm. At the CASA (Club des Amis du Septième Art, based in the Vieux-Colombier) the new version of La roue was presented in 1924 with the title of Tableaux modernes de la machine vivante. The will of Canudo, of Léger and of all the artists who were members of the CASA was to escape the influence of the story, to any dramaturgical form attributable to the theater or too melodramatic literature, to imagine a pure cinema, freed from the constraints of narration and from the empathy generated by the characters. However, it is likely that Ballet mécanique has an earlier origin than La roue. In 1919 Fernand Léger and Blaise Cendrars had an idea for a book, La fin du monde filmée for the Ange Notre Dame. Incredible and extravagant title for a book object, a sort of immense flip-book whose large format allowed the two authors to experiment with spatial proportions, metamorphoses of abstract forms and an innovative mixture of texts and images. Probably La fin du monde filmée for the Ange Notre Dame constitutes the common matrix for Ballet mécanique and La roue: the superimposed texts on Léger’s colorful rhythms suggest the superimposed captions on the tracks that run with hypnotic rhythm in La roue. Ballet mécanique reflects Léger’s attempt to create a new type of representation by attributing spectacular dignity to the mechanical organism. Give up any movement of the camera, considering it inadequate to underline the singularity of the cinematographic representation and to characterize its modernity. For him “the mere fact of projecting its image already qualifies the object“. Hans Richter interprets this transposition of the object into a plastic event as Léger’s main contribution to the avant-gardes: “Léger has completely freed the object from its rational, anecdotal, symbolic meaning, to construct the film only on its plastic value, without any concern for its current meaning “. The objects filmed by Léger, which essentially belong to the industry, are actually treated as plastic elements only through their ’moving’ representation. The mobile image is the main character of the film, while the montage is no longer at the service of narrative logic, but produces rhythm. George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique was originally conceived as an accompaniment for the film and was scheduled to be premiered at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik. However before completion, director and composer agreed to go their different ways. The musical work runs close to 30 minutes, while the film is about 19 minutes long.