Ballet Mécanique

Fernand Léger, 1924 · Gallery 505 · Floor 5

So. It opens on Charlie Chaplin... Sort of. A cut-out puppet version. Bowler hat floating off his head. A cane. A nose that’s just a line. Then a woman on a swing. Back and forth. And then it goes off. Shapes. Hats. Wine bottles. Lips, smiling, all teeth. Pot lids. Some of it split up like a kaleidoscope. At one point, you catch them filming it in a curved mirror. And a woman with a sack on her shoulder, climbing a flight of stairs. Then climbing them again. Then again. And again. No plot. Just things moving faster than you can keep up. This is Ballet mécanique. Mechanical Ballet. 1924. Fernand Léger made it with an American filmmaker, Dudley Murphy. Léger was a painter. One of the big ones in Paris. He got gassed in the First World War and came home painting people like pipes and pistons. Movies were getting very good at telling stories. These guys brought pot lids. Léger’s pitch: painting had already dumped the story. Why did the movies need one? So, get the camera right up on an ordinary thing, and it gets a personality. The pot lid gets a close-up. A hundred years on, MoMA still calls it one of the most influential experimental films ever made. A young American, George Antheil, wrote music for it. Sixteen player pianos. Plus propellers and a siren. But, nobody could keep sixteen player pianos in time. And the music ran almost twice as long as the film. So the music goes out alone. In Paris, 1926. Some heard the future. Some heard noise. His champion, the poet Ezra Pound, starts yelling at the audience. According to the story, he tells them they’re all idiots. There are reports of fistfights in the street. Over a piece of music. Film and music mostly go their separate ways. For decades. The woman kept climbing. Then, in 2001, a composer named Paul Lehrman puts them together. All sixteen pianos, recorded. By then, Léger and Antheil had both been dead for decades. Neither lived to hear that version.

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