Ballet mécanique

Since the beginning of the invention of cinema, Europe was a good place for the most innovative filmmakers to do their work, crazed youngsters who weren't satisfied with conventional film narratives, so they needed to try new and avant-garde film experiments full of images too bizarre and incomprehensible for a conservative German count. Many times these films were influenced or had connections with other Arts, as is the case with "Ballet Mécanique" (1924), a milestone in avant-garde silent film which is influenced by cubism and directed by a painter, Herr Fernand Léger.

The film is an unconventional and unique film experience, a kind of an essay about movement, in which whirling, dazzling galleries of machines images ( pistons, gears ) and deconstructing humans ( female cubist portraits, syncopated images of different persons ) are intertwined , composing together a bizarre, surreal symphony of motion, an extravagant and experimental kaleidoscope. Such avant-garde madness wasn't exclusive to Europe because Herr Léger had the help of two Amerikan madmen, the technical assistance of Herr Dudley Murphy, director and producer and the founder of the New York Dada movement and Herr Man Ray photographer, painter and avant-garde filmmaker, who did the cinematography.

Obviously this German count is accustomed to watch classical and conventional ballets as for example Herr Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" full of elegant movements as "pas de deux", "plié", "sautés"… so the first time that this Herr Graf watched Herr Léger's "Ballet Mécanique" with its organized and meaningless symphonic chaos, the soirée at the Schloss theatre was left in a state of absolute shock. Fortunately many years have passed since then and this Herr Von had the chance to know and watch more bizarre avant-garde silent films, varied and unclassifiable oeuvres that belonged to strange and different cultural movements of the last century so the second time that "Ballet Mécanique" was shown in the Schloss theatre and with such background information digested, this German count still couldn't understand the damn thing… the same thing happened the third, the forth, the fifth time…

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must dance a•"pas de deux" with the Schloss' boiler.

I would not recommend this film to anyone not interested in the cubist painter Leger, or in the dada and surrealist films of the 1920s. Fascinating for its primitive use of montage and eye-line match, the film is just an experiment with different rhythms and images. Your experience may differ grandly depending on the soundtrack that accompanies it. Most videotapes produced of the film have dinky little organ melodies that really take away from the ballet-like beauty of movement that Leger was going for. In the end, the film's value lies in its historical and fine art historical importance.

French abstract painter Fernand Leger was swept up in the first month of The Great War when France was being overrun by the Germans in August 1914. Spending two years on the front, he almost died in Verdun during a mustard gas attack. Leger had a lasting image of the mechanics of the war during his convalescence in the hospital, describing "I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight, in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility." After the war Leger became fixated by mechanical images, with his paintings dominated by tubular and machine-like forms. Once his fame spread as a canvass artist, he became intrigued with how cinema could give his art an extra dimension. When asked to design a movie set for a laboratory sequence in director Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 'L'Inhumaine,' Leger immediately embarked on an experimental short film with photographer/artist Man Ray. His effort produced September 1924's "Ballet Mecanique (Mechanical Ballet)." Filmmaker Dudley Murphy, more familiar with the technology of movie producing, assisted Leger on his project, now considered a masterpiece in experimental film.

Embracing Cubist and Dada aesthetics, Leger took over 300 shots to compress his 15-minute film into a collage of images, live action and others abstractions of lights and lines. The beauty of "Ballet Mecanique" is that individuals are able to arrive at their own personal interpretations of the film's meanings. The juxtapositions of the mechanical cylinders with an old woman carrying a large bag repeatedly up stairs in a loop-edited sequence reflects for some viewers that mechanical inventions are replacing age-old human manual labor for efficiency. The reoccurring Cubist images of Charlie Chaplin are scattered throughout the program.

A special musical score by composer George Antheil premiered two years after the film was released in a June 1926 Paris theater. The cacophonous music stirred up the passions of some viewers at its opening, causing fights between admirers and detractors of Leger's movie in the street after the show.

This comment is on the version with the recreated Antheil score.

There are films that you can experience directly as they penetrate deep. There are films (and other things) you engage with because they help with that, but the experience is still direct and lasting. They are lesser works, and many of then trivial. But over time the aggregation matters. Its a practice. Its a yoga.

And then there are films that may have been one of these in some context, but that context has drained away, eroded somehow. These are schoolroom exercises now. You cannot actually learn the grammar from them because they are immature, regardless of how cutting edge they were. You cannot experience the thrill the original viewers had, the shock, the stretch, the challenge.

But you have to watch them because they were important, and because you'll need to talk to people who learn rather than experience.

It's cubist, and a particular kind of German-influenced reduction based on now discounted notions. It assumes that Cartesian abstraction can be pure, visceral. The score is from a different tradition, one that reduces to ordinarily "pure" phenomenon like machine sounds. These are both bankrupt artistic ideas, silly now. But they are contradictory, and the clash between the two religions is the experience you will find here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This one is available online bearing various running-times (the longest being 18 minutes); for the record, the print on Kino's DVD edition within their 2-Disc collection AVANT-GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920s AND '30s is a mere 11 minutes, with the one I eventually settled on for this review clocking at 16!

It is among the more famous efforts in that set and one which boasts the approval (as per the opening scrolling text) of none other than Sergei M. Eisenstein as among the rare(?!) masterpieces of French cinema, while "Charlot" (i.e. Charles Chaplin as he was known in France) is given an early "presents" credit! In retrospect, the Russian master of film montage must have surely appreciated its rapid-fire cutting and industrial aptitude (in keeping with his Communist beliefs). That said, the most lasting image here depicts a chubby woman being repeatedly made to go up and down the stairs.