Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy
16 min
France 1924

“Ballet Mécanique dates from the period when architects talked about the machine civilization… This film is above all proof that machines and fragments of them, that ordinary manufactured objects, have plastic possibilities” (Léger c.1924).

Structured by a rhythm, the visual material of Ballet Mécanique is arranged like the sections of an orchestra. Only the machinery moves with an autonomous force, an automatic conductor with everything else appearing to follow its lead.

Ballet mécanique premiered on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna.

Fernand Léger
(1881–55) France

Fernand Léger began his career with an apprenticeship in architecture and working as a draughtsman. In 1900 Léger went to Paris and was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Seeing the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and his contact with the early Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had an extremely significant impact on his work. From 1911 to 1914 Léger’s work became increasingly abstract, and he started to limit his color to the primaries and black and white. In 1912 he was given his first solo show at Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris.

Léger served in the military from 1914 to 1917. His “mechanical” period, in which figures and objects are characterized by tubular, machinelike forms, began in 1917. During the early 1920s he collaborated with the writer Blaise Cendrars on films and designed sets and costumes for performances by Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois. In 1924 he completed his first film, Ballet mécanique together with American Dudley Murphy. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibition of his work. Léger lived in the United States from 1940 to 1945 but returned to France after the war where he died in 1955 at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Dudley Murphy
(1897–68) USA

Dudley Murphy began making films in the early 1920s after working as a journalist. His first short film, Soul of the Cypress (1920), was a variation on the Orpheus myth. Ballet mécanique, codirected with Fernand Léger was Murphy's eighth film. Other films include St. Louis Blues (1929) with Bessie Smith, Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, and The Emperor Jones (1933), starring Paul Robeson.

Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, Ballet Mécanique 1924, © courtesy of Anthology Film Archives