George Antheil's music for 'Ballet Mecanique' appears to be one of those artistic works that provoked audiences to violence. The original orchestration included such unorthodox musical instruments as a typewriter and an aeroplane motor! Reportedly, during the premiere of Antheil's music, the audience broke out laughing when a man in the stalls raised his cane with his handkerchief tied to it ... as the white flag of surrender.
I've never enjoyed the paintings of Fernand Leger. In this film, he does some stop-action animation with a cut-out puppet that crudely resembles Chaplin's Little Tramp character. This must have been somewhat confusing for French and Belgian audiences in 1924. In its original release, this film's French title was "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique" ... referring to showman Andre Charlot, who financed this film's French distribution. But in France, Chaplin's Little Tramp character was also known as Charlot ... so the presence of that puppet in this movie must have seemed a cheat: an attempt to advertise a 'Chaplin' movie that doesn't actually have Chaplin in it.
Besides that puppet, we get a lot of brief film clips of mundane objects photographed in unusual ways: often through prism lenses that multiply and distort the image. There's also some extremely crude symbolism here: Leger keeps showing us close-ups of a naught or a zero (from a newspaper headline), and intercutting these with close-ups of an illustration of a horse-collar. He cuts from one to the other, back and forth, until even the thickest viewer will twig the Freudian reference to a piece of female anatomy. (No, that's not my dirty mind: it's really in the movie.) We also see several other numerals in this movie -- some of them mirror-flopped -- but Zero seems to be the one that symbolises the proceedings most effectively.
There's an ongoing theme of swinging and spinning, since most of the moving objects in this movie are either oscillating or revolving. All in all, this film is an interesting experiment but it would have been more effective at shorter length. I liked the music better than the images. My rating: just 3 out of 10.
I've never enjoyed the paintings of Fernand Leger. In this film, he does some stop-action animation with a cut-out puppet that crudely resembles Chaplin's Little Tramp character. This must have been somewhat confusing for French and Belgian audiences in 1924. In its original release, this film's French title was "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique" ... referring to showman Andre Charlot, who financed this film's French distribution. But in France, Chaplin's Little Tramp character was also known as Charlot ... so the presence of that puppet in this movie must have seemed a cheat: an attempt to advertise a 'Chaplin' movie that doesn't actually have Chaplin in it.
Besides that puppet, we get a lot of brief film clips of mundane objects photographed in unusual ways: often through prism lenses that multiply and distort the image. There's also some extremely crude symbolism here: Leger keeps showing us close-ups of a naught or a zero (from a newspaper headline), and intercutting these with close-ups of an illustration of a horse-collar. He cuts from one to the other, back and forth, until even the thickest viewer will twig the Freudian reference to a piece of female anatomy. (No, that's not my dirty mind: it's really in the movie.) We also see several other numerals in this movie -- some of them mirror-flopped -- but Zero seems to be the one that symbolises the proceedings most effectively.
There's an ongoing theme of swinging and spinning, since most of the moving objects in this movie are either oscillating or revolving. All in all, this film is an interesting experiment but it would have been more effective at shorter length. I liked the music better than the images. My rating: just 3 out of 10.