To celebrate the 40th anniversary edition of the Bonn Summer Cinema, we open this year’s festival by showing the first silent film to be screened at the festival back in 1985: BALLET MÉCANIQUE. The film, considered a defining work of avant-garde cinema, combines (and condenses) abstract images of people, industry and everyday objects using a variety of experimental film techniques (including animation, multiple exposures and rapid editing) to create a Dadaistic visual tour de force. EYE Filmmuseum’s 35mm print stems from a rare vintage nitrate print, which contains hand-coloured shots in a variety of different colours.

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Cinema’s downfall is the screenplay, noted Fernand Léger in the 1920s. If it could rid itself of this burden, he continued, then the cinematic arts would become a gigantic microscope for viewing things never before seen or felt.

Léger’s BALLET MÉCANIQUE provides a prototype for this microscope; it guides our view into a foreign universe, into the sphere of the mechanical, into stories freed of false drama and bothersome psychology.

BALLET MÉCANIQUE is to be understood as the continuation and expansion of a number of principles that Fernand Léger, strongly influenced by Cubism, had developed in his painting since 1910: as a systematic deconstruction of mechanized life, as a celebration of the simple graphical forms to which humans and machines can always be traced back. As prescribed by the Surrealistic method, Léger shifts the ordinary to appear as surprising.

The leading character in the film reveals Léger’s strong ties to pop culture. A cubistically alienated “Charlot,” as the French call “their” Charlie Chaplin, lifts his hat in greeting. Like a clockwork conférencier, reduced to his primary symbols (walking stick, wavy hair, moustache, bowler hat, and hobo shoes), Léger’s animated Chaplin presents his “mechanical ballet.”

Stefan Grissemann, in: Laboratorium Moderne. Wien, Nürnberg 2007

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