Ballet Mécanique and Interwar Avant-Garde Cinema

“The error of cinema is the scenario. Freed of this negative weight, the cinema can become a giant microscope of things never before seen or experienced.” —Fernand Léger, in “Peinture et cinema”

The Library for Performing Arts is well known as an important institution for researchers interested in dance, theater, and music. But a deeper look across the Divisions reveals a wealth of resources for researchers interested in cinema as well. Scholarly publications, photos, musical scores, audio recordings of soundtracks, manuscripts, and posters are among the many resources patrons have access to at the Library—including a historic collection of 16mm prints in the Reserve Film and Video Collection. One spectacular 16mm print in the archive is the Dadaist film Ballet Mécanique, made in 1924 conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger.

In early silent cinema, a strain of the avant-garde wing took hold, and it can clearly be seen in this film. In fact, as one of the most thrilling examples of the 1920s avant-garde, it joins multiple currents flowing through the artistic milieu of that period, especially among those associated with Dada and Surrealism. 

This film is the result of three key figures: composer George Antheil, cinematographer Dudley Murphy, and artist Fernand Léger. Antheil composed the piece while living in Europe. After spending a year in Berlin he was convinced to move to Paris. Once there he surrounded himself with like-minded composers, writers, and artists. These encounters in the Parisian art scene inspired him to compose a piece entitled “Ballet Mécanique,” which would accompany a film. As the title states, the music simulates the sound of machinery and industrial noise (sirens, whistles, propellers) commonly heard in factories and loud urban centers, with a driving rhythm that evokes the automated movements of factory machinery. 

Next, Antheil needed to find collaborators who shared his vision, so he placed ads in the press describing the film he had in mind. The project initially attracted cinematographer Dudley Murphy and surrealist photographer Man Ray, but shortly into the planning stages Ray backed out and Léger took his place. Ray’s only notable contribution to the film is the appearance of the underground French icon Kiki de Montparnasse (born Alice Prin), who frequently posed for Ray. Antheil backed out of the project at this time as well. Creative conflicts between Murphy led him to withdraw. Antheil’s composition was performed in concert halls as early as 1926, but the film was not projected with his score during his lifetime. Various versions of the composition were performed in the 1990s alongside the film. Home video technology allowed a shortened version of the score, which had been longer than the original runtime of the film in 1924, to be recorded and synchronized on a DVD release in the mid-2000s.

Dudley Murphy eventually worked on the fringes of the Hollywood industry, but was drawn to experimentation early in his career. One of Murphy’s earliest works was a German expressionist influenced film Danse Macabre, which is set to Saint-Saens’s similarly named composition. The film featured choreography by Adolf Bolm and performances by Ruth Page as Love and Olin Howard as Death (along with Bolm as Youth). Murphy would come to be known for his film work with Black performers such as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith in the 1930s and 40s. When Ray backed out, Murphy was able to bring Léger into the production, and, most importantly, convince Léger to provide financing for the film.

Léger’s interest in urban and industrial modernity in his painting after World War I made him well-suited for this project, and his turn to cinema was inevitable. His first experience working on a film came from designing and painting a set for Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (also 1924). Ballet Mécanique gave him the opportunity to play a more active role in the conception and production of a film.

Léger, like many of his peers in the avant-garde scene during the war, loved cinema’s ability to directly address the senses. For him, it was an ideal medium to challenge the old guard and explore the nascent modernity of early 20th-century life—it could radically transform the way people viewed the world. Through cine-clubs and magazines, the avant-garde wrote polemics arguing for a kind of cinema that was properly cinematic rather than literary or theatrical. Léger saw Ballet Mécanique as an attempt at what some avant-garde circles called cinema pur (pure cinema), or a kind of cinema focusing on editing and composition: rhythmic montage, superimposition, the close-up, the fragment, etc.

Rhythm is the general organizing principle of the film. The editing style, in particular, eschews straight-forward narrative progression in favor of rhythmic patterns. The film opens with an animated cubist Chaplin in his "Little Tramp” outfit waving his arms and tipping his hat to the audience in jerky, unnatural movements. The inclusion of this little Chaplin in the title sequence was a nod to his beloved status among the 1920s avant-garde set. A flurry of shots follow which include two shots of a young woman on a swing (one shot which is centered and another shot that is framed from a high angle and the camera tipped upside down). Kiki de Montparnasse’s lips form a smile, various mechanical objects spinning, subjects and objects shot through a prismatic lens, text, and abstract shapes. Every so often human figures break up the shots of machinery: Murphy and Léger in the reflection of a steel ball rocking back and forth, more Kiki, a man riding down a slide in a park, people on an amusement park ride, feet walking from left to right, and a recurring shot of a woman carrying a heavy sack up a flight of concrete steps intercut with Kiki’s smile and machinery in rotation. 

The series of shots are at once a slapstick homage to the Sisyphean myth and a visual analogy comparing her repeated walk up the stairs to the kinds of machinery in motion throughout the film. Ordinary objects such as wine bottles, a hat, mannequin legs, and a pair of shoes appear throughout the film. Many of the latter objects and shapes, such as triangles and circles, are edited in fragments of three or six frame segments to maintain a regimented rhythm. Everything in the frame, while chaotic, is edited with an exacting rhythmic pulse. It concludes with a return of the cubist Chaplin, this time with limbs moving more frenetically until he breaks apart, and a calm shot of Katherine Murphy in a garden savoring a wall of flowers and greenery. Throughout the film, montage illustrates similarities between the human and the machine.

The legacy of Ballet Mécanique and the film techniques it deploys have had a major impact on cinema from its premiere up to today. It was one of the first major works to bring together different aspects of the experimental film culture of its time: Soviet-style montage and Hans Richter-styled abstract animation. And one can see its stylistic inventiveness and influence on a range of media from mid-century to MTV-era music videos, all the way up to TikTok.