Léger’s ‘Ballet Mécanique’ at Art Museum

The multi-media show in the galleries demonstrates Léger’s involvement with urban life and his interaction with fellow modernists. That exhibit includes a brief clip from Ballet Mécanique, but it’s too short and lacks the avant-garde composer Georges Antheil’s musical score.

The original film used two actors (one of them Léger’s cinematographer partner, Dudley Murphy), a swing, wheels, hats, signs, other objects and cubist renderings of Charlie Chaplin, repeating and looping, backwards and forwards to evoke the cacophony of life in the 1920s, much like many of the Léger paintings in the exhibition. .

Antheil’s equally offbeat score, meanwhile, used pianos, drums, xylophones, tam-tam, bells, airplane propellers and a siren. It’s rhythmically propulsive, mixing jazz and machine-age sounds, with 630 time-signature changes. Since the images in the film are random and Dadaist, there’s no need for music that matches each visual moment (although many of the transitions in the music do coincide quite closely with those in the film).

The bigger problem back in the day was that Antheil’s music and Léger’s film were finished at different times; the film debuted in Vienna in 1924, without Antheil's score. And ultimately the music turned out to be longer than the 16-minute film.

Through the years, attempts were made to match them by trimming the music or by playing it at faster tempi. The current version was produced in 2001, with the music edited, programmed and recorded by Paul Lehrman, using a combination of live recordings and electronic MIDI samples. The film has since toured to 100 museums and film festivals around the world.

Does a 16-minute film deserve such attention? Undoubtedly yes. Ballet Mécanique is so crammed with interesting sounds and images that is seems like a full-lengthy feature. To view it, click here.

To read another review of the Léger exhibit by Jerome Przybylski, click here.

To read another review of the Léger exhibit by Michael Lawrence, click here.