Ballet mécanique

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, first quarter 2012.

Ballet mécanique (1924), by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, belongs to the Futurist movement. But its artistic filiation does not follow a single path and draws on Cubist, Surrealist, Dadaist and Futurist influences. Ballet mécanique in fact claims kinship above all with the Cubist tendency through its attempt at cinematic collage. Moreover, this film is regarded by its author himself as the “best product of Dadaist cinema”. Finally, the music of the film, a veritable “giant machinery in motion”, combines a truly unheard-of orchestration with a use of noises. George Antheil’s music is conceived to underline the modernity of the film, through the use of a bewildering instrumental ensemble. The sound sources have mechanical and electrical origins: thus one finds an engine and an aeroplane propeller as well as an electric siren. As for the orchestra, it is made up of four player pianos and a chamber orchestra of fifteen percussionists comprising: timpani, Glockenspiel, two xylophones, bells, anvils, etc.