I will speak to you a bit about Ballet mécanique. It has a simple story. I made it between 1923-24. At that time, I made paintings where the active elements were objects completely devoid of atmosphere. Painters had already destroyed the story. Just as avant-garde film had supposedly destroyed the descriptive screenplay. I thought that neglected object could take on a value of its own in the cinema as well. On that basis, I worked on the film. I took very ordinary objects and transposed them onscreen, giving them mobility and rhythm, chosen and calculated very carefully. Contrast between objects, slow and rapid passages, pauses, moments of greater intensity, the entire film is built on these foundations. I used the close-up, the sole cinematographic invention. I also employed the fragment of an object; by isolating it, it is given personality. All this work led me to consider the event of objectivity as a new value with a very contemporary nature.

Fernand Léger, Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, Gonthier, 1965

In terms of footage included in Ballet mécanique, what might Léger have planned or had Murphy shoot? Man Ray was adamant that he and Murphy had shot all the footage using Kiki – “You don’t loan out your mistress, do you?” he said – as well as all the open-air footage on the streets and in Luna Park. Murphy corroborates this in an interview given at the time of a New York screening of Ballet mécanique. Along with his discussion of “rhythmic and dynamic tempo”, Murphy, who identifies himself as the key filmmaker, reproduces pictures of the stocking-model legs and kitchen utensils mirrored in the kaleidoscopic lenses, as well a some machine parts, as examples of his idea and work. In his unpublished memoir, “Murphy by Murphy”, he further identifies the shot of the washerwoman climbing the stairs as his in idea and execution, included the looped editing.

William Moritz, “Americans in Paris. Man Ray and Dudley Murphy”, in Jan-Christopher Horak, Lovers of cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde. 1919-1945, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

The music by Georges Antheil: The ensemble for 4 pianos and 12 percussion, includes also two airplanes engines, or at least, their sound: “Smaller Airplane Propeller sound/Large Airplane Propeller sound”. The ‘airplane sound’ is reported in the score sheet and enters five bars after n. 1 and Antheil carefully examine it in the Composer’s Instruction. It is well known that in some fields, such as motor racing for instance, experts and lovers are able to recognise the “musical” sound of a 12 cylinders Ferrari, as also in the aeronautics where each period is characterised by specific engine design.

In the 1920s, the most common French civil airplanes had either a radial engine or a “V” engine on, which were indeed the most diffused: the 1919 Farman F. 60 “Goliath” had radial engines, 1921 Blériot Spad 46 was propelled by an outstanding Lorraine-Dietrich 12 Da, a “V”, 370 HP 12 cylinder with a liquid cooling system; 1924 Blériot 135 used 4 Salmson 9Ab radial engines and so on. Only from the 1950s on, the ‘general’ aviation, that is civil and private, has adopted, for small airplanes, horizontal or lined cylindrical engines with an hegemonic control by the American Continental and Lycoming (…). Probably these distinctions may seem a little captious to someone, nevertheless, just as a bass viol is never mistaken with a cello or a Boehm with a Baroque flute, the differences of sound – volume, tone, nuisance – among different engines are equally important.

Sergio Miceli, Musica e cinema nella cultura del Novecento, Milano, Sansoni, 2000