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The Purist Focus: Lgers Theory of the Close-Up
Abstract
This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use
of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Lgers film Ballet mcanique
(1924) and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in
the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Lgers seeing,
in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on
fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology
and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that
subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic human
consequences that were then witnessed in World War One. These
aesthetics of fragmentation are then compared and contrasted with
Purisms post-war reconciliation of man as a cohesive being,
achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics.
This critique is effected through the portmanteau of Ballet
mcanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war
modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive
form. Keywords Lger; Ballet mcanique; Purism; Futurism; Modernism;
Rappel--lordre
Fernand Lgers film Ballet mcanique (1924) - made with the
assistance of the expatriate
American photographer and filmmaker Dudley Murphy - is
characterised, in addition to its
extraordinarily rapid juxtaposition of images, by its use of
close-ups. Most notable amongst the
subjects of those shots is the face of the glorious Kiki de
Montparnasse (Alice Prin) avant-
garde celebrity, model and muse who was at that time the
girlfriend of another American artist
often said to be involved with Lgers project, Man Ray (Emmanuel
Radnitzky). Writing some
time after the production, Lger commented of his new work: I
used the close up, which is the
only cinematographic invention. [1] However, Lgers attention to
Kikis face is not
straightforward: rather, the sequences in which it appears offer
us the face both whole and
fragmented and, in its fragmentation, paralleled with both pure
geometric forms and everyday
objects, as well as with the carved, wooden features of an Uncle
Sam, presumably an attraction
in the Luna Park funfair where a significant part of the films
footage was shot.
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The aesthetics of Ballet mcanique are such that it is not always
easy to reconcile the film to the
rest of Lgers work at the time of its production. (Though it is,
ultimately, a great deal easier to
do so than to explain their fit to the uvres of Murphy and Man
Ray, who are increasingly
credited with a significant effect upon the content and
structure of the film, because the
inconsistencies between the film as a whole and their works, and
ideas, are even greater.) [2]
One of the most extreme differences between Ballet mcanique and
the rest of Lgers uvre in
the early to mid 1920s is that outside of the film Lger rarely
isolates the face it is usually
connected to a body and it is always, exclusively, a whole face.
Indeed, in only a few paintings
made after he resumes studio work in 1916, after recovering from
wounds sustained at Verdun,
does Lger ever fragment the face. We find it principally in two
circumstances: paintings of
women sitting, looking into a mirror, such as Femmes la Toilette
(1920), and a few paintings
of soldiers. Notable here are Le Soldat la pipe (1916) and La
Partie des cartes (1917) and
especially a number of different versions of the same subject,
Le bless (1918-1919), a painting
of a wounded veteran. Furthermore, it is worth contrasting the
face of the soldier smoking in the
1916 painting with that in a peace-time version, Lhomme la pipe
(1920), painted at a time
when Lger was coming under the influence of Purism, and much
affected by the post-war
rappel lordre. In the latter the face is whole, and painted at
only a slight angle to the canvas.
Furthermore, we see the man, rather than the hands holding the
pipe that also shield the face in
the earlier work.
There is, then, a tension surrounding the varying treatments of
the face within Ballet mcanique
and a substantial and substantive difference between certain of
those treatments and Lgers
paintings of the period. If, in the latter, the face is most
often cohesive, symmetrical, seen en
face, conjoined to a body, with both generally figured in
accordance with the stylistic constraints
of neo-classical painting and the rappel lordre, in the former
it is most often figured in close-
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up and it is, at times, fragmented and multiplied. Either we
must accept a fundamental
inconsistency between the most important part of Lgers practice
and his engagement with a
new medium, or we must look within that practice, and its
influences, for some explanation of
this inconsistency and its possible meanings. If, on the whole,
Ballet mcanique is a deeply
Purist work, where films potential for deploying space variably
over time allows Lger to
temporalise the repetition of forms that he would otherwise
compress within the single canvas, it
is vital to note that he employs a very different compositional
strategy to that consistently
deployed within the paintings. The film is premised on
juxtaposition rather than synthesis, at
the same time as it follows the Purist rule of isolating forms,
yet there are moments when Ballet
mcanique, in its fragmentation of the face, rather peculiarly
recalls and sometimes actually employs
the visual aesthetics of avant-garde movements from the pre-war
and war years. These were
aesthetic and political traditions to which Lger had never been
party, even before 1914. They
represented ideals and aesthetics that were wholly alien to
Lgers ideas, both as they were
theorised in his writings of the early to mid 1920s and
developed in his painting, and to which
the rappel was fundamentally hostile. I suggest that this
paradox stems from Lgers seeing, in
certain of those pre-war movements, an unbridled endorsement of
the value of technology and
modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that
subject to industrial modernity,
with all the catastrophic human consequences that were then
witnessed on the battlefields of
World War One. These aesthetics of fragmentation are then
compared and contrasted with
Purisms reconciliation of man as a cohesive being, within
modernity, achieved through its
conservative revision of modernist aesthetics.
The conventional understanding of Ballet mcanique established in
the wake of Standish Lawders
pioneering work The Cubist Cinema was that it had much in common
with Lgers paintings. In
a recent summary of this argument, Malcolm Turvey suggests that,
for Lawder, Ballet mcanique
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instantiates for the spectator the distinctively modern, dynamic
perceptual experience [3] that
characterises Lgers work immediately before World War One. A
similar dynamism seemingly
informs post-war paintings such as La Ville (1919). The film is
thus a celebration of
technological modernity, of the speed and rhythms of modern,
urban life. For other, earlier,
critics, those large canvases of the late 1910s are in
themselves perceived as possessing cinematic
properties. However, as Turvey shows, Ballet mcanique is not a
straightforward booster for the
delights of industrial modernity. [4] Furthermore, by the time
of the films production Lgers
paintings, and their political and aesthetic affiliations,
differed profoundly from those made
before 1920. Lawders reading of the film, and indeed of Lgers
work, even if it rightly
presumes a degree of conceptual coherence between the different
media deployed in an uvre,
fails to account firstly for the significant stylistic, and
moral, shift found in the work after his
encounter with Purist art and thought, and secondly for the
influence of the rappel lordre as
a new conservatism takes hold of the avant-garde. Christopher
Green, in particular, has identified
in Lgers work, after 1920, the growing importance of classical
motifs and aesthetics. This is
especially manifested in paintings such as Le Grand Djeuner
(1921), a work that in its cohesion
and subordination of the figure to classical norms however
derived from geometrical volumes -
is clearly very different from a painting such as La Ville. [5]
Green argues that it is in a series of
monumental figure-paintings, including La Lecture, made during
the first half of 1924 that
is, at much the same time as he is working on Ballet mcanique,
which is first screened at the
Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna, in
mid September of that year that
the ideas comprehensively set out in Le Grand Djeuner finally
realized their full potential. [6]
Ballet mcanique is made, then, not at a point in Lgers
development when he is enraptured by
industrial modernity in all its aspects if there was indeed such
a point - but at the point where
his rediscovery of, and commitment to, classical aesthetics, and
the conservative vision of man
on which they depend, reaches its apotheosis.
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As John Golding pointed out, In 1920 the human figure reasserts
itself in Lgers work as a
subject in its own right. () The new industrial age is not
inhuman, its machines are
benevolent and confer on those who work with them a new status
of grandeur. [7] Equally, as
Green, along with Romy Golan, David Cottington and Kenneth
Silver, has shown, neither the
intent nor the effect of the rappel lordre was confined to the
register of aesthetics. In the
context of the First World War and its aftermath the
call-to-order was profoundly political.
Many artists associated with Cubism and its variant forms, such
as Orphism, spent much of the
conflict reconciling themselves with critics who interpreted
modernisms experiments with the
spatial articulation of figures and objects as representing an
influx of an alien culture. [8] The
repair of the ruptures with tradition, understood to have been
caused by first Impressionism
and then Cubism, depended on establishing a lineage between the
avant-garde and French
figure painting, particularly as it was represented by the work
of Jean August Dominique Ingres.
During the war Cubism a number of its principal practitioners
marginalised through non-
combatant status (Picasso and Gris) and its principal dealer
(Kahnweiler) in exile in Switzerland
with his work sequestrated by the French government was
frequently characterised as, at best,
anti-French and, at worst, actively pro-German. At the same time
cubist aesthetics underwent a
process of distillation that, whilst facilitating the critical
and formal positions from which a
renewal of the style would be pursued after 1917, nonetheless
represented a diminution. [9]
This tendency was typified in the post-war era by Lgers practise
of what Green understands as
a mechanized variant of Neo-Classicism [10]. Le Grand Djeuner
exemplified the return to
classical humanist values in the midst of the new machine
culture. Here Lger used figurative
poses typical of Ingres and drew attention to individual
properties in the faces of his subjects,
even as he employed a compositional style of cylindrical and
angular volumes, for bodies and
setting alike. As Green observes, The look of the result was not
of nudes synthesized from
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geometric parts and then shaped to a classical ideal, but of
nudes represented in idealized,
classical form. [11]
Turvey argues that there is indeed some degree of ideological
and aesthetic coherence between the
different elements of Lgers uvre. However, the intellectual
foundations of that uvre are
historically variable, so that the effects of this post-war
conservatism are figured in his film and
painting. This necessarily demands a new interpretation of
Ballet mcanique, since the painting
and thought that Lawder assumes the film reflects are wildly out
of alignment with the actual
style, and intellectual underpinning, of Lgers work in 1924.
Turvey suggests that Purist or
machinist readings of the film rightly note a concernwith two
distinct types of social
change: the putative radical transformation in human perceptual
experience supposedly brought
about by the increased pace of life in modernity, and the
significance of the machine age for
society. [12] Challenging Lawders interpretation of the film
through a reading of Lgers 1923
essay Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life, Turvey demonstrates
that although the machine is a
central preoccupation for him [13] the artist is intent on using
the mechanical as so much raw
material, like the elements of a landscape or a still life. [14]
At the heart of Lgers art at this
point, even as it invokes and involves the machine, is an idea
of beauty; indeed, Turvey claims
that during this period beauty is the major stated ambition of
his art. [15] Whilst beauty
may be found often in modern objects and machines, what is
beautiful about them is their
adherence to classical virtues of harmony, proportion, and
order. That is, to be embraced by art,
the mechanical and the objective must adhere to the same
conservative rules as govern the
classically figured body that emerges from the rappel lordre.
Rather than the human being
configured to the machine as Lawder imagines, the machine is
configured to the human, and to
a very nineteenth century notion of man at that. Nor, indeed,
does this notion of beauty inhere
to industrial modernity; it is understood as a universal
property. Lger remarks, in 1924, that a
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machine or machine-made object can be beautiful when the
relationship of lines describing its
volumes is balanced in an order equivalent to that of earlier
architectures. We are not now
confronting the phenomenon of a new order, properly speaking it
is simply one architectural
manifestation like others. [16]
Rather than straightforwardly celebrating technological progress
as Futurism is understood to
have done before 1914 Purism renegotiates modernitys
relationship between the human, the
mechanical and the utopian to account for the figure of man.
Announced by Amde Ozenfant
and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) in
Aprs le Cubisme (1918),
Purism is, effectively, a conservative revision of cubism that
emphasises through isolation the
formal purity of the represented object and at the same time
gives it, as Green observes, an
idealistic, even Platonic flavour. [17] Despite all its
apparently progressive social agendas, we
might consider Purism as one of the most significant and
successful products of the rappel
lordre: it arrests the radical developments of pre-war Cubism
and Simultaneism that concerned
themselves with the visual instability of the subject/object
relationship in space/time; like neo-
classicism it stresses the beauty of the isolated object; within
the domain of aesthetics, and
eventually within their social application in architecture and
design it constrains and reifies
the idealism of pre-war modernist thought within a regime of
subjective instrumentality
provided by new ideas of management and regulation developed by
institutions of government
and capital before and during World War One.
Purism is largely a consequence of a redemptive mapping of
technology onto traditional notions
of both visual and subjective ontologies of the body and the
human. In its reaction to historical
catastrophe the war certainly, but more generally the direction
taken by industrial and
governmental modernity throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries - the demand
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of the rappel lordre is not only for a return to older political
values; it is the cultural echo of
a more general call for epistemic retrenchment. [18] Where
modernism is generally propelled
by a dialectic between sentient embodiment and transcendent,
disembodied consciousness [19],
the reconciliations with capital and power that characterise the
1920s and 1930s of which
Purism is the first assume neither this possible transcendence
as escape from history (the
move of Heidegger through death and Dasein, for example) or that
other escape which we
might characterise as a kind of hyperbolising of sentience
through consciousness, in which
sensation reflects an embodied integration of the subject in
historical space-time (this having
been the move made by Bergson and pre-war Cubism). In their
realistic appraisals of man
within modernity, as the grounds for technological utopia, such
recuperations, from Purism,
through Rudolf Laban, to the Bauhaus, can do no more than
instrumentalise a pervasive,
traditional notion of sentience (Man) as one more mode of
technology with only a mythic
external value. [20] This happens precisely because Purism fails
to analyse the relation between
industrial modernity and its instrumental demands upon
subjectivity, and the notion of the
subject on which it rests a conservative notion called forth by
the violent reaction of the
rappel to the effects of modernity. As Nina Rosenblatt astutely
recognises:
The Purist painting was never intended as a diagram for a union
between art and
industry that was taking place beyond its edges. On the
contrary, it was the only site
upon which aesthetic perception, the modern optic as Le
Corbusier and Ozenfant
defined it, could be reconciled with the mass-produced object
without passing
through the subjective conditions of either labor or
consumption. The hermeticism
of the Purist production cyclewas precisely what enabled Purism
to hold on to a
mass subject defined by an earlier discourse even as it shifted
the terms of that
discourse to the modern world of industry and machines. [21]
We might say that with the recuperation of modernist aesthetics
in the interval between world
wars the dialectic between sentience and transcendence is
supplanted by an exchange between
autonomization (as Jameson has it) realised only in extremis
[22], and automatization, the
subordination of the subject to the apparatus. This exchange
becomes explicit in secondo
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Futurismo with Pannaggi and Paladinis Manifesto of Futurist
Mechanical Art (1922), itself
parlayed into a text by Prampolini published in De Stijl later
in that year and, translated by
Edward Storer, in the October 1922 issue of the journal Broom.
[23] Purisms romantic reliance
upon a pre-modern idea of the subject, and the human, allows it
to ignore this crucial
relationship. Indeed, we might see elements of Ballet mcanique,
founded in Lgers likely
encounter with the texts and images in De Stijl and Broom, as
offering both endorsement for,
and critique of, the renewed enthusiasm for a melding of the
human and the technological
instrument manifested in Futurisms second wave.
Unlike neo-classicism however, Purism openly seeks to establish
an accord between beauty and
modernity, rather than with a nostalgic vision of a pre-modern
past, which was where many
other painters influenced by the rappel directed their attention
after the war, especially, as
Golan shows, those engaged with landscape and peasant life. As
Green remarks: Ozenfant and
Jeanneret concerned themselves not only with an objective
analysis of pictorial architecture
according to the ideal of order, but with a parallel analysis of
the world outside the painting,
which meant ultimately the modern world. [24] However as Green
also notes, one consequence
of this analysis for Ozenfant and Jeanneret was that all men,
even or especially artists are
machines; and paintings are machines too. [25] Indeed, the two
artists, according to Green,
built their pictures not only out of standardised objects, but
out of standardised pictorial parts,
as if in creative mimicry of mass production. [26]
The aesthetic proposed in Aprs le Cubisme, with its emphasis on
formal, harmonic,
relationships between objects in space, governed by the
regulation of proportion through a
return to the classical principle of the Golden Section, was
certainly antithetical to Lgers
painting in the period 1918-20. However, in 1920 Lger met
Jeanneret for the first time and
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the Purist journal LEsprit nouveau republished Maurice Raynals
important essay on the
painters work. Green comments that Throughout Lgers 1921-23 work
there is a hidden
Purist flavour, camouflaged by its force and stylistic variety.
Much points to an early but at first
clandestine infiltration of Purist attitudes [27] There is a
fundamental change in Lgers
working method, reflected in the degree of preparatory work
before painting began and on the
canvas itself: where the picture, before the war, had evolved on
the canvas, it now became the
final stage in a process of manufacturing an idea defined almost
down to the last detail. [28]
Such industrialisation of production is far from specific to
Purism, or novel within the history
of art, but is given a particular contemporary resonance by its
application to everyday objects and
the significant contrast of its use of perspectival construction
to what had immediately preceded
it within the avant-garde namely Cubism. Within its deployment
by Lger, we need to take
note of two other strategies of Purist art that enter his work
in the early 1920s. These are
standardisation of pictorial components, within and between
paintings, and the repetition of
both forms and specific motifs. Green sees this practice at its
most obvious in the figure
paintings of 1921-24, culminating in Le Grand Dejeuner and La
Mre et lenfant (1922). In
these works on the grand scale, as well as in smaller paintings,
we find the same standard
components: the lock of hair like black steel, the U joining
nose to brow, the hands and
fingers: they are all figurative units which achieved invariable
form at the turn of 1920-21.
[29]
If much of the film does not look like Lgers form of Purist
painting (and at times it does look
rather more like the vision offered by secondo Futurismo) Ballet
mcanique at least transfers these
industrial strategies of Purist painting from the canvas to the
filmstrip. But however rapid its
transition between shots, in its organisation it is the very
antithesis of the film produced by
chance, or the disruption of a rough linear narrative by resort
to the analogical meanings of
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allegory, which respectively characterise Man Rays Le Retour la
Raison (1923) or Clair and
Picabias Entracte (1924). Clearly, in its compositional method,
in its editing of space and
time, Ballet mcanique is rigorously thought through. The end
product is determined by prior
principles of mathematical ratio in the relationships of one
image to another; that is, Lger shifts
the compositional ideas of Purist painting from space to time,
without, of course, entirely
dispensing with them in the composition of individual shots. As
Lger put it: From one end to
the other the film is subjected to an arithmetical constraint,
as precise as possible (number,
speed, time). [30] Even allowing for a degree of industrial
systematization and standardisation
necessitated by the economics and technologies of film
production which avant-garde
filmmaking often does its best to eschew, or at least conceal -
we have here precisely that
mechanisation of method [31] that Green sees as characterising
Lgers painting under the
influence of Purism. Similarly we find in Ballet mcanique a
process of composition that relies
almost entirely on standardisation of pictorial components, and
their repetition. Indeed, some of
these components are borrowed from painting for the film, and it
is these tropes that most
clearly allow us to label Ballet mcanique as Lgers. The shot in
which Kikis face is obscured by
a matte, save for her eye, is paralleled by the partial masking
of the subjects face in La Femme au
Miroir (1920) and similar to the way in which the hair of the
reclining woman at the back of the
trio in Le Grand Djeuner conceals one half of her face,
including her left eye, itself a motif
repeated from La Femme (1922). There are relatively few
different shots in Ballet mcanique,
what Lger does with them is the determining factor in the visual
organisation of the film. And
the emphasis on ratio and arrangement here suggests it is Lger
who controls their relation,
whilst Murphy and perhaps Man Ray, to both of whom, for
differing reasons, this principle of
calculation would be alien, operate the film camera. [32] What
we get, of course, is repetition on
a grand scale, with inversion and modification of motifs; there
may not be a great many different
shots, but there is a great deal of printing. The shot with the
matte obscuring most of Kikis face
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is repeated three times; the reflection of Lger and, I think,
Murphy behind the camera in the
artists studio, shown in a mirror ball, is repeated once,
inverted. The most blatant example of
repetition, not least because of the way its loop printing is
put to expressive, if ambivalent,
purpose as a commentary on the machine in contrast to human
labour, is the shot of the
laundry-woman endlessly climbing steps. Ballet mcanique is a
Purist film in its intellectual
framework, its conception and its execution; and yet, in one
crucial regard, we might see it as
anti-Purist
It is notable that Lger nominates the close-up as the sole
invention of cinema, not rhythmic
editing. As a confirmed enthusiast of the medium, who had
recently collaborated with Cendrars
in editing parts of Abel Gances film La Roue (1921-24), who had
earlier produced a film
scenario, La fin du monde (1919) with Cendrars, and been
immersed in a milieu the pre-war
circle of Apollinaire that had tentatively theorised film as a
new art form and sought ways in
which it might be used within the intellectual framework of
modernism, Lger would have been
well aware of the complex interplay between cinema and the more
traditional media of the avant-
garde, and of the development of the close-up in narrative
cinema. [33] Whilst a number of
early British cinematographers used close-ups, it is with the
evolution of narrative cinema as
mass entertainment, and of continuity editing as the vehicle of
those narratives, in the early
1910s and in particular with the films of Griffith that the
close-up comes to be used as a
specific shot that intervenes in action to draw attention to an
individual characters feelings and
express an aspect of their personality. Cendrars had already
nominated the close-up as a
distinctive rhetorical trope in filmmaking in Les ABCs du Cinma,
where he had identified
Griffith as its inventor. [34] Cendrars planned this text, as
early as November 1917, as a wide-
ranging reflection on the significance of cinematographic arts
in contemporary aesthetics,
consisting of some eight chapters, though only small parts of it
were published, sporadically, in
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journals in the early 1920s. [35] I suggest, however, that Lger,
as a close friend of its author,
could well have seen Cendrars work in manuscript before its
publication. If the projected book
- obviously far wider in scope and longer than the surviving
published material - was ever
developed in whole or part, it is likely that he would have seen
that too. Jean Epstein who
Lger had known since 1921 had developed Cendrarss ideas in his
own writing, Posie
daujourdhui (1921), and gone on to make practical use of them in
his film Pasteur (1922),
where the most distinctive close-ups, interestingly given Lgers
attention to isolated objects of
modern life in Ballet mcanique, are of a hypodermic syringe.
[36]
The close-up might be understood as a moment in the flow of
images that creates a brief
suspension of time as it is experienced by the cinematic
spectator. Furthermore, it is a
suspension that when it concentrates upon the human face allows
the spectator to attend to the
subjective constitution of an individual, to see the other as
the source of warmth, generosity and
character, their humanity, or indeed as the expression of their
villainy and their debasement of
humanity, given the way in which Griffith sometimes uses the
shot to impute the malign agency
that propels his melodramas. As such a suspension, the close-up
of the face could be understood
as a peculiarly Bergsonian moment within the Newtonian regime
that constitutes narrative
cinema after the 1910s. If the regulated, ubiquitous linear
temporality of the film strip and the
linear teleology of filmic narratives are significant problems
for the pre-war modernist avant-
garde - with much of its thought deriving from Bergsons
philosophy of time and the subject,
which stresses individual experience of time and its
malleability - then the close-up, however
briefly, seems to take us from cinemas incessant, mechanised
impact upon consciousness into
an illusory space and time of interiority, meditation and
reflection. If the realism of the close-up
continues to insist on the primacy of the Enlightenment
discourse of the truth of appearances
of which lens based images are the modern materialisation - as
an image in time, and as an
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image interrupting a sequential temporal flow, it nonetheless
allows for the subjective
understanding of essential character, of an apprehension of
man.
Lgers use of the close-up of the beautiful face, entire and
symmetrical, in the shape of Kiki,
as a moment of brief respite from the incessant flow of
mechanical and mass-produced images,
whilst it is wholly classical in the terms of his painting of
the time, completely accords with
post-war uses of Bergsons thought. If, before 1914, Bergson had
often been described by
political, intellectual and artistic conservatives as a
Germanised radical, in the post-war era
there was, as Mark Antliff shows, a fundamental reappraisal of
his ideas, especially amongst
those painters engaging with French identity and landscape,
which sometimes led to the creation
of models of temporal organization rife with racist
implications. [37] What had been, before
1914, close to the heart of modernisms critique of modernitys
calculated production and
management of subjects, came, with the rappel to accord with a
politics of reaction. Antliff
argues that the pre-war Bergsonian avant-gardes critique of
modernity pursued a merger of
three distinct time frames: the cadence of human time, the
rhythmic pattern of time in culture,
and the variable temporal systems invented by particular
cultures throughout their history.
[38] Lgers early painting, exemplified by work such as Nues dans
un Foret (1909-11) is
produced in a milieu both the Abbaye de Crteil in particular and
the Puteaux Cubist group
in general - profoundly informed by Bergsonian thought, and by
that of his followers, notably
Jules Romains.
I suggest that Lger employs the rappel lordres post-war revision
of Bergsons ideas within
Ballet mcanique, and that the face in close-up, in both whole
and part, plays a particular role in
this deployment. Like Lgers pre-war painting, the films temporal
system, as it is sketched by
the artist in the Little Review, is tri-axial: it plays
acceleration (tension towards speed) against
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de-acceleration (masses slowed down) in the relation of what
Lger describes as the vertical and
horizontal components of the film. This is a bi-axial relation.
Simultaneously, however, there is
a progressive tendency towards acceleration in the film as a
whole, an axis that bisects this
relationship of temporalised volumes. [39]
Figure 1 Lgers temporal model for Ballet mcanique reproduced in
the Little Review
Where there is in the pre-war painting a merger of
temporalities, in the film they are
contrasted, and indeed work against each other. If, in this
project, Lger is experimenting with a
relationship of temporality and the subject that seems to have
its grounding in his pre-war
experience of Bergsons thought, these intercalations, the
close-ups, have a fundamentally
different function to the relation of figure to milieu in his
pre-war painting. Rather than
incorporating the subject into space, they allow
differentiation. At the same time, this creates a
visual effect radically different in its appearance from Lgers
painting of the time; this difference
derives from Lgers recognition of the specific temporal
properties of the filmstrip in contrast to
those of the canvas. Rather than synthesising Man within his
milieu, Ballet mcanique at
times seeks to redeem him from being merely subjected to it, so
that the subject is now
intercalated where, in Lgers pre-war painting, and that of many
others, it had been dissolved
or fragmented.
Whereas many of his contemporaries turned to the representation,
indeed the mythification of
rural life, and used the conservative recuperation of Bergson to
celebrate the values of a local,
largely agrarian (and racially pure) culture, Lger employs
Bergsonian ideas of time to locate and
recuperate the human Man within the industrial culture of
modernity. In its general
model of mathematical construction Ballet mcanique might be
understood as hyperbolising the
-
Newtonian model of time albeit that this is a rigour that Lger
does not always adhere to as
closely as he claims in the Little Review. As Stephen Kern,
amongst others, has shown, it is this
model of temporality as linear, universal, uniform, and
divisible into equal parts, that becomes
dominant, and is eventually standardised, as the norm of
industrial modernity in the late
nineteenth century. [40] Film, as a technology, and cinema, as
its cultural manifestation, both
represented and literalised this conception of time. As Mary
Anne Doane observes: the
emerging cinema participated in ageneral cultural imperative,
the structuring of time and
contingency in capitalist modernity. [41] At the same time as
his entertainment became
standardised, the industrial workers body and consciousness
became the subjects of systemic
enterprises such as Taylorism that sought to rationalise their
relationship to the machines he
operated. [42] If, under the influence of Purism, Lgers painting
similarly submits itself to the
industrial process, we might see Ballet mcanique, in the ideals
that underpin its production, as
a pursuit of the temporality of the filmstrip to its logical
conclusions. This would, seemingly, be
a regime with no space, or time, for Bergsonian models of
subjective temporality. But in those
moments that Lger describes as Penetration slowed down
(horizontals) [43] I suggest that this
is exactly what occurs. In the highly structured temporal regime
of Ballet mcanique, the close-
up of Kiki becomes a moment of human redemption through
suspended time.
Through its constitution of reality in a moment of suspension,
the close-up paradoxically offers
us something more than the truth of appearances. This, of
course, is not an exclusive property of
the cinematic shot: it is something attempted within the painted
portrait since its inception in
the early modern era, whether through the artists critical and
fantasising attention towards his
subject or, as in the portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, his use
of the subjects surroundings
as a moral index. The close-up, then, removes its subject from
both the autotelic regime of
cinematic temporality, even as it participates in its narrative,
and further, it deviates from the
-
discourses of photographic truth - the fact of presence, a
transparency of meaning predicated on
appearance into the domain of painting and the imagination.
Lgers offering of the close-up as
uniquely cinematic in his comments on Ballet mcanique should
necessarily be tempered by this
after all, as a formally trained painter Lger would have been
aware not only of the history and
historical meanings of portraiture but of the ways in which he
and his contemporaries had
already adapted the portrait to the rhetorical strategies and
critiques of modernist art. Both
history and contemporary practice had already influenced his
approach to the portraiture of
individuals.
However, we might say that what is unique about the cinematic
close-up, for Lger, is not the
degree of its attention to the subject but its use of
subjectivity to disrupt a generic flow of
systemic time; that is, its likeness to painting within a medium
that is otherwise, as figural
depiction and temporal sequence rather than animated abstraction
and simultaneous moment,
antithetical to the ontological structures and rhetorical
devices of modernist painting. The close-
up isolates the individual from the mass, restoring a sense of
subjective particularity to the
specific in modernitys era of universality and generality; the
close-up substitutes interior
contemplation for exterior sensation; the close-up offers, as
felt experience if not as technical
reality, a suspension in the rush towards eschaton that
characterises both the form of cinematic
narrative and the technology of cinematic projection. But we
must necessarily ask what kind of
individual, what kind of subject? For Lger, after all, even the
whole face may be a
standardised, industrial unit, as the stereotypical faces in Le
Grand Dejeuner and a host of
other paintings, which are then replicated in Kikis appearance,
indicate. Indeed, by 1924 Lger
did not want the face to be expressive of character in a
theatrical manner that is, in the
manner in which it is used in the cinematic melodrama. In his
essay on the possibilities of an
intermedial, radical theatre, The Spectacle, Lger first of all
posits, within live performance, a
-
face that, if it appears, may be stiff, fixed, frozen, rigid as
if it were metal. For Lger, The
human face can play its part, but its expressiveness is
absolutely null in the spectacle stage. [44]
The face, then, cannot simply be accommodated as a transcendent
expression of human
character, for to do so, in the context of modernity and its
adequate representation, is to falsify
the historical relation of man to his changed environment. For
the Purist painter and thinker,
man is part of that environment, he certainly does not transcend
it the position of neo-
classical art, and Impressionist or Pictorialist cinema - but
nor yet is he wholly assimilated
within it the position of Futurism. Lger then goes on to discuss
the question of the
possibilities of film. He is scathing about literary adaptations
of films, expressing the same
concern with narrative cinema as little more than filmed theatre
that preoccupied much of the
Parisian avant-garde in the early 1920s. The potential of their
medium for film directors is
largely ignored: The close-up is their alphabet, they can give
plastic identity to a detail. It is
such a field of innovations that it is unbelievable they can
neglect it for a sentimental scenario.
[45] Lgers interest throughout this essay, and it informs his
art throughout the early 1920s, is
to explain the changed role of man in the world through the
relationship of forms, not through
the use of archaic and irrelevant tropes inherited from the
pre-industrial, nor through his
assimilation by the mechanical. Ballet mcanique, then, is part
of a wider scheme on Lgers part
in 1923-24 to situate man within modernity without ever losing
sight of Man. This
relationship between modes of the human is typified for Green by
paintings such as Le Homme
au chandail (1924), which looks back to the first flourishing of
classical principles within a
modern milieu in Le Mcanicien (1920). [46] (And one might
usefully compare the profile of
the head in Le Homme au chandail with that of Kiki at certain
moments in Ballet mcanique.)
Lgers attention to the face then is not the sentimental
attachment to the organic, to a golden age
before modernity that is almost routinely re-created, in bad
faith, in narrative cinema. It is this
-
strategy, common enough in nineteenth and early twentieth
century photography, that
characterises Pictorialist and Impressionist filmmaking, and we
might see the inclusion of
Murphys footage of his wife Katherine, smiling benignly on a
swing, as a particularly ripe
example of such an aesthetic, presented in stark contrast to the
face of Kiki, heavily made
uptransformed, with set gestures. [47] As Lger wrote to his
gallerist Leonce Rosenberg in
1922, plastic beauty in general is totally independent of
sentimental, descriptive and imitative
qualities. Beauty is a consequence of formal properties, not
because of association or
identification with the subject. [48] Pictorialist filmmaking
belongs, for Lger, to that strain of
art which - through its invocation of beauty in precisely those
terms to which he is so hostile - is
bent on restoring departed times and which plagiarizes them
badly. [49] Indeed, Murphys
Soul of the Cypress (1920), with its photographic fantasy of the
classical world would be a prime
example of this practice.
Whilst Ballet mcanique does, indeed, in general, follow the
tenets of the rappel lordre and
Purism, it does not necessarily do so by consistently obeying
the demands for figural unity and
beauty that stem from the return to Ingres and to a wider notion
of classicism, nor the use of
Bergsonian thought. The varying uses of the close up simply do
not support such a claim in
isolation. There is within Ballet mcanique a second use of the
face that seemingly contradicts not
only Lgers deployment of the close-up as integral and beautiful
within the film but which
flatly goes against all his paintings and ideas of the time. We
must here pay attention to the
nature of the image within those temporal suspensions, those
slowed down horizontals. The
contrast between Murphys stilted view of an illusory, natural
past and Lgers notion of man
within modernity may present us with some clue as to why this
double deployment of the face
occurs. Drawing on Barnaby Dickers recent interpretation of
Ballet mcanique as a compilation
film that includes a wide range of sometimes contradictory
modernist tropes [50], I suggest that
-
Lger introduces these figures of fragmentation as examples of
recent avant-garde practices (and
derrire garde in the case of Pictorialism) typical of first
generation Futurism and Vorticism,
for example - that would be repellent to the aims of the rappel.
As Dicker points out, Ballet
mcanique at times looks like a great many different films, so
that while being Purist, and
despite Lgers assertion that this film is objective, realistic,
and in no way abstract [51] the
film is at once Futurist in its citing of the Futurist
Mechanical Ballet of 1922, in its title and its
tropes, as well as its referencing of the ideas and images of
Pannaggi, Paladini and Prampolini;
Dadaist, in its reference to Picabias mechanomorph of 1915 and
its use of seemingly random
imagery; abstract (it includes purely geometric forms in the
manner of Hans Richters
Rhythmus films, one of which Lger had almost certainly seen at
the Dadaists Soire du Coeur
Barbe in 1923, and read about in De Stijl) Pictorialist (through
its inclusion of footage shot by
Murphy) and Vorticist (through using the technique originally
developed by Ezra Pound and
Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1916 for photography). I suggest that
Lger would have been
familiar with the general principles of what this last technique
was designed to achieve, if not its
specific use within Vorticism. In the Little Review Lger refers
to a technical novelty of Mr.
Murphy and Mr. Ezra Pound the multiple transformation of the
projected image. [52] This
novelty manifests itself, for example, in sequences where
Murphys face is fragmented and
multiplied through the use of mirrors attached to the camera
lens. This was a technique
developed by Pound and the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn
during the winter of 1916-
17. Lger may not have seen Coburns Vortographs when they
appeared in February 1917 at
the Camera Club in London, but as Pound put it at the time,
Coburns images worked within
the fundamental principles of Vorticism, and those of vorticist
painting in so far as they are
applicable to the work of the camera. [53] Indeed, Coburn had
already produced something
similar with his photographs of crystals, illustrating a
Maeterlinck text, published in Paris in
1914. We might further note that the technical innovation of the
Vortograph is conceptually at
-
odds with the quality of objective representation that Lger
pursues in his painting and
elsewhere in Ballet mcanique. As Richard Humphreys notes of
Coburns work: The abstracted
patterns were usually blurred to remove a sense of the objects
specificity. [54]
Lger, indeed, would have been wholly familiar with the
principles of Vorticism, well before his
first encounter with Pound in Paris in 1920. He would have
encountered and understood them
in 1914 when the Vorticists first stated them, and well before
then with Futurism, since what
Pound, Lewis, Roberts and their fellows were doing was often
little more than developing ideas
first articulated by Marinetti. As Pound noted, cynically, in a
letter to John Quinn, The
Vortoscope isnt a cinema. It is an attachment to enable a
photographer to do sham Picassos.
[55] Pounds remark here confuses the visual effects, and
presumably the principles, of
Vorticism (and therefore those of Futurism) with the visual
effects and principles of Cubism,
the conceptual antithesis of those movements, despite their
common interest in the temporalised
restructuring of the subject in space. Indeed, Vorticism and
Futurism represented conceptions
of art, modernity and the subject from which Lger had diverged
as an artist almost since his
emergence in the pre-war Parisian avant-garde. As Virginia Spate
points out, the first encounter
between Futurist theory and the young French cubist painters led
to works, including by Lger,
that were almost an illustration of certain aspects of the
Futurist programme. [56] However,
within a few months this position changed: the actual sight of
Futurist painting after so much
theory made them recognize that the Futurists confused the
simultaneous [which is what the
French artists influenced by Bergson pursued] with the
successive, as was pointed out by
Delaunay, by the critic Cartaultand later by Jacques Villon.
[57] Although Lger and the
Futurists are both engaged in the common question of
representing the complexities of mans
temporal and spatial relationships in modernity and at times
both acknowledge to each other
-
the congruity of their thought Lgers practice by 1913 diverges
from Futurisms methods, as
both Carr and Boccioni recognised. [58]
To make Ballet mcanique, then, Lger collaborated with a number
of artists whose earlier, and -
in the case of Man Ray - recent, practices might be said to
represent different visual traditions
within the avant-garde, and whose conceptual and, in some cases,
political stances were often
diametrically opposed to those he assumed, especially once he
became increasingly wedded to
Purisms revision of Cubist thought. Such collaboration might be
understood as an expedient,
and perhaps cynical, way of introducing technical effects by a
tyro filmmaker with a demanding
and time-consuming studio practice; except that film scholars
who try, sometimes very hard, to
wrest authorship of Ballet mcanique from Lger on the grounds of
inexperience as a filmmaker
neglect the degree of his prior involvement with Gance and
Cendrars, and over-estimate the
experience of his collaborators at that time. Judi Freeman, for
example, asserts that Lger did
not possess sufficient technical know-how to realize a film; an
argument that might lead us to
generally credit cinematographers as the key figures in the
authorship of films, rather than
directors. [59] There is evidence that in 1924 Lger had actually
had more experience of
mainstream filmmaking, as well as direct engagement with
theorists of film, notably Cendrars
and Epstein, than Man Ray who at that time had made only the
largely camera-less La Retour
la Raison (1923) and shot some footage, now lost, with the
equally inexperienced Duchamp, of
the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. Murphy had been
involved with Metro Goldwyn
Mayer, but as an art director, not a cameraman or director. His
personal projects to that moment
were derivative efforts whose aesthetics looked back to the
photographic tradition of the previous
decade, principally designed to showcase the attributes of his
various child-brides. Lger would
certainly have needed access to a camera for his film, and
Murphy might well have been
technically equipped to fulfil the role of cameraman. Aside from
a shared interest in the
-
synchronising of music and image there is very little else to
yoke together Lger and Murphy,
and it is notable that claims for Murphys authorship in Ballet
mcanique proceed largely from
recollections solicited in the 1960s, and ignore sustained
analysis of Lgers uvre and
discussions of the film within the modernist avant-garde from
the films inception.
Some of the footage incorporated into Ballet mcanique is, very
probably, shot by Man Ray.
What we may say, however, is that there is a profound divide
between the aesthetics, and
politics, of the Dada project in which Man Ray was engaged until
1924, and the affiliations of
Ballet mcanique, taken as a whole. Man Ray, who had known
Duchamp and Picabia in New
York when both were avoiding the war, might have understood
something of the implications of
the political divide between those avant-garde artists who had
fought a significant majority
and those, especially the Dadaists, who had managed to evade it
on health grounds or, as Picabia
did, through something approaching desertion. The question of
what one had done in the war
did much to inform the aesthetic affiliations of artists in the
years after 1918: Cendrars never
forgave Robert Delaunay, who like Duchamp was excused on medical
grounds in 1914, and
who, like Duchamp decided to go abroad before being offered a
second opportunity when the
standards for admission to the slaughter were lowered. Similar
hostility pursued Albert Gleizes,
who escaped through family connections after a few months in the
army. It is questionable
whether artists who were also veterans, and especially wounded
veterans, ever forgave Picabia, or
his fellow Dadaists, who had mostly sat out the war in
Switzerland and New York. It is certainly
questionable, given the ferocity of his attacks even on the
memory of his friend Apollinaire,
whether Picabia forgave the modernist avant-garde for giving in
so easily to the cheap appeal of
patriotism in 1914. [60] Murphy and Pound and Man Ray are
included in Ballet mcanique
because, respectively, in their misrepresentation of the past,
their nature of their investment in
technological modernity, and their affiliation with Dada, they
represent everything that Lger has
-
opposed since his first encounter with Futurism, and in the
1920s embody everything that
Purism opposes. Lgers relationship to Dada, from the moment of
its arrival in Paris, is
antipathetic. In February 1920, he had been one of the
established artists who voted to exclude
the Dadaists from the revived Section dOr of the annual Salon.
This led to open hostility
between the Dadaists and artists such as Archipenko and Gleizes.
Lgers relationship to the
Dadaists, whether in the citation of Picabias mechanomorph or
the employing of Man Ray, is
hardly likely to have been based on fond affection. [61]
The terms of Pounds involvement are even more debatable, since
he had repeatedly opposed the
idea of cinema as an art form throughout the previous decade.
[62] In addition, we should note
that Pounds affiliations within the Parisian avant-garde were,
to say the least, confused. Rebecca
Beasley sums the situation up nicely: although Pound had
deliberately sought an association
with the avant-garde group [Dada] that had set itself against
most firmly against the order and
rationality ofpost-war classicism, [Purism] the works he praised
most highly were those that
could be assimilated to the conservative aesthetic values of
post-war Paris. [63] Pound thus
straddled two antipathetic positions, Purism on one side and on
the other that of Dada, and in
particular the Dada of his friend Picabia, who in 1923-24 was at
his most scathing both
towards Classicism and Purism, and the politics of the rappel.
This awkward stretch was surely
a product of the same confusion and lack of attention to the
politics and aesthetics of the art
world that led Pound to equate a Vortograph with a Picasso. Noel
Stock suggests that Pound,
after meeting Murphy, had already contemplated making a
Vortographic film. [64] For the two
Americans, Lgers project perhaps became a way of testing that
experimental possibility; by
citing it in his own film, Lger demonstrated its redundancy.
-
Lger, in contrast to this disparate group of expatriate
Americans, had done rather more than
simply write a scenario for a film with Cendrars and perhaps
read Les ABCs du Cinma in whole
or part, or design a poster for La Roue or sets for Marcel
LHerbiers LInhumaine (1924).
Green comments that when La Roue was shown again early in 1924
Paris-Journal remarked that
remarked that the involvement of Lger and Cendrars (who was
assistant) explained the special
power of the machine sequences. [65] This would be on the
occasion of the premiere of the
full-length version of the re-edited film. However, by this time
the Parisian avant-garde was
almost overly familiar with the montage sequences in the film.
Whilst Mikhail Iampolski, keen
to marginalise Cendrarss cinematic influence as a relative
dilettante [66] and following Roger
Icart, claims that major changes were made to the montage after
Gance met with D.W. Griffith,
Canudo had already screened sequences concerned with the
interpretation of landscape within a
special cinematic section of the Salon dAutomne in December
1921. That interpretation
suggests something other than a naturalistic editing. A
full-length version of the film, edited
by Gance, having met Griffith in that year, was first screened
at the Gaumont Palace on 14
December 1922. However, screening versions of the material first
shown by Canudo circulated
in private projections and cin-clubs. One of these, described by
Giovanni Lista as a sort of
Ballet mcanique avant la lettre, [67] was shown by Canudo in the
Salon dAutomne of
December 1923. As Lista points out, it is very probably this
version of La Roue not the full
length melodrama - that Lger is praising in his essay on the
film. Green adds that certainly
Lger acted as an advisor during the editing process [68]; Pierre
Descargues, cited by Green,
comments that the artist actually participated in the shooting
of La Roue. [69]
I suggest that it is within the politics and politicised
aesthetics of Purism that we find the reasons
for the citation of varying, antipathetic, styles in Ballet
mcanique: Lger, equipped with both the
knowledge and experience to do so, assembles his portfolio as a
lexicon of failure and error. He
-
contrasts these approaches, and their conceptual architecture,
through critical parody, with his
own notion of what both filmic form, and cinematographic
representation, should be. [70] The
temporal structure of the film, and in particular its rapid
inter-cutting and the brevity of some
sequences, should alert us to the possibility that the subject
of Ballet mcanique is style. As
Fredric Jameson remarks, apropos of not only the novel that is
his main concern but the
modernist project in general: any violence to normal or habitual
everyday time is enough to
foreground the process of aesthetic perception, to make the work
be noticed as such. [71] This
attention to pre-war style is not simply a matter of aesthetics,
of taste; in the terms of the
rappel a lordre it is profoundly political: the positive
imagination of the body fragmented and
multiplied by the speed and diversity of modern life, which had
so characterised Futurism and
Vorticism is compared, unfavourably, with the integral. The
contrast of close-ups is between the
specific and the universal (the subjectively disabling tendency
of modernity from the early
nineteenth century which has its historical form in the
automatization of the individual by the
state at war, and by capital through programmes such as
Taylorism); the whole and the
shattered; the organic and the mechanical; the modern reality
(Purism) and the illusorily
nostalgic (Pictorialism). The radical imagination of the
shattered subject of pre-war modernity
had found a mirroring reality, for the rappel, in the shattered
bodies of the western front and
the automatic bodies of the Taylorised factory.
Lger, I suggest, uses the fragmentation and multiplication of
the subject, in contrast to the
whole or part of the face in close-up, to undertake an
aggressive critique of earlier modernist
aesthetics and thought in their embrace of modernity, and of
pre-war modernisms
understanding of that condition as both representing and having
a radical transformational effect
upon the human subject. It is essential to note here that such
an exchange of tropes was not
untypical of the aesthetic politics of the rappel lordre. The
first issue of LEsprit nouveau in
-
1920 had created exactly such juxtapositions between photos of
Impressionist work, represented
by Monet and Rodin, and both archaic classical and primitive
forms on the one hand and on
the other a Gris still-life and Seurats Le Chahut (1889-90). If
its journal took the trouble to
label Monet and Rodin as bad and the others as good, and to
briefly explain its
condemnation of the two nineteenth century radicals as grounded
in their supposed
misunderstanding of the relationship of physical and plastic
forms whereas Ballet mcanique is
nowhere explicit in labelling its peculiar aesthetic relations
Purism nonetheless establishes a
model of visual montage that, rather than offering simply a
positivist succession of authorially
generated imagery, provides one that is retrospectively critical
through appropriation and
comparison. Lger similarly takes modernist styles that have been
discredited, either by the
aesthetic developments of Purism or more specifically by the
historical effects of the war, to
illustrate their inadequacies alongside Purisms harmonising of
the human with modern
technology. This practice of appropriation as critique extends
even to the films title, where Lger
invokes Picabias mechanomorph and recent Futurist projects. As I
have argued elsewhere, the
ethos that underpins Picabias work is profoundly at odds with
that found either in Lgers
post-war painting or, ultimately, in Ballet mcanique. [72] In
giving his film this title Lger
either completely misunderstands the critical relationship
between the human and the machine
that is articulated in Picabias work (and indeed in Duchamps) by
seeing in it the same
suborning, and misrepresentation, of the human that he takes to
be the core of Futurist and
Vorticist thought, or, more likely, appropriates it as a
challenge to the position of the two French
artists who mostly completely embraced the aesthetics and
politics of Dada, and whose thought
was so divergent from his own, and that of Purism.
The visual diversity of Ballet mcanique is part of a
recognisably Purist strategy that Ozenfant
and Jeanneret employ elsewhere to critique and discredit older
avant-garde forms. Modernisms
-
reconciliation with the demands of the rappel lordre is thus
effected not simply through the
invocation of the natural, the beautiful and the cohesive in
contrast to the mechanical, the
grotesque and the fragmented, but rather through the exposure of
a certain fallacy in the
modernist investment in an aesthetic of the mechanical and the
fragmentary. For Lger, I
suggest, the failure implicit in these modernist aesthetics is
the condemnation of the subject to
the effects of modernity rather than its redemption from them.
Ballet mcanique uses its
appropriations to promulgate a politicised condemnation of
pre-war modernism as somehow
complicit in the catastrophe of technology for the human that
the war represented.
A fractured face in 1923-24 meant something profoundly different
from 1912, when in a
painting such as Lgers La Femme en bleu it had signified the
possibility of passage between the
subject and the dynamic time and space of modernity that it
inhabited. A fractured face in
1923-24 meant something different from 1916, when Pound and
Coburn had conjured their
first Vortographs, and even from 1918 when the majority of the
French public were probably
still unaware of what a severe facial wound could look like,
even if a hardened soldier like Lger
would have been under no illusions by then. Oddly, with the
exceptions of Romy Golan and
Tom Slevin, none of the art historians addressing the aesthetics
of the rappel lordre note the
profound cultural schism between the call for imaginative
beauty, whether manifested in
Classicism or Purism, and the everyday reality of ravaged,
fragmented bodies and faces in post-
war France. If 1,400,000 Frenchmen died in the conflict, there
were a further 4,200,000 who
had been wounded. (Roughly a quarter of the male French
population was killed or wounded
between 1914 and 1918.) [73] Amongst the most extreme
manifestations of the wounded were
those with utterly fragmented faces, who in France became known
as Les Gueules casses.
These were those soldiers who had suffered facio-maxillary
injuries so severe that reconstruction
to something approximating a normal appearance was impossible.
Whilst, as Tom Slevin has
-
recently observed [74], a discourse emerged throughout the
combatant nations that sought to
repair the damage caused by modern war within a framework of
classical aesthetics often a
brutal, primitive framework that enclosed the injured mans head
after surgery there were
throughout France, as in every other European country, thousands
of men whose fragmented
faces were almost unbearable to look at traumatic, and
traumatised, deviations from the
classical norm (or even the quotidian) that modernity had
created and which modernity could
do little to restore. The disintegrating figure of
Charlot/Chaplin at the beginning of Ballet
mcanique is significant here: for Lger, as he would for a number
of other avant-garde artists
and radical critics such as Walter Benjamin, and however much
his anarchic appeal was
recuperated, Chaplin stood for the ordinary man in relation to
modernity. [75] One of the
consequences of Lgers military service was a lifelong sympathy
for, and investment in, the
ordinary man with whom he had shared danger, fear and injury. He
had witnessed the effects
of an unchecked modernity upon the body of the ordinary man, its
literal disintegration under
shell and machine gun fire, its literal realisation in the
dystopia of the trenches of all the novel,
radical, subjective properties that pre-war modernist art had
promoted as symbolising the
possibilities for a utopian relationship between man and his
milieu. With the war the technique
of passage that Lger had practised before 1914 came first to be
a melding of figure to
environment through camouflage, then of body to mud and air
through its disintegration: that
was what a fragmented face symbolised in 1924.
The gueules casses had already assumed symbolic importance as a
visible manifestation of the
trauma of war. As Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker note, during the
signing of the Treaty of
Versailles, on 28 June 1919, the delegation of gueules cassesand
severely disabled veterans
behind the table was a prominent living reproach, but the men
were also nothing more than
strange and emblematic dcor. [76] The mutilated were present in
a double role: as witness
-
to the human suffering caused by the war, which, in 1919, was
being blamed wholly on
German militarism, and as symbols of wider national trauma the
trauma of those who would
have to care for them, and to look at them, for the rest of
their lives, and in a more general sense
of the smashing of the face of France in its devastated northern
landscape. A remark by Maurice
Aubert, cited by Golan, is apt evidence of the conflation of
soldier and soil in the national
imagination, especially through the figure of the
peasant-warrior, and the relation of traumatised
but still living, men and ravaged, but recovering, landscape.
The face of wounded France will
bear for a long time, maybe forever, the scars inflicted on it
by these tragic years. Surely nature
will soon hide with its endless regenerative powers the murder
attempts and the crimes of men.
Filled in, the trenches will disappear under the plough. [77]
So, I would argue that there is a
symbolic unity that extends beyond the dead peasant, the son of
the soil, corpse fragmented
beyond identification in no-mans-land or buried in a battlefield
cemetery, and reunited with
that soil in its defence - his terroir, la patrie - to the
wounded survivor, now remote from the
wounded landscape, and incapable of being restored to the
natural unity and beauty that the
landscape will, eventually, regain. To be a victim of the war,
to be shattered, had a political
meaning. As the military historian Marc Ferro observes:
the war gave rise to a new hierarchy of merit which society
accepted without a
murmur of protest. At the head of this new elite of victims
(second only to the
dead) were the blinded veterans, followed by the gassed [Lger],
the amputees
[Cendrars], and those whose faces had been disfigured. The lads
of the trenches
came next, with survivors of the nightmares of Verdun [Lger],
the Somme and the
Champagne [Cendrars] ranking higher than veterans of the
Dardanelles or of other
fronts. [78]
I argue that the difference between Ballet mcanique and Lgers
paintings of the time is that the
artist employs in the former the aesthetics of earlier
avant-garde practices as compositional
elements precisely in order to critique them, in the politicised
terms of the rappel lordre, and
-
using a strategy explored elsewhere within one of its central
vanguard art movements, Purism.
This is something that the temporality of the filmstrip allows,
through sequential juxtaposition,
but which would be impossible in the single canvas. The evidence
of the paintings of the same
period is that these appropriated practices, and their aesthetic
traditions, are fundamentally
antithetical to Lgers post-1920 understanding of aesthetics and
politics. Lger adopts these
tropes in making Ballet mcanique into his film, during and after
editing, in order to expose
their flaws, their faith in an unchecked modernity, by their
juxtaposition with the Purist ideal
which bears the hope of reparation, within modernity, after the
trauma of war.
Leger close up notes 1: Lger, F. (Anderson, A. trans.) Ballet
mcanique (dated to 1924 but probably written in 1925 at the
earliest) in Fry, E.F. (ed.) Fernand Lger: Functions of Painting
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1973) p. 50 2: See for example,
Delson, S. Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card (University of
Minnesota Press, ), a determined effort to appropriate Ballet
mcanique to the history of American film that completely ignores
the relationship between the film and the larger affiliations of
Lgers work; Donald, J. Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy
and Ballet mcanique Modernism/modernity Vol. 16, no. 1 (January
2009) 3: Turvey, M. The Avant-Garde and the New Spirit: The Case of
Ballet mcanique October, 102 (Fall 2002) p. 40 4: The Avant-Garde
and the New Spirit: The Case of Ballet mcanique passim 5: Green, C.
Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French
Art, 1916-1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) p. 53 6:
Green, C. Lger and the Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1976) p. 242; Viviani, C. Le Ballet mcanique in Forestier,
S. et al, Fernand Lger et le Spectacle (Paris: ditions de la Runion
des muses nationaux, 1995) p. 120, corrects the date of October
1924 given for this screening in Fernand Lger, Le Ballet mcanique
in Cinma dadaste et surraliste (Paris: Muse national dArt moderne,
1976). Green, C. Lger and the Avant Garde (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976) p. 281 also points out that the film was
modified after the Vienna screening, since the jewel theft referred
to in the film only took place in September 1924. 7: Golding, J.
Lger and the Heroism of Modern Life in Lger and Purist Paris
(London: Tate Gallery, 1971) p. 12 8: Silver, K. Esprit de Corps:
The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War,
1914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989);
Cottington, D. Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and
Politics in Paris, 1905-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998). For the post-war effects of the rappel lordre see especially
Green (1987) op cit and Golan, R. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and
Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995). 9: Cubism and its Enemies p. 13 10: ibid, p. 53 11:
ibid. 12: The Avant-Garde and the New Spirit: The Case of Ballet
mcanique p. 46 13: The Avant-Garde and the New Spirit: The Case of
Ballet mcanique p. 47 14: Lger, F. (Anderson, A. trans.) Notes on
Contemporary Plastic Life (1923) in Fernand Lger: Functions of
Painting op cit, p. 24 15: The Avant-Garde and the New Spirit: The
Case of Ballet mcanique p. 48
-
16: Lger, F. (Green, C. trans.) The Machine Aesthetic: The
Manufactured Object, the Artisan and the Artist, Part I, first
published in Bulletin de LEffort Moderne, No. 1 (January 1924), in
Lger and Purist Paris, op cit., p. 88. 17: Green, C. Cubism
Classicised: a new view of Modern Life in Lger and Purist Paris op
cit., p. 33 18: See Slevin, T. The Body in Modernity: Radical
Imaginations and Reactionary Ideologies, PhD thesis, University of
London, 2009. 19: I am influenced here by two magisterial essays by
Fredric Jameson and their relation of literature to subjectivity:
Form Production in the Magic Mountain and Kafkas Dialectic and in
particular by his discussion of the articulation between Hegels
Phenomenology of Spirit and The Magic Mountain, in Jameson, F. The
Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 80-81 20: See The Body
in Modernity op cit; see also the introduction to my Modernism and
Death: The Body, the Spectre and Modernity (University of Leuven
Press, forthcoming) for a discussion of individuality, death and
subjective transcendence. 21: Rosenblatt, N. Empathy and
Anaesthesia: On the Origins of a French Machine Aesthetic, Grey
Room, 2, (winter 2001) pp. 92-23 22: Form Production in the Magic
Mountain op cit, p. 91 23: See Versari, M.E. Futurist Machine Art,
Constructivism and the Modernity of Mechanization in Berghaus, G.
(ed.) Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopi, 2009) pp. 149-175; for a discussion of the
variation in Futurisms ideas about technology see Berghaus, G.
Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between the
Machine Cult and Machine Angst in the same volume, especially pp.
28-34, and Poggi, C. Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of
Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
24: Green, C. Cubism Classicised: a new view of Modern Life in Lger
and Purist Paris op cit., p. 37 25: Green, C. Leger and LEsprit
nouveau, 1912-1928 in Lger and Purist Paris op cit., p. 49 26:
Ibid, p. 60 27: Ibid, p. 59 28: Ibid, p. 60 29: Ibid, p. 61 30:
Lger, F. Film by Fernand Lger and Dudley Murphy Musical Synchronism
by George Antheil The Little Review, Vol. 10, no 1, (Autumn-Winter
1924-25) p. 43. The hand written draft for this commentary on the
film is dated July 1924. It is reproduced in Bauquier, G. Fernand
Lger: vivre dans le vrai (Paris: Galerie Adrien Maeght, 1987) 31:
Leger and LEsprit nouveau, 1912-1928 op cit, p. 61 32: Man Rays
filmmaking in 1924, such as it was, was premised on ideas of
chance, although Kim Knowles discerns a formal process at work
within this, which would, indeed, reflect Dadas reining in of the
possibilities of aleatorism at the same time as it is deployed.
(See Knowles, K. A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2009) pp. 19-74; Ghali, N. Lavant-garde
cinmatographique en France dans les annes vingt: ides, conceptions,
thories (Paris: ditions Paris Exprimental, 1995) pp. 258-277;
Watts, H. Chance: A Perspective on Dada (Ann Arbor: University
Research Press, 1979.) The ideas that underpin Ballet mcanique,
both in the political and aesthetic terms of Purism, would have
been wholly antithetical to a Dadaist such as Man Ray, and indeed,
Lgers own position in relation to Dada would have problematised Man
Rays involvement. Descriptions of Ballet mcanique as a Dadaist
project in some form, for example by Knowles, neglect the internal
politics of the various movements in the Parisian avant-garde in
the post-war era and the profound schisms resulting from the war.
33: Lger and the Avant-Garde op cit, p. 276, citing Paris Journal,
1 February 1924, p. 3 34: Cendrars, B. LABCs du Cinma in Chefdor,
M. (ed.) (Allen, E. and Chefdor, M. transs.) Blaise Cendrars:
Modernities and Other Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992) p. 27 35: Chefdor, M. The ABCs of Cinema in Blaise
Cendrars: Modernities and Other Writings op cit, p. 122; the
publication history of the various fragments of LABCs du Cinema is
given on p. 129 36: Epsteins early writing and films suggest that
he too had seen and considered rather more of LABCs du Cinma than
was published. 37: Antliff, M. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics
and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993) p. 170 38: Ibid, p. 174 39: In this sense Lawder is
right about the relation of the film to the early paintings, though
he never discusses the temporal regimes of those works. 40: Kern,
S. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press,
-
41: Doane, M.A. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2002) pp. 4-5 42: On Taylorism and economic change in France
in the early twentieth century see Kusiel, R.F. Capitalism and the
State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) pp.
1-92 43: Film by Fernand Lger and Dudley Murphy Musical Synchronism
by George Antheil, op cit, p. 44 44: Leger, F. (Anderson, A.
trans.) The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle
in Fernand Lger: Functions of Painting op cit, p. 41. Lger here is
drawing on an established tradition of the cinematic mask face. See
Iampolsky, M. (Joseph, L. trans.) Mask Face and Machine Face, The
Drama Review, vol. 38, no. 3 (Fall 1994) pp. 64-66. However, we
should not conflate the mask face and the machine face, since they
represent distinct notions of the subject. 45: Ibid p. 42 46: See
Lger and the Avant-Garde op cit, p. 262 47: The Spectacle op cit,
p. 41 48: See Lger and the Avant-Garde op cit, p. 274 49: The
Spectacle op cit, p 45 50: Dicker, B. Ballet mcanique as citation
collage and avant-garde revue, paper given at conference Back to
the Futurists: avant-gardes 1909-2009, Queen Mary College,
University of London, July 2009, publication forthcoming. 51: Film
by Fernand Lger and Dudley Murphy Musical Synchronism by George
Antheil, op cit, p. 46 52: Ibid, p. 43 53: Pound, E. The
Vortographs originally published anonymously in the catalogue
Vortographs and Paintings for Coburns exhibition at the Camera
Club, February 1917, reprinted in Zinnes, H. (ed.) Ezra Pound and
the Visual Arts (New York: New Directions, 1980) p. 154 54:
Humphreys, R. Demon Pantechnicon Driver: Pound in the London
Vortex, 1908-1920 in Pounds Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts
in London, Paris and Italy (London: Tate Gallery, 1985) p 71 55:
Pound, E. Letter to John Quinn, 24 January 1917, reproduced in Ezra
Pound and the Visual Arts op cit, p.281 56: Spate, V. Orphism: The
evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris, 1910-1914, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 29 57: Ibid, p. 33 58: Ibid, pp.
260-261 59: Freeman, J. Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins
and Production of Fernand Lgers Ballet mcanique in Kuenzli, R.
(ed.) Dada and Surrealist Film (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996)
p. 28 60: This hostility is clear in Picabias collection of poetry
Jsus Christ Rastaquoure (1920), in his paintings that mock the work
of Ingres, such as La nuit Espagnole (1922) and in passages of both
Relche and Entracte that make specific reference to the war and its
aftermath. See Pierre, A. (Petersen, E. trans.) Dada Stands its
Ground: Francis Picabia Versus the Return to Order in Petersen, E.
(ed.) Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, Vol. VI, Paris
Dada: The Barbarians Storm the Gates (Farmington Hills: G.K. Hall
& Co., 2001, and my The Art I Love is the Art of Cowards:
Francis Picabia and Ren Clairs Entracte and the Politics of Death
and Remembrance in France after World War One Science as Culture,
Vol. 18, no. 3 (September 2009) pp. 281-296. See also Cubism and
its Enemies, pp. 49-53 61: Archipenko was detested by the Dadaists,
as Paul Paret makes clear. See Paret, P. Archipenkos Failure:
Sculpture and Criticism in post World War One Berlin in Russian
Berlin in the 1920s: Henry Moore Institute Essays on Sculpture, no.
54 (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, nd) His mocking by Van Doesburg
and Raoul Hausmann is paralleled, perhaps, in Entracte where the
coconut heads at which Jean Brlin shoots might be understood as
parodying the Russian artists smoothed, symbolic forms. 62: See Art
Notes The New Age, January 30, 1919 reprinted in Ezra Pound and the
Visual Arts op cit, pp. 94-95 and the draft of Canto 27 reproduced
in Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism op cit, p. 188
63: Beasley, R. Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 175 64: Stock, N.
The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Harmondsworth, 1985) p. 253 65:
Lger and the Avant-Garde op cit., p. 276; see also Pound, E. Paris
Letter, first published in The Dial (March 1923) in Zinnes, H.
(ed.) Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, op cit. p. 175, discussing
the version screened at the Gaumont Palace. My italics 66:
Iampolski, M. (Ram, H. trans.) The Memory of Tiresias:
Intertextuality and Film (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998) see pp. 130-133. We need to remember that the two inventions
of the cinematic
-
alphabet that Cendrars credits to Griffith are the cut-back and
the close-up, not montage. Cendrars, and many other modernist poets
would have been wholly familiar with the principle of juxtaposition
that governs montage; they had after all been using it in
literature for the best part of a decade. For a close reading of
Cendrarss work that reveals syntactical strategies and an
application of forms in the 1910s that will surface in both La Roue
and indeed Ballet mcanique see Scott, C. Reading the Rhythm: The
Poetics of French Free Verse, 1910-1930 pp. 121-153 67: Lista, G.
Lger Scnographe et Cinaste in Fernand Lger et le Spectacle op cit,
p. 56 68: Lger and the Avant-Garde op cit., p. 276. My italics 69:
Descargues, P. Fernand Lger (Paris, 1955) p. 69 70: Cendrars, of
course, had done something rather similar with his Kodak:
Documentaires (1924) project, where he had appropriated Gustave Le
Rouges Le Mystrieux Docteur Cornlius (1913) to demonstrate,
parodically, that the novel functioned as poetry, with only
fifty-six lines out of the 790 total actually being written by
Cendrars. I am indebted to my colleague Eric Robertson for
discussions of this work. See also Reading the Rhythm op cit, pp.
154-183 71: Form Production in the Magic Mountain op cit, p. 71 72:
See my The Last Hope of Intuition: Francis Picabia, Eric Satie and
Ren Clairs Intermedial Projects Relche and Entracte Nottingham
French Studies (forthcoming, 2010-11) 73: The French population in
1914 was about 39.6 million. There were 1.4 million military
deaths, 0.3 million civilian dead, 4.2 million military wounded.
74: Slevin, T. The Wound and the First World War: Cartesian
Surgeries to Embodied Being in Psychoanalysis, Electrification and
Skin Grafting, Body and Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2008) pp.
39-62 75: One model of such recuperation would be Ricciotto Canudos
poem Skating-Ring Tabarin. Ballet (1920) and the subsequent ballet
based upon it, Skating Rink (1922) drawn from Chaplins 1916 Mutual
comedy The Rink. 76: Audoin-Rouzeau, S. & Becker, A. (Temerson,
C. trans.) 14-18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2002) p. 232. See also Audoin-Rouzeau, S. La dlgation des
gueules casses la signature du trait de Versailles in Versailles
quatre-vingt ans aprs. But as Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker
acknowledge, symbolism at the Versailles conference was one thing,
and political reality for les gueules casses as citizens of
post-war France quite another. The mention of victims in the text
of the treaty does not mean that the negotiators had properly
assessed their fate. Quite the contrary. They especially the
mutilated soldiers would have to fight long and hard to obtain
certain rights, not always successfully [14-18 p. 232] Of
necessity, then, by the early 1920s these former soldiers had
acquired a distinct political presence. Organised by five wounded
veterans, and led by Colonel Picot, the most senior amongst them,
the Union des Blesss de la Face was founded in 1921. This group
advanced the idea of a pension, coupled with long-term medical care
and support, including special care and work centres, for its
members. A charitable subscription was opened in late 1925 that led
to the building of a number of such centres by 1927; however,
between the founding of the Union and the successful soliciting of
support came a four year campaign, orchestrated by Picot, in which
Les Gueules casses were highly visible. See Delaporte, S. Les
Gueules Casses: les blesss de la face de la Grand Guerre (Paris:
Nosis, 1996) 77: Modernity and Nostalgia, op cit, pp. 11-21 and
40-45; Aubert, M. Trsors dart de la France meurtrie (Paris, 1921)
cited in Modernity and Nostalgia, op. cit. p. 41. 78: Ferro, M.
Cultural Life in France, 1914-1918 in Roshwald, A. & Stites, R.
(edd.) European Culture in the Great War: The arts, entertainment,
and propaganda, 1914-1918 (CUP 1999) pp. 306-307 Acknowledgements:
This essay has benefited from discussions with my now former PhD
students Barnaby Dicker and Tom Slevin, as well as from colleagues
including Mandy Merck and Eric Robertson, when I presented a
shorter version, largely concerned with Les guelles casses, in a
research seminar at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2009.
Further discussions of Ballet mcanique in the research seminar on
Modernism and Film in the School of Advanced Study at University of
London in 2010 have also contributed to ideas in this essay, and I
am indebted to Kim Knowles for her valuable contributions to that
debate.