Formal Play in Ballet Mécanique
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	Narrator: Working at a moment of rich collaboration among the arts, painter Fernand Léger made the short film Ballet Mecanique in 1924 with filmmaker Dudley Murphy to accompany a composition by George Antheil. Like the cubists who broke from realism in order to represent multiple perspectives of depicted objects, Léger made works that were strongly geometric. He was particularly interested in mechanical shapes and saw cinemas dynamism as exemplary of the machine age.
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	Narrator: At various points throughout the film, mechanical images are filmed in motion and moved on- and off- screen by the editing that associates one moving part with the next. But movement is also created when these images are refracted, mirror-like, within the frame itself. These images become part of a rhythmic chain of abstract, unidentifiable moving parts. The suggestion in the film’s title that cinema could be seen as a mechanization of human activity. Like ballet, it is clearly evident in this sequence.
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	Narrator: Léger, like many modernist artists, uses the human figure as an object rather than a subject—as an element like any other in a frame. Here at the beginning of the film, we see the photographic image of a woman swinging.
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	Narrator: We might think of the images that follow as her daydream, but we are also encouraged by the image of a pair of lips to abstract the image of the woman as just one among many in a pattern of shapes and movements.
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	Narrator: In fact, fragmenting images of the modern woman is one of the most notable ways that 1920s avant-garde art explored the connection between the human form and the machine. A striking image of a pair of woman’s lips sharply outlined in lipstick is isolated by a mask over the rest of her face. Intercut with images of a straw hat, the lips smile and relax, clearly representing the objectified female image. We see again in a later sequence how the isolated features of the same woman become a part of the patterns in the film. Here, the woman’s plucked eyebrows echo the curved shape of her eye so that a quick cut that turns her eye upside down goes by almost undetected.
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	Narrator: At another section of the film, a dance of mannequin legs adorned with garters is a delightful visual joke, but at the same time it disturbingly evokes a sense of dismemberment.
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	Narrator: A clue to the formal concerns of Ballet Mecanique lies in the image at the start of the movie of silent film comedian Charlie Chaplin rendered in a fragmented form reminiscent of Léger’s paintings. The title card says the film is presented by “Charlot,” as Chaplin is known in France.
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	Narrator: Towards the end of the film, the image does a little animated dance of its own. Léger pays tribute to Chaplin’s iconic film image in a graphic form. Chaplin’s image is then enfolded into the film’s sequences of everyday objects set in motion, showing the crossover between cinema and other arts during this vibrant period of modernist experimentation.
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