Avant-Garde Cinema and Ballet Blogchanique

For my final post I will be focusing upon Avant-Garde, with close reference to Malcom Turvey’s The Avant-Garde and the “New Spirit”: The Case of “Ballet méchanique”. What I found most interesting that was mentioned in Turvey’s reading was the strange dichotomy that exists in Avant-Garde films of the era – Matei Calinescu notes that Avant-Garde films such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique (1924) display a “radical criticism of the past and a definite commitment to change and the value of the future”. It is true that such films simultaneously typify a sort of filmic self-flagellation for cinematic wrong doings of the past and a great hope – “a universal joyousness” (Apollinaire) for the future.

Using Ballet méchanique as a reference point it is interesting to deduce how such a theory can be applied to the genre, and how it parallels the general sentiment of post World War I society. In Ballet méchanique “the machine functions as an ideal that human beings should emulate in their behavior in order to achieve the maximum efficiency and productivity”. Ironically, the Avant-Garde’s desire to mechanize humanity came after a war where machines had played such a pivotal role in bloodshed and destruction on an unprecedented scale.