The Avant-Garde and the “New Spirit”: The Case of Ballet mécanique

Abstract

37 What are we to make of this statement? In part, as Kristin Thompson has pointed out to me, it is probably the case that Leger simply meant that his film is not the sense that, say, Hans Richter and Victor Eggeling's films are abstract. In other words, unlike their films, or the paintings of a Kandinsky or a Mondrian, Ballet mecanique is not concerned with the Neoplatonic depiction of spiritual or metaphysical truths behind appearances.38 However, there is a second sense which the film can be understood as in no way that is hinted at the manner which the quotation above lists some of the concrete objects depicted Ballet mecanique, as opposed to their abstract similarities to each other. One of the things that readers of Leger might notice his remarks on film general is the extent to which, above all other cinematic techniques (including editing, which he hardly ever mentions), Leger privileged and emphasized the close-up and its transformative power. For example, his retrospective notes on Ballet mecanique, he remarked, I used the close-up, which is the only cinematographic invention.39 And his March 1923 reply to Rene Clair's enquete the journal Film, he observed, [The cinema] will be everything... when filmmakers develop the consequences of the close-up, which is the cinematic architecture of the future.40 By themselves, neither of these quotations should surprise us too much, for as we know from Lawder's research, Leger was indebted to Cendrars's book L'ABD du cinema, which the close-up, along with editing, is singled out repeatedly. However, following the passage just quoted from Film, Leger goes on to say of the power of the close-up, A detail of an object transformed into an absolute whole is personified when projected large dimensions; a portion of a human being is personified when projected large dimensions.41 And his remarks on Ballet 37. Quoted Kosinski, Leger, 1911-1924, p. 24. 38. On Neoplatonism Kandinsky and Mondrian, see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,