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.

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-

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.