Ballet Mécanique
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ballet Mécanique (1924) is an non-narrative film written and directed by the artist Fernand Léger and filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in a silent version on 24 September 1924 in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
The film features random visuals, disembodied legs and a woman climbing a staircase. There is also the famous gaze by Alice Prin
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Film credit and history
In her book Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card, film historian Susan Delson argues that Murphy was the film's driving force but that Léger was more successful at promoting the film as his own creation. However, after fighting at the front in World War I and spending the year of 1917 in a hospital after being gassed there, Fernand Léger exclusively made the dazzling effects of mechanical technology the subject of his art, and it is clear that he conceived of the film himself.
Léger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on all of his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. As he explained:... I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.The Card Players marked the beginning of his "mechanical period" of which Ballet Mécanique is a part, an artistic technique that combined the dynamic abstraction of constructivism with the absurd and unruly qualities of Dada. We see this trend in the film from beginning to end.
However, a photo of a Dada sculpture with the name Ballet Mécanique had been previously featured in 391, a periodical created and edited by the Dadaist Francis Picabia that first appeared in January 1917, and continued to be published until 1924. But it is not known if Fernand Léger was aware of it or not.
Visual puns
In its original release, the film's French title was "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique" (as seen on the original print), referring to Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character as he was known in France. The image of a Cubist-style paper puppet of Charlot, by Leger, appears several times in the film. It is only the first of many visual puns in the film—a seeming display of the film's sheer visual modernity, as intended by its creators from the get-go.
Ballet Mécanique as a score
George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique (1924) was originally conceived as an accompaniment for the film and was scheduled to be premiered at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik. However before completion, director and composer agreed to go their different ways. The musical work runs close to 30 minutes, while the film is about 19 minutes long.
Antheil's music for Ballet Mécanique became a concert piece, premiered by Antheil himself in Paris in 1926. Antheil assiduously promoted the work, and even engineered his supposed "disappearance" while on a visit to Africa so as to get media attention for a preview concert. The official Paris première in June 1926 was sponsored by an American patroness who at the end of the concert was tossed in a blanket by three baronesses and a duke. The work enraged some of the concert-goers, whose objections were drowned out by the cacophonous music, while others vocally supported the work. After the concert, there were some fights in the street. Antheil tried to replicate this scandal at Carnegie Hall by hiring provocateurs, but they were largely ignored.
Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. In 2000, Paul Lehrman produced a married print of the film. This version of the film was included in the DVD collection Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894–1941 released in October 2005.
As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is Antheil's best known and most enduring work. It remains famous for its radical repetitive style and instrumentation, as well as its storied history. Antheil himself was not a Dadaist, though he had many friends and supporters in that community.
In concert performance, the Ballet Mécanique is not a show of human dancers but of mechanical instruments. Among these, player pianos, airplane propellers, and electric bells stand prominently onstage, moving as machines do, and providing the visual side of the ballet. As the bizarre instrumentation may suggest, this was no ordinary piece of music. It was loud and percussive – a medley of noises, much as the Italian Futurists envisioned new music of the 20th century.
In 1927, Antheil arranged the first part of the Ballet for Welte-Mignon. This piano-roll was performed on 16 July 1927 at the "Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden 1927". Unfortunately, these piano rolls are now thought to be lost.
The original orchestration called for 16 player pianos (or pianolas) in four parts, 2 regular pianos, 3 xylophones, at least 7 electric bells, 3 propellers, siren, 4 bass drums, and 1 tam-tam. As it turned out, there was no way to keep so many pianolas synchronized, so early performances combined the four parts into a single set of pianola rolls and augmented the two human-played pianos with 6 or more additional instruments.
In 1953, Antheil wrote a shortened (and much tamer) version for four pianos, four xylophones, two electric bells, two propellers, timpani, glockenspiel, and other percussion. The original orchestration was first realized in 1992 by Maurice Peress.
In 1999, the University of Massachusetts Lowell Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Jeff Fischer, presented the first performance of the original score (without the film) using 16 player pianos and live players. The player pianos were Yamaha Disklaviers, controlled via MIDI using the Macintosh software program Opcode StudioVision.
In 1986, the film was premiered with a new score by Michael Nyman.
The score and film were successfully combined in 2000 by Paul Lehrman, who used an edited version of the original orchestration in which he used player pianos recorded after the Lowell performance, with the rest of the instruments played electronically. This version is available in the DVD set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894–1941 released in October 2005 and also in the DVD set Bad Boy Made Good, which also contains Lehrman's documentary film about Antheil and the Ballet mécanique, which was released in April 2006. The featured film print is the original version, premiered in Vienna on 24 September 1924 by Frederick Kiesler.
In November 2002, a version of the score for live ensemble (which required further editing, since live players couldn't play it as fast as electronic instruments) was premiered in Columbus, Ohio by an ensemble from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, conducted by Julian Pellicano. The performance, with the newly-realized soundtrack and the 1952 version of Ballet mécanique, was repeated at the Friedberg Concert Hall at Peabody Conservatory on February 17, 2003. This version was then performed a dozen times in Europe by the London Sinfonietta in 2004 and 2005.
In 2005, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC commissioned Lehrman and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR), Eric Singer, director, to create a computer-driven robotic ensemble to play the Ballet mécanique. This installation was at the Gallery from 12 March to 7 May 2006. It was installed in December 2007 at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, FL, and again at 3-Legged Dog in New York City, where it was used to accompany a play about Antheil and Hedy Lamarr, and their invention of spread-spectrum technology, called "Frequency Hopping." During the run of the play, the Léger/Murphy film was shown, with the robotic orchestra performing the score, at two special "after-concerts."
A musical analysis
The Ballet is hard to surmise from just looking at the score—one must hear it to get a real sense of its chaos. It moves frighteningly quickly, up to 32nd notes at tempo (quarter = 152). It sounds like an onslaught of confusing chords, punctuated by random rings, wails, or pauses. The meter rarely stays the same for more than three measures, distracting from the larger form of the music and instead highlighting the driving rhythms. However, the piece is definitely structured in a sonata rondo.
The sonata rondo form follows an [AB] [A'C] [A'’B'’] [Coda] pattern, where A is a first theme, B is a second theme, and C is a middle section loosely related to A and B:
A – Theme 1 starts at the beginning of the piece. It is easily identified by the oscillating melody in the xylophones. It moves through rhythmic and intervallic variations until a bridge into the next theme (measure 38 in the original scoring).
B – Theme 2 (m77) features the pianolas, supported by drums. The melody is mostly built from parallel series of consonant chords, sometimes sounding pentatonic but often making no tonal sense at all. Antheil uses pianolas for things that would be difficult for human players (a 7-note chord at m142, for example).
A' – Xylophones return in triple meter to recall Theme 1 (m187). This is not strictly a repeat of Theme 1 but another variation and development upon it. This section descends into increasing chaos (starting m283) which signals a transition into part C (m328).
C – The xylophones and pianolas play a new tune. They stay in better rhythmic agreement here and give a more ordered feel to this section. The xylophones eventually cut out to make way for a serene pianola passage.
A'’B'’ – The xylophones return (m403) with the theme from the beginning. There are differences from the original AB part, including new bitonal passage (m530) and miniature round (m622) between xylophones and pianolas. The pentatonic melody, hinted in part B, returns (m649) and gets developed in the context of the round.
Coda – A startling change occurs when all instruments cut out except for a lone bell (m1134). This signals the beginning of a very long and thinly textured coda. It alternates between irregular measures of complete silence and pianola with percussion. The measures of silence get longer until the listener begins to wonder whether the piece is already over. Finally, there is a crescendo of pianola, a flurry of percussion and a bang to mark the real ending. The score indicates the last measure of the piece to be ended with the pianos and drums only, but modern performances have the xylophones joining back in and doubling the melody of the pianolas to create a more firm, solid, and recognizable ending.
The mechanics of the ballet
The mechanical pianos keep the tempo strictly at (quarter = 152). All longer rests in the pianola part are notated in 8th rests, as if to suggest the exactness of the instrument. At this rate, the 1920s pianola played 8.5 feet per minute of paper rolls over three rolls. This logistical nightmare has been described by some scholars as being an error, and that Antheil's suggested tempo was actually half that (quarter = 76), but in fact Antheil's 1953 Ballet Mécanique score indicates a tempo of 144–160.
The airplane propellers were actually large electric fans, into which musicians would insert object such as wooden poles or leather straps to create sound, since the fans don't make much noise. In the Paris performances, beginning in June 1926, the fans were pointed up at the ceiling. However, at the Carnegie Hall premiere on 10 April 1927, the fans were positioned to blow into the audience, upsetting the patrons.
Ballet Mécanique as synchronized film
Nevertheless, with respect to the original synchronized film, and despite the quality of last sound performance and its consistent reliability with Antheil's original plans for its concert (made by Lehrman himself and endorsed by the Schirmer publisher for the DVD Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894–1941, 2005), its timing with the film it is still in full debate today.
New points of view offers Ortiz Morales, in his thesis El ballet mécanique y el Synchro-ciné , already in 2008. He refutes all the points of view that have given origin to the realization of Lehrman and proposes other alternatives within what he calls the state of confusion around the film. Among others, the score of 30 minutes and 16 synchronized pianolas so laboriously obtained is not really the original musical idea for the film, but a subsequent expansion of the original idea, which was carried out by Antheil as a spectacular and independent concert, once proved that it could not synchronize its music together with the images of Léger. The true film score must have been much simpler and more precise, and possibly the one that would end up orchestrating in 1953. It argues, therefore, that the problem of original synchronization was never in the 16 synchronized pianolas of the giant score, but the problem with the simple version (for the film) must have been in the device that had to synchronize it mechanically : the Synchro-Ciné of the inventor Charles Delacommune, possibly the first audio-visual mixing table in history and with which it is known that they were desperately trying for a while (as is documented) the material for that film, signed by Léger and Delacommune). According to technical studies on documentation (the apparatus as such was lost in II World War ) , it seems that the synchro-ciné was a synchronizer capable of good audio-video simultaneities in standard measures, but the fleeting and devilish rhythm of the work far exceeded its possibilities: especially the amalgamated ones, of 7 and 5, very used in the work and impossible to obtain with a such precarious device. With a more restrained and square music, they could have been tuned and synchronized mechanically, which was what Léger promised to the press after talking to Delacommune (but before having tried it in practice with the music of Antheil).
This thesis, and the implications that it originates, has been greatly reinforced in 2016 with the publication of the original reconstruction of kinematic synchronism according to it in the so-called Canonical version. This version, made with the collaboration of the Ensemble Modern, and from the few truly reliable and objective data that have reached today, searches through algorithms computer the exact copy of the film and the correct Antheil score, which they both joined together in 1935 (the only time they know that proper 'timing' occurred, according to themselves). Since the various copies that have come to us from the Ballet Mecanique are different from each other (some a lot), because it seems that Léger was, little by little replacing the original images of Man Ray and Dudley Murphy until almost the end of his lifetime. Thus, in each period, a slightly different copy of the Ballet has circulated: no two are alike. That is to say, that the film was going from dadaist to cubist, gradually, which explains, in part, doubts about its ascription to a certain aesthetic.
On the other hand, scholars of the film and of Antheil's music almost unanimously consider most of the previous two paragraphs to be unsupported by any verifiable research, and know that to consider any version of the score to be "canonical" is nonsensical. Antheil never claimed to have created a score that could synchronize with the film, and the two or three performances that he did with the film in the early 1930s used only one of the three pianola rolls that comprise the piece (and the duration of that roll is much shorter than that of the film). There is no earlier, shorter version of the score than the one that Antheil wrote for multiple pianolas, and that runs between 25 and 30 minutes, depending on the tempo (although there are two different versions of it, the pianola parts are identical). Delcommune's invention, whose proper name was the "ciné-pupitre" ("Synchro-ciné" was the name of his company, not the device), while it could be useful for synchronizing to a film a score played by conventional instruments and led by a conductor--it was essentially what we now know as a Teleprompter--there was no possible way it could have been used with pianolas, since it lacked any mechanical linkage between the film projector and the pianola mechanisms. Finally, although Leger did continue to make changes to the film for some time (although not until the end of his life), many of the original images shot by Murphy and, presumably, Man Ray have remained in every version.
Discography (audio)
- "Ballet Mécanique" MusicMasters. Cond. Maurice Peress, 1992. 01612-67094-2
- "Fighting the Waves: Music of George Antheil." Ensemble Moderne, cond. HK Gruber. RCA, 1996.
- "George Antheil: Ballet Mécanique." Boston Modern Orchestra Project, cond. Gil Rose. BMOP/sound, 2013.
- "Ballet Mecanique and Other Works for Player Pianos, Percussion, and Electronics." UMass Lowell Percussion Ensemble, cond. Jeffrey Fischer. Electronic Music Foundation, 2000.
See also
