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This film is a very interesting short. To fully understand it you have to put your self in a mindset of someone in the 1920's when machines were starting to do jobs that humans typically did, were we being replaced by our own creations. It's scary and beautiful and shows machines as humanistic and humans as mechanical and visa versa. However, what I found most interesting was the score which was composed when the film was made in the 20's but couldn't be preformed or recorded until today as it requires 16 synchronized player pianos. This score was well worth the wait, it is one of the most interesting beautiful and shocking pieces of music I have ever heard. If the idea of music written for xylophones, sirens, a piano, 4 percussionists, an airplane propeller, buzzers, and the aforementioned player pianos intrigues you then you should hear the score however possible.

Note: the score of which I'm referring isn't on all versions of this film, as it was not recorded as intended until 1999 so make sure you see this film with the music you were supposed to see it with or you will be sorely missing out.

1924. While everyone else is screwing with "feature" films with subtitles and storylines, along comes Ballet Mecanique. A fifteen minute experimental masterpiece, that walks the fine line of boredom/pointlessness and excitement/entertainment. This particular film was showing in the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, and was a visual treat playing in the same section as the Picaso.

Leger and Murphy used magic and early optical illusions, such as looping segments and split screens. The repetitive movements of the steel machines, match those of the live action people doing work, or even the comical puppet like figure that dances across the screen to create a mechanical ballet. Be it mechanical movements of humans, or mechanical movements of machines. Something tells me I should make a parallel between the man-machine imagery and the 70's electronic German godfathers, Kraftwerk. It's the Europeans I tell ya...they bring us all the best art as entertainment. Every image, from the smiling girl, to the numbered cards all serve a purpose in the grande scheme of Ballet Mecanique.

I really encourage anybody in the Toronto area, or anyone visiting Toronto, to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario to check out Ballet Mecanique. It's on a continual loop. I could have stayed watching it all day. Very spellbinding.

This excellent surrealist short is a highly imaginative montage of images of people interspersed with machinery. It doesn't have any narrative whatsoever; instead it concentrates on presenting images in a variety of interesting ways. It's more about one central idea – the connection between man and his machines – being expanded on and expressed through an avant-garde art film; in this case via the styles of Surrealism and Dada. The steady pace mimics the mechanised tempo of the machinery depicted in the film. The images themselves are highly imaginative, incorporating a variety of camera trickery and optical illusions, coupled with repeated shots, way before Andy Warhol had similar ideas. It's overall, a very beautiful and compelling presentation. For anybody at all interested in 1920's art films, this is a must. It's well worth 15 minutes of your time.

I was lucky enough to see 'Ballet Mécanique' some eight months ago at a screening of Dadaist films which included work by the likes of Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, and this stood out as being the highlight of the programme.

Certainly now one of my favourite films, Léger's vision came about as close to the ideal of synaesthesia as anyone has ever achieved - the visuals are so synchronised with the soundtrack that the filmic experience takes on an entirely new dimension, completely mesmerising the viewer.

Such is 'Ballet Mécanique' that words can do it little justice - the title alone perhaps best describes it. If you get the chance to view this rather obscure masterpiece, make sure you do.

Since the beginning of the invention of cinema, Europe was a good place for the most innovative filmmakers to do their work, crazed youngsters who weren't satisfied with conventional film narratives, so they needed to try new and avant-garde film experiments full of images too bizarre and incomprehensible for a conservative German count. Many times these films were influenced or had connections with other Arts, as is the case with "Ballet Mécanique" (1924), a milestone in avant-garde silent film which is influenced by cubism and directed by a painter, Herr Fernand Léger.

The film is an unconventional and unique film experience, a kind of an essay about movement, in which whirling, dazzling galleries of machines images ( pistons, gears ) and deconstructing humans ( female cubist portraits, syncopated images of different persons ) are intertwined , composing together a bizarre, surreal symphony of motion, an extravagant and experimental kaleidoscope. Such avant-garde madness wasn't exclusive to Europe because Herr Léger had the help of two Amerikan madmen, the technical assistance of Herr Dudley Murphy, director and producer and the founder of the New York Dada movement and Herr Man Ray photographer, painter and avant-garde filmmaker, who did the cinematography.

Obviously this German count is accustomed to watch classical and conventional ballets as for example Herr Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" full of elegant movements as "pas de deux", "plié", "sautés"… so the first time that this Herr Graf watched Herr Léger's "Ballet Mécanique" with its organized and meaningless symphonic chaos, the soirée at the Schloss theatre was left in a state of absolute shock. Fortunately many years have passed since then and this Herr Von had the chance to know and watch more bizarre avant-garde silent films, varied and unclassifiable oeuvres that belonged to strange and different cultural movements of the last century so the second time that "Ballet Mécanique" was shown in the Schloss theatre and with such background information digested, this German count still couldn't understand the damn thing… the same thing happened the third, the forth, the fifth time…

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must dance a•"pas de deux" with the Schloss' boiler.

French abstract painter Fernand Leger was swept up in the first month of The Great War when France was being overrun by the Germans in August 1914. Spending two years on the front, he almost died in Verdun during a mustard gas attack. Leger had a lasting image of the mechanics of the war during his convalescence in the hospital, describing "I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight, 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." After the war Leger became fixated by mechanical images, with his paintings dominated by tubular and machine-like forms. Once his fame spread as a canvass artist, he became intrigued with how cinema could give his art an extra dimension. When asked to design a movie set for a laboratory sequence in director Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 'L'Inhumaine,' Leger immediately embarked on an experimental short film with photographer/artist Man Ray. His effort produced September 1924's "Ballet Mecanique (Mechanical Ballet)." Filmmaker Dudley Murphy, more familiar with the technology of movie producing, assisted Leger on his project, now considered a masterpiece in experimental film.

Embracing Cubist and Dada aesthetics, Leger took over 300 shots to compress his 15-minute film into a collage of images, live action and others abstractions of lights and lines. The beauty of "Ballet Mecanique" is that individuals are able to arrive at their own personal interpretations of the film's meanings. The juxtapositions of the mechanical cylinders with an old woman carrying a large bag repeatedly up stairs in a loop-edited sequence reflects for some viewers that mechanical inventions are replacing age-old human manual labor for efficiency. The reoccurring Cubist images of Charlie Chaplin are scattered throughout the program.

A special musical score by composer George Antheil premiered two years after the film was released in a June 1926 Paris theater. The cacophonous music stirred up the passions of some viewers at its opening, causing fights between admirers and detractors of Leger's movie in the street after the show.

I would not recommend this film to anyone not interested in the cubist painter Leger, or in the dada and surrealist films of the 1920s. Fascinating for its primitive use of montage and eye-line match, the film is just an experiment with different rhythms and images. Your experience may differ grandly depending on the soundtrack that accompanies it. Most videotapes produced of the film have dinky little organ melodies that really take away from the ballet-like beauty of movement that Leger was going for. In the end, the film's value lies in its historical and fine art historical importance.

If you want to feel depressed and annoyed, watch this short film.

This is a remarkably groundbreaking film, and an extraordinary work, but before you hunt it up and watch it, there is one thing you should be warned about. If you're migraine-prone, or seizure prone, *don't.* There are a lot of flashing lights and swirling images, and the entire thing reminds me of the sorts of dreams I'd often have, as a child, when I had a high fever. Which isn't *bad,* at all, unless you're like members of my family and even seeing images of that nature can trigger a migraine (or a seizure!) This is just something to bear in mind before you begin watching, because while the film's not *intended* to make you feel comfortable, for some people the discomfort level could actually intrude on their health.

George Antheil's music for 'Ballet Mecanique' appears to be one of those artistic works that provoked audiences to violence. The original orchestration included such unorthodox musical instruments as a typewriter and an aeroplane motor! Reportedly, during the premiere of Antheil's music, the audience broke out laughing when a man in the stalls raised his cane with his handkerchief tied to it ... as the white flag of surrender.

I've never enjoyed the paintings of Fernand Leger. In this film, he does some stop-action animation with a cut-out puppet that crudely resembles Chaplin's Little Tramp character. This must have been somewhat confusing for French and Belgian audiences in 1924. In its original release, this film's French title was "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique" ... referring to showman Andre Charlot, who financed this film's French distribution. But in France, Chaplin's Little Tramp character was also known as Charlot ... so the presence of that puppet in this movie must have seemed a cheat: an attempt to advertise a 'Chaplin' movie that doesn't actually have Chaplin in it.

Besides that puppet, we get a lot of brief film clips of mundane objects photographed in unusual ways: often through prism lenses that multiply and distort the image. There's also some extremely crude symbolism here: Leger keeps showing us close-ups of a naught or a zero (from a newspaper headline), and intercutting these with close-ups of an illustration of a horse-collar. He cuts from one to the other, back and forth, until even the thickest viewer will twig the Freudian reference to a piece of female anatomy. (No, that's not my dirty mind: it's really in the movie.) We also see several other numerals in this movie -- some of them mirror-flopped -- but Zero seems to be the one that symbolises the proceedings most effectively.

There's an ongoing theme of swinging and spinning, since most of the moving objects in this movie are either oscillating or revolving. All in all, this film is an interesting experiment but it would have been more effective at shorter length. I liked the music better than the images. My rating: just 3 out of 10.

I definitely watched this before. Again a foray towards the artsy Experimental Genre after watching some Michael Snow.

Ballet Mécanique is an early 'art' film that strayed away from narrative sensibilities of the era. Made with a somewhat noted Cubist and an American director , it literally is a mix of stop motion, image presentation and video peppered apparently with visual puns (which definitely flown over my head) presented in repeated and timely manner. In a way, the film represent its title - A Mechanical Ballet.

Its style definitely feels like a precursor to Michael Snow's diatribe with the 'structural' approach he had been doing few decades after BUT this is wilder.

Images repeats itself. Again and again. Its less limited and defiantly has more real estate covered compared to Snow- that especially when you realize that this was only 16 minutes. I also love that it shows INTENT in changes in pacing and visuals that I definitely appreciate. Its approach is much more zany and it goes for more. AND, it also has color, which definitely is ahead of its time.

Highly recommended.

An abstract collage of images that are hurled at the viewer with increasing speed. Your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on your tolerance for the absurd masquerading as high art.

The detail of a mouth, rotating mechanical objects, a girl who goes on a swing in a reverse frame to reality. Human movement is camouflaged in mechanics and imitates cumbersome movements. The forms are alchemically mutated and broken by subversive geometries. The flow of the frames as in a "mechanical Ballet" is the leitmotiv (recurring motif of formal union). All these elements, considering in particular the figure decomposed in cubes with moving stick, create a filmic equivalent of the pictorial movement of Cubism and Cubofuturism.

This is just one of many strange films from the DVD collection "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941" and it's from Disc 3.

In the notes shown on the screen before the film begins, you learn that the original musical score was so complicated and strange that it was not played at the film's original debut. For the film, they were able to recreate the cacophony caused by eight percussionists, two pianists, bells, a siren, airplane propellers and sixteen player pianos! This film is a creation and is made up of a weird collage of machinery, objects and shapes. Being Dadaist, is seeks to defy contemporary ideas of art, provoke the viewer and be anarchic. I liked the cubist intro myself and loved whenever it reappeared (it looked like Chaplin as drawn by a cubist) and thought it rather cute--which would have horrified the folks who made this! I don't think 'cute' is what they were going for with this film! The rest of the film consisted of pulsating objects, upside-down film clips of people, kaleidoscopic effects, random objects that were in primary and secondary colors and, once again, the cubist Chaplin! It all defies adequate description and is not something most folks would like to see very often--but I can respect all the work they put into it.

This one is available online bearing various running-times (the longest being 18 minutes); for the record, the print on Kino's DVD edition within their 2-Disc collection AVANT-GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920s AND '30s is a mere 11 minutes, with the one I eventually settled on for this review clocking at 16!

It is among the more famous efforts in that set and one which boasts the approval (as per the opening scrolling text) of none other than Sergei M. Eisenstein as among the rare(?!) masterpieces of French cinema, while "Charlot" (i.e. Charles Chaplin as he was known in France) is given an early "presents" credit! In retrospect, the Russian master of film montage must have surely appreciated its rapid-fire cutting and industrial aptitude (in keeping with his Communist beliefs). That said, the most lasting image here depicts a chubby woman being repeatedly made to go up and down the stairs.

This comment is on the version with the recreated Antheil score.

There are films that you can experience directly as they penetrate deep. There are films (and other things) you engage with because they help with that, but the experience is still direct and lasting. They are lesser works, and many of then trivial. But over time the aggregation matters. Its a practice. Its a yoga.

And then there are films that may have been one of these in some context, but that context has drained away, eroded somehow. These are schoolroom exercises now. You cannot actually learn the grammar from them because they are immature, regardless of how cutting edge they were. You cannot experience the thrill the original viewers had, the shock, the stretch, the challenge.

But you have to watch them because they were important, and because you'll need to talk to people who learn rather than experience.

It's cubist, and a particular kind of German-influenced reduction based on now discounted notions. It assumes that Cartesian abstraction can be pure, visceral. The score is from a different tradition, one that reduces to ordinarily "pure" phenomenon like machine sounds. These are both bankrupt artistic ideas, silly now. But they are contradictory, and the clash between the two religions is the experience you will find here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Ballet mecanique (1924)

*** (out of 4)

This short is often considered one of the earliest examples of real avant garde filmmaking. It's worth noting that the film is available in the UNSEEN CINEMA collection and that the production notes for this film say that the score that was written for it in 1924 was so difficult that it couldn't be performed at all. In fact, according to the notes, the score wasn't able to be completed until the late 90s when technology was good enough to try and capture the various moods and notes going on with the score. The "visuals" include a wide range of stuff from film clips to puppets to some stop-motion animation. There's no real "story" to talk about, instead we're just given various images that play well against the score as the film moves along both the images and that score grow faster and more intense. You never really know how one might take these avant garde films because many will view them as nothing more than a complete mess and while I think that can often be the case, in special cases, like this one, you can tell there's some passion and effort going into the production. I'm not going to sit here and say that a deep meaning jumped out at me but I did enjoy the experimental music and many of the visuals in front of me. The stuff with the puppet was probably my favorite but I think I'd recommend this film to those who enjoy strange music. The music is certainly the main ingredient here and it's an interesting mix that really adds to the overall experience.