Infant's

Celebration: Ballet Mecanique	The story of Ballet Mecanique is quite fabulous. It is a classic art film and a long-neglected classical composition. In short, Ballet Mecanique was directed by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy in 1924 with cinematography by Man Ray, and featuring Alice Prin. George Antheil composed a soundtrack for the film. The relationship between the film and music is unclear, but what is certain is that the film and its original soundtrack were not married in any of the artists' lifetimes. A great deal of information on Antheil and the composition, and a decent amount on the film and filmmakers, is available here. Antheil's composition has been one of our favorite pieces of music for many years. And the film has been an abiding interest for quite some time. You might have noticed, if you're digging through all of Celebration For Outliving Christ, that most of the works are also celebrations of people, places and things that are important to The MVM. And that was intentional on our part. The year we worked on these pieces was a celebration of life and creativity and pleasure. In many ways we think all of the work that comes out of The MVM really boils down to a celebration of who and what we love from day to day. For the penultimate composition in our celebration, we chose to create a new soundtrack for this seminal film. In that way paying tribute to Antheil and the filmmakers. The base upon which Ballet Mecanique is built is a field recording made at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As part of the exhibit L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, LACMA showed the silent Ballet Mecanique film from opening to closing. Being obsessive in our approach to field recording, we camped out and recorded in the gallery space used to show the film for several days (we came and went at open and close, of course). We marked mini-discs each time the film started and ended. We then loaded all of the sound into ProTools and cut it into however many showings we ended up with. It was a lot. Because ProTools LE only goes 24 tracks deep, we had to keep mixing down versions twenty four at a time and adding them to the layering of fresh runs. In the end we had a wonderful composition built up just with that process. But it wasn't perfect, so there is a fair amount of additional composition added, primarily from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film career we were watching chronologically. We married the soundtrack to the film and released a DVD of the pair as part of Celebration For Outliving Christ. Six copies of this DVD were sent to the estates of Tarkovsky, Leger, Prin, Murphy, Ray and Antheil. The seventh we shopdropped at LACMA's gift shop.
All materials generated by The Museum of Viral Memory are free for the butchering under a creative commons license. Some items generated by others which we feature here are copyright protected. This is clearly stated when it is the case. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Celebration: Ballet Mecanique

Ballet

The story of Ballet Mecanique is quite fabulous. It is a classic art film and a long-neglected classical composition. In short, Ballet Mecanique was directed by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy in 1924 with cinematography by Man Ray, and featuring Alice Prin. George Antheil composed a soundtrack for the film. The relationship between the film and music is unclear, but what is certain is that the film and its original soundtrack were not married in any of the artists' lifetimes. A great deal of information on Antheil and the composition, and a decent amount on the film and filmmakers, is available here.

Antheil's composition has been one of our favorite pieces of music for many years. And the film has been an abiding interest for quite some time. You might have noticed, if you're digging through all of Celebration For Outliving Christ, that most of the works are also celebrations of people, places and things that are important to The MVM. And that was intentional on our part. The year we worked on these pieces was a celebration of life and creativity and pleasure. In many ways we think all of the work that comes out of The MVM really boils down to a celebration of who and what we love from day to day.

For the penultimate composition in our celebration, we chose to create a new soundtrack for this seminal film. In that way paying tribute to Antheil and the filmmakers.

The base upon which Ballet Mecanique is built is a field recording made at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As part of the exhibit L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, LACMA showed the silent Ballet Mecanique film from opening to closing.

Being obsessive in our approach to field recording, we camped out and recorded in the gallery space used to show the film for several days (we came and went at open and close, of course). We marked mini-discs each time the film started and ended. We then loaded all of the sound into ProTools and cut it into however many showings we ended up with. It was a lot. Because ProTools LE only goes 24 tracks deep, we had to keep mixing down versions twenty four at a time and adding them to the layering of fresh runs. In the end we had a wonderful composition built up just with that process. But it wasn't perfect, so there is a fair amount of additional composition added, primarily from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film career we were watching chronologically.

We married the soundtrack to the film and released a DVD of the pair as part of Celebration For Outliving Christ.

Six copies of this DVD were sent to the estates of Tarkovsky, Leger, Prin, Murphy, Ray and Antheil. The seventh we shopdropped at LACMA's gift shop.

All materials generated by The Museum of Viral Memory are free for the butchering under a creative commons license. Some items generated by others which we feature here are copyright protected. This is clearly stated when it is the case.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.