Anémic cinéma

Well, what can one say about this? Seven minutes of spirals and circles and nonsensical sentences or sentence-fragments in French, an experiment in revolution I suppose you could say. Duchamp's only known film as director, obviously a conjunction of formalist exercise and dadaist nonsense. I won't say it wore out its welcome, but I'm also glad it wasn't any longer. Watched on YouTube in an OK copy but most with a real interest in the avant-garde will want to catch it on Kino's excellent "Avant-Garde #1 with other experimental works from the silent and early sound periods including works from Man Ray, Joris Ivens, etc.

Not really "rateable" I think, though I'm doing it anyway...

"Anemic Cinema" is a different sort of Dada film from the 1920's when compared to the work of the surrealists which later followed it. Instead of disturbing, dreamlike imagery which became the trademark of Luis Bunuel, or the creepy, uncomfortable world created by the Quay Brothers, the famous French artist Marcel Duchamp here goes more for the look of a moving painting rather than a film in the repetitive cycle this short follows. The effects of the moving discs called "Rotoreliefs" might question your use of drugs, and as a whole the film takes on the look of a flip-book.

Duchamp's film--not his only one as he apparently made several other versions of the Rotoreliefs after this--depicts many whirling spirals intercut with French text, apparently a series of puns that are incomprehensible if you don't know French. While it creates a good effect for a bunch of cardboard discs, the speed of them really isn't fast and doesn't go for a hypnotic effect like you might expect, and the entire thing seems a little too long like some segments could have been removed; it drags after a bit. Also, the amount of movement itself depends: some spirals create better visual effects than others, and at one point one of the least-moving ones stops entirely. Interesting and eye-catching, but little else.

Well, it's only four or five minutes, so if you can see it do so. Any fan of Duchamp or anyone interested in the experimental films made during the Dada movement in the 1920s would find this fascinating. Others will find it pointless. Non-sensical French phrases are placed on a spinning wheel and inter-cut with neat spiral visual effects. The epitome of Dada and Duchamp's only experience with directing film (to my knowledge.)

And what to think of it I am not sure. Basically it is made up of interchanging rotating spirals and rotating discs with text written on them in French. The text is short and in doesn't add up to much. Except for various kinds of dizziness there is nothing else here than what you can theorize around it.

It is a piece of dada-art where things were put out of context and therefore gains a new meaning or get incomprehensible. One example is Duchamps signed urinal and like that it almost requires to be put in a gallery to get meaning from it.

It is photographed by the great visualist Man Ray, but you cant notice as it is fixed in the same position for the whole duration of the movie (6 minutes).

A mesmeric seven minutes of avant-garde animation in which spiralling patterns alternate with nonsensical prose.