The Case of "Ballet mécanique"

The Avant-Garde and the "New Spirit": The Case of "Ballet mécanique"
Author(s): Malcolm Turvey
Source: October, Vol. 102 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 35-58
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779130
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The Avant-Garde and the "New Spirit":
The Case of Ballet mecanique*
MALCOLM TURVEY
Embedded in the standard story or version of the European avant-garde of the
1910s and 1920s are two basic assumptions. The first is that, despite its sheer variety,
its dispersal across many often conflicting and openly hostile groups, the avant-garde
of this period was nevertheless a unified phenomenon. It was unified by what Matei
Calinescu has called "a radical criticism of the past and a definite commitment to
change and the values of the future,"1 a commitment that the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire identified contemporaneously as a "New Spirit which ... promises to
modify the arts and the conduct of life from top to bottom in a universal
joyousness."2 According to scholars such as Calinescu, while the avant-garde's
commitment to change was shared with modernism in general, it was much more
uncompromising and extreme in character: "The avant-garde is in every respect
more radical than modernity. Less flexible and less tolerant of nuances, it is
[It] borrows practically all its elements from the
naturally more dogmatic....
modern tradition but at the same time blows them up, exaggerates them...."3 And
as Apollinaire's words suggest, the avant-garde'scommitment to change was social as
well as aesthetic. It consisted not only of the sweeping rejection of older aesthetic
conventions and traditions, but also the desire to fundamentally alter "the conduct of
life" itself. Indeed, in the Soviet context, Boris Gasparovhas argued that this desire to
transform "not merely the conventions of art and language ... but life as a whole" was
so extreme that the avant-garde
would not bow to any constraint-be it aesthetic traditions, conventions
of language and social behavior, or natural laws as established by
*
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to audiences at the following institutions: the
Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Chicago;
and Sarah Lawrence College. I thank these audiences for their questions, comments, and criticisms.
Thanks as well to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson for their help with images. And finally, thanks,
as always, to Annette Michelson.
1.
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:Modernism,Avant-Garde,Decadence,Kitsch,Postmodernism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 95.
2.
Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years:The Origins of the Avant-Gardein France, 1885 to
WorldWarI(New York:Vintage Books, 1968), p. 294.
3.
Calinescu, FiveFacesof Modernity,p. 96.
OCTOBER102, Fall 2002, pp. 35-58. ? 2002 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.
FernandLger. StillfromBallet mecanique. 1924.
? Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,Paris.
nineteenth-century "positivist" or "bourgeois" science. Even the most
fundamental conditions of biological existence, such as mortality,
were not seen as insurmountable for the human spirit, once its creative
power had been freed from the limitations of the previous century's
"positivist"mentality.4
The standard version recognizes, of course, that avant-gardists disagreed
vehemently about what needed to be transformed in society and how, a
disagreement that reflected broader tensions in the West about the forces of
change at work in modernity and how they should be evaluated-forces such as
secularization, scientific and technological progress, the rise of mass entertainment,
industrialization, urbanization, and so on. Some avant-gardists (Futurists,
Constructivists, Productivists) for the most part evaluated these forces positively,
and argued that society should be transformed by intensifying them. Others
(Dadaists, the Surrealists) on the whole evaluated them negatively, and
believed that society should be changed by subverting and rejecting them, and
finding alternatives. But what they all shared, according to the standard version,
was a commitment to revolutionary social transformation of some kind. And a
corollary of this commitment to the "not yet" was the rejection by avant-gardists
4.
Boris Gasparov, "Development or Rebuilding," in Laboratoryof Dreams:The Russian Avant-Garde
and CulturalExperiment,ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1996), p. 133.
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
37
of imitation, copying, or mimesis in their artistic practice. Rather than an imitator
of "the conduct of life"-a "realist"-the European avant-gardist of the 1910s
and 1920s was either a "constructionist,"offering an "intimation of what can be," as
Andre Breton put it,5 or literally attempting to participate in the construction of a
new society on a practical level when conditions allowed, as the Soviet Productivists
aimed to do; or a "destructionist,"typified by the nihilist wing of Dada.
The second assumption embedded in the standard version follows from the
first, namely, that it was the avant-garde's uncompromising commitment to
change-both aesthetic and social-that set it apart from other artistic trends and
movements of the period, including the movements of the 1930s (such as Socialist
Realism) that were to varying degrees enforced by the totalitarian governments of
Italy, Germany, the USSR, and later France. Unlike the avant-garde, these
rejected aesthetic change by perpetuating the older aesthetic conventions and
traditions of realism and classicism. And again unlike the avant-garde, they were
much more likely to reject social change by advancing "reactionary" political and
ideological positions.
Revisionist scholarship in art history on the avant-garde, however, has
challenged these two assumptions in a number of ways. For example, careful
empirical research by historians has revealed that the avant-garde's commitment
to aesthetic change, and its aesthetic difference from the realism and classicism of
other artistic trends and movements, was not nearly as extreme as the standard
version assumes and the avant-garde'sown rhetoric suggests. In the French context,
for example, scholars such as Kenneth Silver and Christopher Green have shown
how the French avant-garde was gripped by a so-called "call to order" after World
War I, a "call to order" that manifested itself in a variety of self-conscious attempts
by avant-gardists to ground their artistic practice in classical tradition.6
Others have attacked the second assumption I outline above, namely, that
it was its uncompromising commitment to social transformation that set the
avant-garde apart from other artistic trends and movements of the period. The
work of Romy Golan on the post-World War I French avant-garde and its
relationship to the "reactionary" pastoralism of French middlebrow art is a
good example. Golan has argued that, far from being marginal political and
ideological positions that became dominant only in the 1930s and under Vichy,
pastoralist themes such as "the disenchantment with technology,... the turn to
the rural and, in more general terms, to the organic became ever-more pervasive in French art" of the 1920s. "Instead of the tabula rasa predicated by high
modernism" (by which she means the commitment to the "not yet"), Golan
argues that the 1920s were dominated by "a collective ethos driven toward the
5.
Andre Breton, Manifestoesof Surrealism(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 5.
6.
See Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps:The Art of the Parisian Avant-Gardeand the First WorldWar,
1914-1925 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Christopher Green, Cubismand
Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987).
38
OCTOBER
restoration of what had been before [World War I]: a world stilled, and a vision
infused ... by nostalgia and memory."
[O]rganic retrenchment deeply affected all of the major modernists
working in France. By the late 1920s, even hard-liners like Fernand
Leger, Le Corbusier, and Amedee Ozenfant would shift towards
organicism, distancing themselves from the unconditional embrace ...
of the machine aesthetic that had previously informed their work.7
In other words, as the 1920s progressed, according to Golan, French avantgardists such as Leger, Ozenfant, and Le Corbusier compromised their
commitment to the radical social changes envisaged by their "machine aesthetic"
by incorporating "reactionary"political and ideological positions into their artistic
practice from pastoralism and the cultural and political discourse around itprincipally organicism and a "return to man." It is therefore not as easy as the
standard version argues it is to distinguish French avant-garde art of the 1920s
from other artistic trends and movements on the basis of its commitment to
fundamental social transformation.
Whether or not one agrees with the specific conclusions of these scholars, the
general picture of the avant-garde that is emerging from this kind of revisionist
scholarship in art history is of a much more ambivalent, contradictory, and complex
phenomenon than the standard version and the avant-garde'sown rhetoric-both of
which suggest that the avant-garde'scommitment to aesthetic and social change was
extreme and uncompromising in character-acknowledges. As Hal Foster has put it:
"avant-gardepractice at its best is contradictory, mobile, and otherwise diabolical."8
Or asJohn Bowlt and Olga Matich have suggested, the avant-gardewas a "multifarious
phenomenon ... represent[ing] the most contrary philosophical positions: mechanistic and organic, mathematical and lyrical,primordial, classical,and modem."9
It is as a contribution to this type of revisionist view of the avant-garde,
which has not emerged in film studies to the extent it has in art history, that I offer
the following analysis of Fernand L6ger's film Ballet mecanique.Underlying this
analysis is the suspicion that it was rarely the case that any European avant-garde
artist's commitment to change was unequivocal in nature. For while it is undoubtedly
true that aesthetic and social transformation was a major preoccupation of the
7.
Romy Golan, Modernityand Nostalgia:Art and Politics in Francebetweenthe Wars(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), pp. ix-x.
8.
Hal Foster, TheReturnof theReal: TheAvant-Gardeat theEnd of the Century(Cambridge: MIT Press,
1996), p. 16.
9.
John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, "Introduction," in Laboratoryof Dreams,p. 4. Bowlt and Foster's
pronouncements call to mind Benjamin Buchloh's critique of Peter Burger's book Theoryof the AvantGarde,a work that takes the avant-garde's stated desire for revolutionary aesthetic and social change at
face value. As Buchloh puts it in his 1984 review of Burger's book: "any theorization of avant-garde
practice from 1915 to '25 ... must force the vast differences and contradictions of that practice into the
unifying framework of theoretical categories, and is therefore doomed to failure. One wishes that
Burger had displayed some awareness of how patently absurd it is to reduce the history of avant-garde
practices in 20th century art to one overriding concern" (Art in America[November 1984], p. 19).
39
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
European avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, that transformation nevertheless
inspired in avant-garde artists, I suggest, fear as well as awe, anxiety as well as
Apollinaire's "joyousness"-and European avant-garde artistic practice was often
just as much a highly imaginative "cure" or "antidote" for it as an embrace of it.
This, at least, is what I hope to demonstrate in the case of Ballet mecanique,a film
that is usually viewed as an art work overflowing with Apollinaire's "New Spirit."10
I
The standard reading of Leger's Balletmecaniquein both art history and cinema
studies argues that the film is concerned with a distinct type of revolutionary
social change in modernity that greatly preoccupied the avant-garde in the 1910s
and 1920s. Society, it was argued by many avant-gardists of the period, was being
fundamentally transformed by forces such as technology, industrialization, and
urbanization, all of which were rapidly increasing the pace of everyday life for
human beings, especially in urban environments. As a result of this increase,
reality was no longer perceptually experienced by human beings as a smooth,
spatiotemporal continuum, according to many avant-gardists. Rather, it was now
perceptually experienced as a dynamic, fragmented, unstable flux, susceptible to
constant rupture and violent transition.
It is this, for the sake of shorthand, "dynamic" perceptual experience of
reality that is, of course, the subject of much avant-garde art in a variety of media,
especially prior to World War I. And it is considered by many Leger scholars to be
the major subject of his idiosyncratic Cubist and post-Cubist painting style, often
termed "dynamic divisionism," from about 1910 onward.11 His concern with it is
said to have originated in his exposure, during his formative years as a painter in
Paris, to the heady mixture of Futurism, Bergsonian philosophy, and the concept
of "simultaneity" prevalent among the poetic avant-garde in the years 1911
through 1914-and in particular to his association and friendship with the poet
Blaise Cendrars. And the claim that it is the major subject of his painting is
supported by much of what Leger had to say about his art during this period. The
following quotation from 1913 is highly representative: "Present-day life, more
fragmented and faster moving than life in previous eras, has had to accept as its
means of expression an art of dynamic divisionism."12
10.
T.J. Clark describes quite beautifully the complexity of the attitude toward social change I will
try to point to in Ballet mecanique:"Modernism is caught interminably between horror and elation at
the forces driving it" (Farewell to an Idea: Episodesfrom a History of Modernism [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999], p. 8). Clark does not, however, seem to share this attitude with the artists and
art works he analyzes, instead viewing "modernization" as a "holocaust" (ibid., p. 3). Surely, even the
most trenchant critic of modernity should have a more nuanced and balanced view than this.
11.
See Christopher Green, Legerand the Avant-Garde(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). This
essay is greatly indebted to this wonderful book.
12.
Fernand Leger, "The Origins of Painting and Its Representational Value" (1913), in Functionsof
Painting (New York:Viking Press, 1973), p. 8.
40
OCTOBER
It is Leger's concern to find in his painting a pictorial equivalent for this
new, dynamic perceptual experience of reality that informs the standard reading
of Ballet mecanique. This reading originates in modern cinema studies in
Standish Lawder's now classic work The Cubist Cinema,published in 1975, which
argues that Ballet mecaniqueis continuous with Leger's painting as a whole in
that it instantiates for the spectator this distinctively modern, dynamic perceptual
experience. In order to substantiate this argument, Lawder and others typically
argue that the dynamic perceptual experience of reality remains the major
concern of Leger's painting at least up until he makes Ballet mecanique in
1923-24. Evidence for this claim is usually found in Leger's famous painting
from 1919, The City,which is commonly agreed to be a major work in the avantgarde painting genre of "visual simultanism"-by which is basically meant the
synthesis of physically and psychologically disparate fragments into a single
image as a pictorial equivalent of a dynamic but single perceptual experience.
Here is how Lawder, echoing standard simultanist readings of the painting in
art history, describes it:
The City is essentially a portrait of modern life in which Leger has
used the Cubist visual vocabulary of sharp-edged flattened forms to
create a simultaneous image of the many characteristic faces of the
city. The constant shift of scale and viewpoint, the rush of images
assaulting the eye simultaneously, the confusion of the senses, the
disjointed space, the depersonalization of the individual, the vision
in motion-all of these sensations that so incisively describe city life
are realized by Leger here. The painting has a consciously modern
note, for Leger was highly sensitive to the images and rhythms of
urban life. He attempted to transpose those sensory impressions
directly and immediately onto his canvas.13
Although Ballet mecaniqueis obviously not a city film, Lawder argues that
it attempts to elicit the same dynamic perceptual experience from the spectator as The City. As he puts it, "Contrast is both the life blood and the binding
force of Ballet mecanique.The film is composed not from separate shots, which
link to each other as in most films, but from disparate ones which clash and
collide."14 And he links the putative centrality of perceptual dynamism in the
film created through editing to the concerns and strategies of Leger's painting
as a whole:
He sought to create in film the same discontinuous, fragmented, kaleidoscopic world that his paintings [describe].... The pulsating energies
of modern urban life, its rhythms and its forms ... all can be felt in
Ballet mecanique.[This] film is a spectacle in constant movement... a
13.
14.
Standish D. Lawder, The CubistCinema(New York:New York University Press, 1975), p. 72.
Ibid., p. 166.
41
The Avant-Garde and the "NewSpirit"
hard, intense, and vitally alive man-made environment, like the city,
like [Leger's] painting The City.15
Further evidence for this reading is found by interpreters such as Lawder in
Leger's close postwar relationship to the poet Cendrars, and more specifically
in the way in which Cendrars's ideas about the cinema-first developed while
working for the director Abel Gance on the shoot of J'accusein 1918-influenced
Leger. Cendrars's book on the cinema, L'ABC du cinema, published in 1918, is
seen as a direct influence both on Leger's painting and on Ballet mecanique. In
this book, Cendrars focuses on those cinematic techniques that seem to parallel
most closely the simultanism of his poetry: editing and the close-up. He celebrates
in particular the capacity of these techniques to fragment space and time,
and-especially
through rapid editing-to
produce an overwhelming and
of
As
he puts it, "A hundred worlds, a
visual
exhilarating
experience
dynamism.
thousand movements, a million dramas simultaneously enter the range of the eye
15.
Ibid., p. 167.
Leger.The City. 1919. ? ArtistsRights
Paris.
Society(ARS),New York/ADAGP,
42
OCTOBER
with which cinema has endowed man."16 Leger's art of the immediate postwar
period, in particular his illustrations for Cendrars's poemJ'ai Tue,is said to reflect
this influence by evincing an even greater degree than before of both spatiotemporal
fragmentation and the painterly equivalent of the close-up, namely, the isolation
and fragmentation of objects. And from this aesthetic debt to Cendrars, it is a
short leap to the claim that Ballet mecanique,under the influence of Cendrars's
basically simultanist conception of the cinema, also uses editing and the close-up
to fragment objects and disruptively and rapidly cut from shot to shot, creating an
effect of perceptual dynamism for the spectator.
Finally, several statements from Leger's writings of the period, both on his
film and his art in general, are marshaled to support this reading. In 1924, for
example, during the period in which he was completing Ballet mecanique,Leger
writes in an article for his dealer Leonce Rosenberg's magazine, The Bulletin de
l EffortModerne:
Life rolls by at such a speed that everything becomes mobile. The
rhythm is so dynamic that a "slice of life" seen from a caf6 terrace is a
spectacle. The most diverse elements collide and jostle one another
there. The interplay of contrasts is so violent that there is always
exaggeration in the effect you glimpse.17
And, as Lawder is keen to point out, in his unpublished preparatory notes for
Ballet mecanique,Leger summarized the design of his film as follows: "Everything is
a constant opposition of violent contrasts."18
Thus, we have the standard reading of the film, which argues that it is
concerned with a distinct type of radical social transformation in modernity: the
putative change in human perceptual experience of reality brought about by the
increased pace of life attendant upon technological progress, industrialization,
and other forces of modernization. Ballet mecanique,it is argued, instantiates this
specifically modern perceptual experience of reality, one of conflict, fragmentation,
and dynamism. And this reading, originating in Lawder's work, is still very
influential. For example, it is repeated almost verbatim in a catalogue essay from
1994 by Dorothy Kosinski.19
There is, however, another plausible reading of the film's concern with
revolutionary social transformation, one which, to my knowledge, has never
been systematically articulated, but which is nevertheless present in Lawder's
16.
Blaise Cendrars, Modernitiesand Other Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992),
p. 25.
17.
Leger, "The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle" (1924), in Functions of
Painting, p. 35.
18.
Lawder, The CubistCinema,p. 166.
19.
See Dorothy Kosinski, "Leger, 1911-1924: A Language for the Modern World," in FernandLeger
1911-1924: TheRhythmof ModernLife (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1994).
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
43
reading and others. It concerns the film's relation to the "machine aesthetic"
or "machinism" of the 1920s, associated mainly with Le Corbusier and Ozenfant
in France, but also found elsewhere among the avant-garde in Europe, particularly
in the Soviet Union. Summarizing somewhat crudely and reductively:
According to machinism, society should be fundamentally transformed using
the machine as a blueprint, so as to produce a utopia of order, harmony, control,
and maximum efficiency. Through the literal and figurative mechanization of
life, a new, utopian society should be created. And it is this radical transformation
of society through the mechanization of life, based on an idealized conception
of the machine typical of the 1920s, that Ballet mecaniquecan plausibly be seen
as concerned with.
Most obviously, the film itself contains shots of machines and machine
parts, mass-produced objects manufactured by machines, and an intermittent
mechanical rhythm created by editing as well as movement within the image,
which periodically animates the subjects of the shots with a mechanical beat
regardless of whether they are machines or not. This rhythm also functionsalong with plastic properties such as shape and texture-to
encourage the
to
notice
abstract
similarities
between
the
mechanical
and
nonmechanical
spectator
the
shots
The
of
the
machine
in the film
objects
depict.
apparent centrality
also dovetails with Leger's postwar painting in general. Although he had used
mechanical shapes such as cylinders as plastic elements prior to the war in
paintings such as La femme dans un fauteuil (1913)-therefore famously breaking
with the Cubists' standard use of traditional subjects such as the nude-it is
only after the war that machines and machine parts actually become concrete
subjects of his paintings. And this change is commonly attributed to L6ger's
experiences as a soldier on the front line during the war.
Thus, Ballet mecaniquecan be tied in a loose way to machinism because of
the seeming centrality of the machine in it, as well as the centrality of the
machine in the paintings preceding it. However, it can also be tied to the
machine aesthetic in a more precise way. For although the film does not explicitly
or systematically offer the machine as a blueprint for transforming society, it
nevertheless does make a more substantial gesture toward one component of
the transformation of society envisaged by machinism, namely, the mechanization
of human beings. And it does this in a variety of ways: through the rhythmical
repetition of the facial expressions of Kiki de Montparnasse, which robs her
face of psychological depth and turns it into a pure plastic surface; through the
use of an aperture to isolate her facial features, which has a similar effect;
through the use of editing to rhythmically repeat bodily movement, as in the
famous sequence of the washerwoman climbing a staircase, which again robs
the human body of psychological depth and turns it into a plastic object animated
by a mechanical beat; and through the general emphasis throughout the film on
abstract similarities between mechanical objects and the human face and body,
such as similarities of shape and rhythm.
I
r
's'-
K
Leger.StillsfromBallet mecanique. 1924. Top:Kiki de
Montparnassewith aperture.Bottom:washerwoman.
? ArtistsRightsSociety(ARS),New York/ADAGP,
Paris.
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
45
While in much of the discourse of machinism the mechanization of human
beings remains a mere metaphor-the machine functions as an ideal that human
beings should emulate in their behavior in order to achieve maximum efficiency
and productivity-avant-gardists
sometimes seemed to subscribe to a neoLamarckian belief in the possibility of the literal and rapid evolution of human
beings into machine-like entities. And Leger was no exception, remarking, for
example, in a letter to his dealer Rosenberg in 1922, "The contemporary
environment is clearly (dominated by) the manufactured and 'mechanical' object;
this is slowly subjugating the breasts and curves of woman, fruit, the soft
landscape."20While such remarks by Leger are quite rare, it is certainly plausible
to argue that this view of "the contemporary environment" and its transformative
impact on the human body is instantiated in his postwar nudes and human subjects,
which are highly mechanized and standardized in character, and which lack any
kind of psychological dimension.
Whether or not we take Leger to be subscribing to the neo-Lamarckian view
that human beings will literally evolve into machine-like entities in modernity, it is
clear that the human face and body in Ballet mecaniqueare reduced to plastic
objects, and that the spectator is strongly encouraged by the film to notice
abstract similarities between them and machines. And this seems to indicate the
presence in the film of a distinctly machinist version of the avant-garde commitment
to transforming society, especially that component of machinism that views the
machine as a blueprint for the transformation of human beings themselves.
Further evidence for this can be found in Leger's writings on film from this
period. In his essay from 1922 on Gance's La Roue, for example, he points
approvingly to the way in which, in the first part of the film, "the machine
becomes the leading character, the leading actor,"and that this elevation of the
machine "crushes and eliminates the human object, reduces its interest, pulverizes
it."21And this clearly echoes the views of other artists and filmmakers allied to the
machine aesthetic, including Dziga Vertov, who in exactly the same year-1922is calling for the "[exclusion of] man as a subject for film" and his replacement by
"the poetry of machines." "The machine makes us ashamed of man's inability to
control himself," announces Vertov, articulating the contempt for the human
body typical of the machine aesthetic in its heroic phase.22
Thus, we have a second plausible reading of the film's concern with social
change. Again, this reading can be found in Lawder's seminal work, where he talks
of the mechanization of the human figure in the film.23And there are also traces
of it in the detailed analysis of the film by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
20.
Quoted in Green, Legerand theAvant-Garde,p. 244.
21.
Leger, "A Critical Essay on the Plastic Quality of Abel Gance's Film The Wheel"(1922), in
Functionsof Painting, p. 20.
22.
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye:The Writingsof Dziga Vertov(London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 8.
23.
Lawder, The CubistCinema,p. 150.
46
OCTOBER
in their Film Art textbook, although they are very careful not to go beyond the
modest claim that the film "cues" the spectator to notice abstract similarities
between human beings and machines. As they put it:
[T]he film creates a mechanical dance. Relativelyfew of the many objects
we see in the film are actually machines.... But through juxtaposition
with machines and through visual and temporal rhythms, we are
cued to see even a woman's moving eyes and mouth as being like
machine parts.24
On the aesthetic level, there is a major, fundamental incompatibility
between this reading and the first. For Bordwell and Thompson's reading argues
that the film is designed to encourage the spectator to notice abstract similarities
between shots, rather than to produce the "violent contrasts" between shots that
the first reading postulates as the central perceptual effect of the film.
Without a doubt, both of these readings correctly identify a concern in Ballet
mecaniquewith two distinct types of social change: the putative radical transformation
in human perceptual experience supposedly brought about by the increased pace
of life in modernity, and the significance of the "machine age" for society. But
neither reading tells the full story. For what neither addresses is the natureof this
concern, the attitudeof the film toward these social changes. If one looks carefully,
one finds that this attitude is not the extreme and uncompromising one postulated
by the standard version of the avant-garde, but is instead much more complex.
This complexity becomes visible if we try to resolve the aesthetic incompatibility
between the two readings I have summarized above, as well as consider several types
of new evidence: a) other comments that Leger made about his film and the cinema
as a medium; b) other aspects of the film's design; c) what Leger was saying about
his art in general around 1923-24 when the film was made; d) research on the
post-World War I "call to order" among the French avant-garde published since
Lawder wrote his seminal and highly influential book; and e) Leger's debt to
French film theory of the early 1920s beyond Cendrars, which is very rarely
remarked on by interpreters.25
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, FilmArt (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1997), p. 148.
24.
There is a third reading of the film, recently formalized by William Moritz, which views the film
25.
as Dadaist ("Americans in Paris: Man Ray and Dudley Murphy,"in Loversof Cinema:The FirstAmerican
Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1995]). Moritz argues that Ballet mecanique's"primary filmmakers" were the Americans Dudley Murphy
and Man Ray, not Leger, and that Leger erroneously claimed credit for the film (pp. 119; 126).
According to Moritz, in the majority of the film's footage, which "originated with Man Ray and
Murphy, an ironic spirit pokes Dada fun at the seriousness of Machine Modernism, at Purist and
Futurist utopianism.... Leger loved machines; Ballet mecaniquedoes not" (pp. 128-29). I do not address
this reading here, for it seems highly implausible to me. While it may be the case that Murphy and Ray
had a greater role in the conception of the finished film (as opposed to filming some of its parts) than
has hitherto been acknowledged, and that the film bears traces of their influence, there is a far greater
continuity-in terms of form and iconography-between Leger's art in general and the versions of the
film that survive than there is in the cases of Murphy or Ray, a continuity that bears out the claim for
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
47
II
Let us take the machinist reading first. This reading argues that the
machine is central to Ballet mecaniquein the literal form of shots of machines
and machine parts, and in the more figurative form of the mechanical beat that
periodically animates mechanical and nonmechanical objects alike, as well as
the abstract similarities between machines and nonmechanical objects-such
as the human face and body-which the film foregrounds. However, if we look
closely at Leger's writings from around 1923-24, we find that, although the
machine is obviously a central preoccupation for him, Leger describes it simply
as "raw material" that he uses in the creation of something else that is much
more important. As he puts it in 1923, "The mechanical element is only a means
and not an end. I consider it simply plastic 'raw material,' like the elements of a
landscape or a still life."26The machine is a means to an end for the creation of
something else in his art, according to Leger. It is not an end in itself. And during
this period, the something else that Leger aims to create in his art is what he
refers to most often as "the Beautiful" or, quite simply, "Beauty."The production
of beauty is the central ambition of his art at this time, he repeatedly asserts,
and one place where he believes that beauty occurs often, but certainly not
always, is in what he refers to as "modern" or "useful" objects, which include,
but are not confined to, machines and mass-produced objects. He therefore
states that the goal of his painting is to "obtain the equivalent of the 'beautiful
object' sometimes produced by modern industry."27 Indeed, he views artists
within modernity as being in competition with, and potentially rendered obsolete
by, the beauty of the "modern" or "useful" object:
The situation at the present moment is tragic enough. The artist is "in
competition" with the useful object, which is sometimes beautiful. Or
at least fascinating. He [the artist] must create as well or better.... If
they were always beautiful, there would no longer be any reason for the
Leger's primary authorship. For example, there is the repeated use of close-up, the cinematic
technique most prized by Leger; the depersonalization of the human face and body; the attempt to
replicate the modern, dynamic perceptual experience of reality pointed to by Lawder; the systematic
effort at drawing attention to graphic similarities between mechanical and non-mechanical objects
pointed to by Bordwell and Thompson; and the film's iconography, drawn from Purism. All of these
are Leger's concerns, amply documented in his painting and writing prior to and around the time of
the making of the film. None of these are primary concerns in Murphy's prior output, or in Man
Ray'sDada/Surrealist films of the 1920s. Furthermore, if looked at closely, Moritz's argument rests on little
more than a few statements by Ray and Murphy themselves (why should one believe them any more than
Leger?), and the highly impressionistic claim that the film pokes fun at machines, one that does not
accord with my experience of the film. While the film certainly has an atmosphere ofjoyous celebration, it
does not, to my eyes, poke fun at anything, except perhaps bourgeois taste, which had been a feature of
Leger's art since he pioneered his style of "dynamicdivisionism"from 1910 onward.
26.
Leger, "Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life" (1923), in Functionsof Painting, p. 24.
27.
Leger, "Notes on the Mechanical Element" (1923), in Functionsof Painting, p. 28.
OCTOBER
48
role of the artist to exist.... I repeat, in the face of these objects, the
artist's situation is often disturbing.28
Thus, for Leger in 1923, the year he begins to make Ballet mecanique,the
production of beauty is the major stated ambition of his art, and beauty is often
found for him in "modern" or "useful" objects, including machines, with which
the artist is in competition.
Now, there is a great deal one can say about Leger's concept of beauty, in part
due to the imprecision with which he defines it, and in part due to its complex origins and genesis. However, for the sake of brevity, I will point to only those features
that are of relevance to the machinist reading of Balletmecaniqueunder discussion.
First, Leger during this period defines beauty both in reality and in his art
in, roughly speaking, a classical fashion as "geometrical order," in which the plastic
properties of objects are internally and externally balanced into harmonious,
ordered relationships. As he puts it:
A picture organized, orchestrated, like a musical score, has geometric
necessities exactly the same as those of every objective human creation
(commercial or industrial achievement). There are the weight of masses,
the relationship of lines, the balance of colors. All the things that
require an absolute order.29
And what is beautiful about many "modern" or "useful" objects, for which Leger's
art tries to find a competitive "equivalent," is precisely their classical qualities,
their order, balance, and harmony.
The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute
orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionably influential;
they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles,
farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the "beautiful
object"; it is undeniable.30
Second, we can recognize in Leger's embrace of a broadly classical ideal of
beauty during this period the influence of the turn toward classicism by the French
avant-garde in general in the post-World War I years, the so-called "call to order"
that I mentioned earlier. While this "call to order" and embrace of classicism was a
complex phenomenon that defies a simple summation, Christopher Green has
concluded that its principle effect on Leger was that, from about 1920 onward,
"Leger'sview of what was essential to reality in moder life gave a central importance
to the qualities of precision, economy, and equilibrium."31And it is these classical
qualities that scholars such as Green see as being instantiated in the balance of hori28.
29.
30.
31.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 28.
Leger, "Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life" (1923), p. 24.
Green, Legerand theAvant-Garde,p. 211.
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zontals and verticals in paintings from 1921 onward, such as ThreeWomen,in sharp
contrast to the fragmentation and conflict of paintings prior to 1920, such as TheCity.
Third, in line with classical conceptions of beauty more generally, Leger
argues that the beauty he is trying to produce in his art is not specific to modernity,
but is a universal, transhistorical, human constant. Again in 1924, he says,
We are not now confronting the phenomenon of a new order, properly
speaking; it is simply one architecturalmanifestation like others.... Greek
art made horizontal lines dominant. It influenced the entire French
seventeenth century. Romanesque art emphasized vertical lines....
One can assert this: a machine or machine-made object can be beautiful
when the relationship of lines describing its volumes is balanced in an
order equivalent to that of earlier architectures.32
In other words, what is beautiful for Leger about "modern" or "useful"objects-a
beauty he attempted to instantiate in his art-is fundamentally continuous with
beauty in previous epochs. We should not conclude from this that he did not
think there was something significantly different about modernity from previous
epochs, for he argues repeatedly that "modern man lives more and more in a
predominantly geometric order."33However, he did not see this "geometric order"
itself as anything radically new-merely its intensity and omnipresence was new.
Fourth, while this broadly classical ideal of beauty is often embodied for
Leger in the machine, it also transcends the machine to include a variety of
32.
Leger, "The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist" (1924),
in Functionsof Painting, p. 53.
33.
Ibid., p. 52.
50
OCTOBER
objects in everyday life that exemplify it. As Leger puts it in 1924, "The Beautiful
is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans in the white
walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official
museums."34And he is very careful to insist, again in 1924, that beauty and the
machine are by no means co-extensive:
[T] he more the car has fulfilled its functional ends, the more beautiful it
has become. That is, in the beginning, when vertical lines dominated its
form ... the automobile was ugly.... When, because of the necessity for
speed, the car was lowered and elongated ... it [became] beautiful. This
evidence of the relationship between the beauty and utility of the car
does not mean that perfect utility automatically leads to perfect beauty; I
deny it until there is a conclusive demonstration to the contrary.35
Thus, it seems clear that Leger's primary artistic ambition at the time he
made Ballet mecaniquewas to produce beauty, using the machine as one type of
"raw material"; that his conception of beauty was, broadly speaking, a classical
one; and that beauty and the machine were overlapping, but separate, concepts
in his theory and painting. And there is ample evidence to support the argument
that Leger extended all of this into his film practice. First, if we look carefully
at what Leger liked so much about La Roue-and, if you recall, it is his remarks
about La Roue that can be used to support the machinist reading that argues for
the centrality of the machine in Ballet mecanique-it is not the centrality of the
machine per se that he celebrates, but its instantiation of a classical ideal of beauty:
You will see [in La Roue] moving images presented like a picture, centered
on the screen with a judicious range in the balanceof still and moving
parts (the contrast of effects); a still figure on a machine that is moving,
a modulated hand in contrast to a geometric mass, circular forms,
abstract forms, the interplayof curves and straight lines (contrasts of
lines), dazzling, wonderful, a moving geometrythat astonishes you.
[My emphasis.]36
Second, Ballet mecaniquedepicts many "modern" and "useful" objects, of
which only some are machines or machine parts. It also depicts hats, bottles,
kitchen utensils, words, abstract shapes such as circles, and much else. While most
of these objects are not machines, arguably what nearly all of them have in common
are classical qualities: their shapes are highly geometrical and symmetrical; they are
often organized into ordered, balanced patterns, and so on.
Third, it is possible to interpret the way in which the film consistently
foregrounds the abstract similarities between these objects not as an attempt to
34.
Ibid., pp. 52-53.
35.
Ibid., pp. 53-54.
36.
Leger, "A Critical Essay on the Plastic Quality of Abel Gance's Film The Wheel"(1922), in
Functionsof Painting, p. 22.
Leger.StillsfromBallet mecanique. 1924.
Non-mechanicalobjectsin film. ? ArtistsRights
Paris.
Society(ARS),New York/ADAGP,
52
OCTOBER
point to the resemblances nonmechanical objects (such as the human face and
body) bear to machines, as the machinist reading argues, but as an effort to
emphasize what all of these objects have in common, namely, the classical ideal of
beauty to which Leger subscribed at the time. Evidence for this emerges if we
address Leger's initially perplexing claim about his film that it is, in effect, not an
abstract film at all. Scholars such as Bordwell and Thomspon view the film as a
paradigmatic example of an abstract film, and they employ it as such in their Film
Art textbook by examining in detail the various ways it encourages the spectator to
notice abstract similarities between objects in different shots. And yet, Leger
emphatically stated about his film, "Figures, fragments of figures, mechanical
fragments, metals, manufactured objects ... objective, realist, and in no way
abstract."37What are we to make of this statement?
In part, as Kristin Thompson has pointed out to me, it is probably the case
that Leger simply meant that his film is not "abstract"in the sense that, say, Hans
Richter and Victor Eggeling's films are abstract. In other words, unlike their films,
or the paintings of a Kandinsky or a Mondrian, Ballet mecaniqueis not concerned
with the Neoplatonic depiction of spiritual or metaphysical truths behind
appearances.38 However, there is a second sense in which the film can be
understood as "in no way abstract" that is hinted at in the manner in which the
quotation above lists some of the concrete objects depicted in Ballet mecanique,as
opposed to their abstract similarities to each other.
One of the things that readers of Leger might notice in his remarks on film
in general is the extent to which, above all other cinematic techniques (including
editing, which he hardly ever mentions), Leger privileged and emphasized the
close-up and its transformative power. For example, in his retrospective notes on
Ballet mecanique,he remarked, "I used the close-up, which is the only cinematographic invention."39 And in his March 1923 reply to Rene Clair's enquetein the
journal Film, he observed, "[The cinema] will be everything... when filmmakers
develop the consequences of the close-up, which is the cinematic architecture of
the future."40By themselves, neither of these quotations should surprise us too
much, for as we know from Lawder's research, Leger was indebted to Cendrars's
book L'ABD du cinema, in which the close-up, along with editing, is singled out
repeatedly. However, following the passage just quoted from Film, Leger goes on to
say of the power of the close-up, "A detail of an object transformed into an absolute
whole is personified when projected in large dimensions; a portion of a human being
is personified when projected in large dimensions."41And in his remarks on Ballet
37.
Quoted in Kosinski, "Leger, 1911-1924," p. 24.
38.
On Neoplatonism in Kandinsky and Mondrian, see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoricof Purity:
EssentialistTheoryand the Advent of AbstractPainting (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
39.
Leger, "BalletMecanique"(ca. 1924), in Functionsof Painting, p. 50.
40.
Quoted in Rene Clair, Cinema Yesterdayand Today(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1972),
p. 20.
41.
Ibid., p. 20.
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
53
mecanique,he continues, "Fragments of objects were also useful; by isolating a
thing you give it a personality."42
The common word here, of course, is "personality" and "personified," and
in his use of this word, and in his repeated linking of it as an effect to the close-up,
we can surely detect the influence of the film theory of one of the most wellknown theorists of the period, Jean Epstein. Epstein, by 1923, was an acquaintance
of Leger's, and had published a text by Leger in his journal Promenoirin Lyons.
Leger knew Epstein's works Bonjour Cinema and La poesie d'aujourd'hui, and in
March 1923 named him, along with Gance and Cendrars, as one of the most
important figures in the French cinema. Epstein's basic, and frankly mystical,
argument about the close-up in the early 1920s was that it, along with movement,
endowed objects with a "personality," a "soul," a "life," thereby dramatically
intensifying the perceptual and emotional impact they have on the spectator.
And it is this argument to which Leger was probably alluding, I believe, in the
remarks I have cited.
It is impossible to know how far Leger subscribed to Epstein's theory, or
indeed how much he understood it, for he does not spell out his use of the word
"personality."However, I think it is a plausible conjecture that he believed, following
Epstein and other early French film theorists who held similar views, that by using
the close-up in Ballet mecaniqueand by endowing the objects he depicted in each
shot with movement, he would thereby grant these objects an anthropomorphic
"personality."For not only does Ballet mecaniqueencourage the spectator to notice
abstract similarities between objects, it also makes extensive use of the close-upindeed, almost every shot is a close-up. And, of course, almost every object
depicted in the film is endowed with movement of some kind.
This debt to Epstein's film theory suggests that Leger was not merely
concerned with drawing the spectator's attention to the abstract similarities
between objects. Rather, the consistent use in the film of the close-up and
movement suggests that-under the influence of Epstein's theory of the power of
these techniques-he was equally concerned with intensifying the perceptual and
emotional impact on the spectator of the concreteobjects themselves, independently
of their abstract similarities to each other. And, of course, many of the objects in
the film are not machines. My guess is that Leger wanted to interest the spectator
in all of these concrete objects-and not just machines or their abstract similarities
to each other-because,
as I have already suggested, during this period his
was
the
primary goal
production of a classical ideal of beauty. While he certainly
believed that most machines instantiated this ideal, he also thought that many
other objects, such as hats, bottles, and indeed the human face, did so as well. By
endowing these objects with movement and shooting them in close-up in Ballet
mecanique,Leger followed Epstein in assuming, I think, that they would gain an
anthropomorphic personality, thereby intensifying the perceptual and emotional
42.
Leger, "BalletMecanique"(ca. 1924), p. 50.
OCTOBER
54
impact on the spectator of the classical beauty he believed them all to possess.
Whether or not the close-up in combination with movement actually achieves
such an effect, their consistent use in the film seems to point to Leger's concern
to interest the spectator in a number of concrete objects, not just machines or
abstract similarities.43
What can we conclude from all of this? I think it is reasonable to argue
that Leger's attitude in Ballet mecaniqueto the "machine age" was much more
complex than one of extreme and uncompromising commitment. Leger's primary
artistic ambition during the period he made Ballet mecanique,it seems, was the
representation of a classical ideal of beauty that he found all around him in the
present,rather than an unconditional embrace of the machine as a blueprint for
a future utopia. While he believed that this ideal of beauty was more intense
and omnipresent in modernity than in previous epochs, it appears he did not
think that it was anything radically new, instead seeing it as fundamentally continuous with previous epochs. And while he thought that the machine often
exemplified this ideal, he saw the machine as just one type of object among
many others to do so. Thus, he employed many "modern" or "useful" objects in
his film rather than just machines, nearly all of which arguably exemplify his
classical ideal of beauty. And he attempted, again arguably, to foreground this
ideal both by encouraging the spectator to notice the abstract similarities
between all these objects, and-under the influence of Epstein's theory-by
trying to intensify the perceptual and emotional impact of their beauty on the
spectator through the repeated use of the close-up and movement.
III
I turn now to the standard reading of Ballet mecanique,which argues that the
film instantiates the dynamic perceptual experience of reality putatively brought
about by the increased pace of modern life. Already it should be apparent from
what I have said that this reading contrasts strongly with Leger's pursuit of a
classical ideal of beauty in the period in which he made Ballet mecanique. In
marked contradistinction to the distinctively modern, dynamic, fragmented,
unstable perceptual flux susceptible to constant rupture and violent transition
43.
Also, the fact that Leger uses the word "personality" in relation to the machine should warn
us about the complexity of the role the machine plays in his artistic practice. For, far from Ballet
mecanique functioning as a blueprint for the transformation of human beings into machine-like
is using the close-up and movement in order to ascribe a
entities, in it-if I am right-Leger
human or anthropomorphic quality, namely "personality," to machines. This is a speculative claim
that requires more research, and I therefore will not pursue it here, but it is almost as if he believed
that by endowing machines and other modern objects with a human property such as a "personality,"
he would thereby make them more attractive to human spectators. And if this is the case, he had
much in common with other machinists of his generation, as I have tried to show in the case of
Vertov. See my "Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera,"October89 (Summer
1999).
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
55
emphasized by Lawder and others, Leger, according to research published after
Lawder's influential book, from 1920 onward pursued "the qualities of precision,
economy, and equilibrium" associated with the classical, transhistorical ideal of
beauty, as is evident in his writings and in the balance of horizontals and verticals in
his paintings from 1921 onward.
However, Leger's remarks from this period contrast even more strongly
with the standard reading of the film than this new research suggests. In a text
from 1924 (the year he finished Ballet mecanique),titled "The Spectacle: Light,
Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle," we find Leger repeatedly criticizing
the dynamic perceptual experience of reality supposedly characteristic of
modernity as harmful to human beings. For example, he claims, "The visual
world of a large modern city, that vast spectacle that I spoke of in the beginning, is
badly orchestrated; in fact, not orchestrated at all. The intensity of the street
shatters our nerves and drives us crazy."44And again: "As long as the economic
revolution does not give man the hoped for new equilibrium, as long as he is a
victim of the machine instead of being its beneficiary, we will witness that daily
phenomenon of people hurrying and scrambling to go to work, to eat, who at
night rush to a spectacle in order to try to find distraction from their daily
exhaustion."45 And again: "The hypertension of contemporary life, its daily
assault on the nerves, is due at least forty percent to the overdynamic exterior
environment in which we are obliged to live."46
In 1924, therefore, the perceptual experience of dynamism associated by
so many avant-gardistswith modern life is an object of criticism in Leger's writings.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, he views the classical ideal of beauty, with its qualities
of harmony and order, as the perfect antidote or cure for the disease of this
quintessentially modern perceptual experience. "If the spectacle offers intensity,
a street, a city, a factory ought to offer an obvious plastic serenity," he claims.
"Let's organize exterior life in its domain: form, color, light.... A society without
frenzy, calm, ordered, knowing how to live naturally within the Beautiful without
exclamation or romanticism."47
Obviously, these remarks, coming in the same year as Leger is completing
Ballet mecanique,give us good reason to question the standard reading of the
film by Lawder and others, which claims that Leger is trying to instantiate in
Ballet mecaniquethe very dynamic perceptual experience that, in the extracts I
have just cited, he is criticizing as having a deleterious effect on human beings.
But there is also evidence available from Leger's unpublished notes on the film
to make us doubt this reading, evidence that Lawder and others ignore. For
sometimes, far from emphasizing dissonance, rupture, and conflict, Leger
44.
45.
46.
47.
Leger, "The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle" (1924), p. 46.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., p. 47.
Leger.StillsfromBallet mecanique.
1924. ?Artists RightsSociety(ARS),
Paris.
New York/ADAGP,
TheAvant-Gardeand the "NewSpirit"
57
writes of the classical qualities of unity and similarity and the desire to avoid
fragmentation in his film. For example: "Each of the parts [of the film] has its
own unity due to the similarity of clusters of object-images which are visually
alike or of the same material. That was the goal of construction and it prevents
the fragmentation of the film."48And we also have Bordwell and Thompson's
detailed analysis, which-although
needing perhaps to be qualified in the light
of Leger's claim that his film is not an abstract film-nevertheless convincingly
shows that the film does encourage the spectator to notice abstract similarities
between objects in the shots of the film, once again pointing to the pull toward
similarity in the film rather than difference and conflict.
Nevertheless, there are clearly places in Ballet mecaniquethat conform to
the standard reading of Lawder and others, and that are very dynamic and
hard for the spectator to synthesize into ordered relations of similarity. And
there are other places in Leger's unpublished preparatory notes for the film
where he clearly points toward his desire to create conflict and dissonance,
such as when he talks of a "constant opposition of violent contrasts" in the
film. Thus, we seem to be left with two potentially incompatible readings of the
aesthetics of the film, both of which are sanctioned by elements of the design
of the film itself and remarks Leger made about his film. Can this incompatibility
be resolved?
One of Leger's published statements on the film seems to indicate that it
can be. For he says, "Contrasting objects, slow and rapid passages, rest and
intensity--the film was constructed on that,"49a statement that seems to suggest
that there is a deliberate push and pull between "rest" and "intensity" in the
film; that the film is ultimately a mixture of what Leger calls the "intensity of
the street [that] shatters our nerves and drives us crazy,"which he sees as characteristic of modern perceptual experience, and the "calm" order of "the Beautiful,"
the classical ideal, which in 1924 he sees as the antidote or cure for this intensity.
However, if this is the case, then once again Leger's attitude toward social
change in Ballet mecaniqueemerges as a complex one. For although, following
the standard reading, the film does at least partially instantiate the new,
dynamic perceptual experience of reality associated by avant-gardists with
modernity, it certainly does not do so in order to embrace this change unequivocally. Rather, it does so in order to offer an antidote, a cure for this perceptual
experience in the form of a transhistorical classical ideal of beauty that is manifested
in machines, various other objects, and the human face and figure, their
impact intensified by drawing attention to their abstract similarities as well as
use of the close-up and movement. Thus, once again we find that Ballet
mecanique'sstance toward the transformation of society is not one of extreme,
uncompromising commitment.
48.
49.
Lawder, The CubistCinema,p. 131.
Leger, "Ballet Mecanique" (ca. 1924), p. 50.
LegerStillfromBallet mecanique. 1924. ? Artists
Paris.
RightsSociety(ARS),New York/ADAGP,
In this paper, I have tried to show that the attitude toward fundamental
social change in Ballet mecaniqueis more complex than readings of the film to
date have suggested. The important question, I think, is to what extent an
is typical of the European avant-garde
avant-garde film such as Ballet m&canique
of the 1910s and 1920s, and to what extent it is an exception. Increasingly, I
have a hunch, following revisionists in art history, that it is typical of avantgarde film of the period, and that, beneath the avant-garde's own rhetoric,
there was usually a much more ambivalent, contradictory, sophisticated, and
nuanced attitude to radical social transformation than the standard version
and the avant-garde's own rhetoric acknowledges.