Ballet Mechanique

Been meaning to point you, Dear Reader, to this great find. Did you, think, f'rinstance, that Citizen Kane was Orsen Welles first movie? Think again.

Quick, name Orson Welles's first movie. Citizen Kane, right? Guess again. It's The Hearts of Age, which the 19-year-old prodigy co-directed with a friend in 1934.

This eight-minute trifle isn't much of a movie. Still, its story-free parody of modernist mannerisms gives a tantalizing glimpse of the visual preoccupations -- startling images, fluid cinematography, eye-jolting montage -- that would become Welles's trademarks.

I recalled the collection today because I got to hear a brief part of the soundtrack to Ballet Mechanique, and for a few moments was transfixed.

Virtually all the Unseen Cinema items are striking, and some are downright dazzling. One example is Ballet Mechanique (1924), directed by the French artist Fernand Leger and the American cineaste Dudley Murphy, who provided many of the movie's playful, collagelike visual ideas. A staple of modernist programs in classrooms and elsewhere, the film contains many seminal Dadaesque images: a woman swooping upside down on a garden swing, a newspaper headline with animated letters, a washerwoman trudging up a staircase that never ends. What's new in the Unseen Cinema presentation is the presence of George Antheil's music, composed for the film in 1924 but never before paired with the movie in a readily available edition -- not surprisingly, since Antheil's score calls for an unorthodox orchestra including a siren, three xylophones, numerous electric bells, and three airplane propellers. [Here and in the above paragraph, modified to fix names in which accents wouldn't translate from site to site, and I was too lazy to find a better work-around. So sue me.]

It wasn't the "unorthodox scoring" of Ballet Mechanique that made the sountrack a rarity, though. It's because it also requires several player pianos and until recently it was simply impractical to synchronize them.

Oh, and the reason I heard that brief excerpt is because it was mentioned in this review of the Dada show now on exhibit at the National Gallery.

Oops, and this was meant to be a purely non-political post. I'd forgotten that by writing approvingly of such things, I'm being objectively pro-degenerate art.