The Avant-Garde

The standard interpretation of “Avant-Garde” cinema is that it was more radical and extreme than “Surrealist” cinema. “Avant-Garde” is seen to be a representation of a need for radical social change. A reflection of industrialisation of the socio-economic climate, a search for a pure form that displayed the mechanics of the machine age. I wish to consider this in relation to Leger’s Ballet Mecanique. There are of course elements in the film that recall Metropolis, the mechanisation of objects that anthropomorphically suggest the repetition of the machine. In addition, Leger’s own painting “The City” conveys an influence on the film which through close ups and rapid editing produces a visual experience of dynamism. A visual notion of simultaneity that is also reflected in the fine art movements of the time, Futurism, with the work of Balla and the Bragalia brothers. However, in relating the film to art movements of the time, I wish to suggest that it possibly owes more to synthetic  cubism, that the sum of the parts is actually less than the whole. So what is the whole that Leger is suggesting? In reviewing “The Avant-Garde and the “New-Sprit”: The Case of the Ballet mecanique” by Malcom Turvey, a revised approach to Leger’s Ballet Mechanique, I do tend to agree that Leger’s work  is more complex than the traditional interpreation. That by his own writings, Leger critises the machine age and that through Ballet Mechanique, Leger is calling for a social reform that negates the machine age, and is representing though the film notions of classical unity,  a call for calm and unity in the name of social reform.