George Antheil’s original 1924 score “Ballet pour instruments mécaniques et percussions” called for 16 player pianos, a melange of percussion instruments, and two human pianists, supplemented by a siren, airplane propellers, and electric bells. Antheil had described his work as “the first piece of music that has been composed out of and for machines, on earth.” The score was originally supposed to accompany the film even though, famously, it never really did. Presumably due to communication problems between Fernand Légerand Antheil, the score ended up being almost twice as long as the film. In 1952 Antheil revised the score for human performance but because it is a widely difficult work to execute both in terms of personnel and equipment, it has very rarely been played together with the film without the use of computers or multi-track recordings. In this performance, everything, with the exception of the propellers’ sound, will be played live and by humans, including the piano, xilophone and siren parts. The score calls for: glockenspiel, small airplane propeller sound, large airplane propeller sound, gong, cymbal, woodblock, triangle, military drum, tambourine, small electric bell, large electric bell, tenor drum, bass drum, 2 xylophones, 4 pianos and siren.

Timothy Brock

The story of avant-garde films is rather simple. They are a reaction against films with screenplays and actors. They offer imagination and play as opposed to the commercial nature of other types of film. And that is not all. They are the painters’ and poets’ revenge. In an art such as this one where the image should be everything and instead it becomes secondary to a fictional anecdote, artists had to defend themselves and prove that the arts of the imagination, relegated to being accessory, could on their own and with their own means create films without scripts by treating the moving image as the main character. (…) Whatever Ballet mécanique may be (…) the goal is to avoid the average, to be free of the dead weight that constitutes other films’ reason for being. To break away from elements that are not purely cinematographic. To let imagination run free no matter the risk, to create adventure on the screen as do poetry and painting every day.

Fernand Léger, “Fonctions de la peinture”, Gouthier, Paris, 1965

I will speak to you a bit about Ballet mécanique. It has a simple story. I made it between 1923-24. At that time, I made paintings where the active elements were objects completely devoid of atmosphere. Painters had already destroyed the story. Just as avant-garde film had supposedly destroyed the descriptive screenplay. I thought that neglected object could take on a value of its own in the cinema as well. On that basis, I worked on the film. I took very ordinary objects and transposed them onscreen, giving them mobility and rhythm, chosen and calculated very carefully. Contrast between objects, slow and rapid passages, pauses, moments of greater intensity, the entire film is built on these foundations. I used the close-up, the sole cinematographic invention. I also employed the fragment of an object; by isolating it, it is given personality. All this work led me to consider the event of objectivity as a new value with a very contemporary nature.

Fernand Léger, Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, Gonthier, 1965

In terms of footage included inBallet mécanique, what might Léger have planned or had Murphy shoot? Man Ray was adamant that he and Murphy had shot all the footage using Kiki – “You don’t loan out your mistress, do you?” he said – as well as all the open-air footage on the streets and in Luna Park. Murphy corroborates this in an interview given at the time of a New York screening ofBallet mécanique. Along with his discussion of “rhythmic and dynamic tempo”, Murphy, who identifies himself as the key filmmaker, reproduces pictures of the stocking-model legs and kitchen utensils mirrored in the kaleidoscopic lenses, as well a some machine parts, as examples of his idea and work. In his unpublished memoir, “Murphy by Murphy”, he further identifies the shot of the washerwoman climbing the stairs as his in idea and execution, included the looped editing.

William Moritz, “Americans in Paris. Man Ray and Dudley Murphy”, in Jan-Christopher Horak, Lovers of cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde. 1919-1945, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

The music by Georges Antheil: The ensemble for 4 pianos and 12 percussion, includes also two airplanes engines, or at least, their sound: “Smaller Airplane Propeller sound/Large Airplane Propeller sound”. The ‘airplane sound’ is reported in the score sheet and enters five bars after n. 1 and Antheil carefully examine it in the Composer’s Instruction. It is well known that in some fields, such as motor racing for instance, experts and lovers are able to recognise the “musical” sound of a 12 cylinders Ferrari, as also in the aeronautics where each period is characterised by specific engine design.

In the 1920s, the most common French civil airplanes had either a radial engine or a “V” engine on, which were indeed the most diffused: the 1919 Farman F. 60 “Goliath” had radial engines, 1921 Blériot Spad 46 was propelled by an outstanding Lorraine-Dietrich 12 Da, a “V”, 370 HP 12 cylinder with a liquid cooling system; 1924 Blériot 135 used 4 Salmson 9Ab radial engines and so on. Only from the 1950s on, the ‘general’ aviation, that is civil and private, has adopted, for small airplanes, horizontal or lined cylindrical engines with an hegemonic control by the American Continental and Lycoming (…). Probably these distinctions may seem a little captious to someone, nevertheless, just as a bass viol is never mistaken with a cello or a Boehm with a Baroque flute, the differences of sound – volume, tone, nuisance – among different engines are equally important.

Sergio Miceli, Musica e cinema nella cultura del Novecento, Milano, Sansoni, 2000