Modernity and the machine in Ballet mécanique

ABSTRACT This article aims to examine Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924), focusing on its response to technological modernity. Firstly, it assesses the film’s ‘Purist’ leanings, and especially the notion that it provides moments of reprieve from the perceptual shock that typifies modern urban life. Following this, it provides a close examination of the relationship between the human and the machine in the film, considering whether it seeks to write out the human in favour of the mechanical, or to reconfigure the human with the model of the machine in mind. Finally, the article considers other ‘mechanisms’ at work in the film – the cinematic apparatus and the human psyche – and the figure of ‘Charlot’ (Charlie Chaplin) as an emblem of these. It ultimately suggests that Léger is mobilising some of the techniques of the earlier ‘cinema of attractions’ in order to capture anxieties around the effects of machine culture on the human beings living under its regime.