BALLET MÉCANIQUE
FERNAND LÉGER, 1924
So, a woman climbs a flight of stairs. Then she climbs them again. Then again. And again. That's Ballet mécanique. About twenty minutes. No plot. Nobody to follow. Just whisks, pot lids, gears, bottles, faces, everything moving. Now look at what it does to a kitchen funnel. Slow turn. Lit from the side. Held on screen far too long. It gets the movie-star treatment. That was the trick for Léger. Put a funnel in front of a camera, and suddenly it matters as much as a face. Put a face in front of the same camera, and it starts looking like another piece of machinery. Face, funnel, same amount of love. Léger spent the war surrounded by machines. He came home unable to stop thinking about them. Movies were barely thirty years old, and already everybody thought they knew what they were for. Stories. This one announces itself right on the print: "The first film without a scenario." Léger made it with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy. Man Ray may have helped. People still argue over whose film it really is. Léger's name is the one that stuck. But the plan was clear enough. Make a movie that runs like a machine. Then George Antheil comes in to make the machine audible. Sixteen player pianos. Electric bells. Three airplane propellers. A siren. Small problem. His music lasts thirty minutes. The film doesn't. And nobody could keep sixteen player pianos together. They had built a machine that couldn't run. So the film went one way and the music went another. Antheil premiered the score by itself in Paris in 1926. Half the room thought it was the future. The other half thought it was noise. Ezra Pound waited for a quiet moment, stood up and called everybody idiots, and the argument spilled into the street. Meanwhile, the woman kept climbing those stairs in silence. The film and the music finally ran together. The machines caught up, seventy-five years late.