Ballet Mécanique is awesome. Once you finish it, go watch the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.
Virtually all the Unseen Cinema items are striking, and some are downright dazzling. One example is Ballet Mécanique (1924), directed by the French artist Fernand Léger and the American cinéaste Dudley Murphy, who provided many of the movie's playful, collagelike visual ideas. A staple of modernist programs in classrooms and elsewhere, the film contains many seminal Dadaesque images: a woman swooping upside down on a garden swing, a newspaper headline with animated letters, a washerwoman trudging up a staircase that never ends. What's new in the Unseen Cinema presentation is the presence of George Antheil's music, composed for the film in 1924 but never before paired with the movie in a readily available edition — not surprisingly, since Antheil's score calls for an unorthodox orchestra including a siren, three xylophones, numerous electric bells, and three airplane propellers.
After years of viewing Ballet Mécanique in silence, I found it thrilling to see and hear it in a form even more authentic than that experienced by its original Vienna audience some 82 years ago, when the music — too unwieldy to sync up properly with the movie — was ingloriously omitted. Its unprecedented sounds and images remind me why I love exposing students to such audacious, inimitable work. In an age when movies and TV shows are straitjacketed in a tiny number of iron-clad formulas, the obstreperous sights and sounds of a Ballet Mécanique are eruptions of liberating artistic freedom that wake and shake our habit-ridden sensibilities.
Both of the film collections reviewed in this article are available through NetFlix.
