Vom Singen, vom Mechanischen und von den Emotionen

Abstract

Fernand Leger’s The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart from Hans Richter’s episode movie Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) connects the after-war reality to the importance of the mechanical and the dominant role of objects in avant-garde projects of the 1920s and combines them with the disintegration of subject sovereignty as a category and the substitution of the human body through puppets. It is based on a popular dandy song performed by two vocal stars of the 1940s—Libby Holman and Josh White—and portrays a romantic love story with a fatal ending, told in animated scenes of mannequin dolls, abstract paintings, and objects from Leger’s oeuvre that in the end lead to a collage of discursive differences: the popular vs. avant-garde; the clash between time concepts in music and image; heteronomous concepts of femininity; love and narcissism; and the changing relations between the real and the imaginary, especially in the pretended subjectivity of dreaming.