Abstract
Fernand Leger’s The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart from Hans Richter’s episode movie Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) connects the after-war reality to the importance of the mechanical and the dominant role of objects in avant-garde projects of the 1920s and combines them with the disintegration of subject sovereignty as a category and the substitution of the human body through puppets. It is based on a popular dandy song performed by two vocal stars of the 1940s—Libby Holman and Josh White—and portrays a romantic love story with a fatal ending, told in animated scenes of mannequin dolls, abstract paintings, and objects from Leger’s oeuvre that in the end lead to a collage of discursive differences: the popular vs. avant-garde; the clash between time concepts in music and image; heteronomous concepts of femininity; love and narcissism; and the changing relations between the real and the imaginary, especially in the pretended subjectivity of dreaming.
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