Directors: Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
Year: 1924
Time: 17 mins
Music:
George Antheil
Paul Lehrmann
Eye of Sound:
It's difficult to make a brief description of such a historically
charged film, so I'll just mention a few facts about the version
presented here. Ballet Mécanique was jointly conceived by Dadaist
painter and filmmaker Fernand Léger and Futurist composer George
Antheil. Legend has it that Antheil's score was technically impossible
to execute at the time: among other "oddities", it demanded sixteen
synchronized pianos when there was no technology available to
synchronize so many instruments at a time. Antheil rearranged it and
added live piano players, but its American première turned out to be a
disaster, with riots and all. The score was abandoned and for many
decades every attempt to perform it bumped into the problem of
synchronizing the pianos. Finally, in the 90s, after the discovery of
the complete cut for Ballet Mécanique, Paul Lehrmann used modern MIDI
technology to synchronize the piano section, thus "restoring" the score
and allowing today's viewers to watch Ballet Mécanique as it was
conceived. As far as I know, this is the only version which included
the original George Antheil score.
