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184 III. COMPOSITION
she insisted on the correspondence between visual and musical rhythms.19 The visual "symphonies" of the period had two organizational characteristics. First, at least some of the artists producing these films found it convenient to follow the lead of a musical piece in evolving their pictorial sequences. Madame Dulac in her Disque 957 translated, or believed to translate, the Chopin Prelude no. 6 into a continuity for the eyes; and Oskar Fischinger was fond of patterning his rhythmical abstractions on given music, classical or otherwise. Suffice it to mention the actual occurrence of such fusions between music and film; the aesthetic problem they raise has already been dealt with in previous contexts.*
The second characteristic has to do with the material rhythmicized. Germaine Dulac pointed to it when she defined cinema as "the art of the movement and the visual rhythms of life and the imagination."20 Her definition sanctioned what was then customary practice; the visual rhythms were imparted through both things imagined and real-life phenomena. The penchant for invented shapes resulted in a number of films confining themselves to sheer abstractions; Marcel Duchamp's Anaemic Cinema with its concentric circles and rotating spirals goes far in this direction. Other rhythmical films were less puristic. Take Disque 957 or Richter's Film Study 1926: the movements contrived in them involve not only abstract patterns but natural objects as well. Some such composite creations even show a marked concern for physical reality; Leger's Ballet mecanique, for instance, includes only a minimum of drawn or painted geometrical forms.21
ENCROACHMENT OF CAMERA-REALITY
What exactly is the function of the real-life inserts in avant-garde films featuring visual music? On the one hand, their authors were keen on capturing, with the aid of genuinely cinematic techniques, interesting details and unusual sights fit to stimulate audience sensitivity to the world about us; in Disque 957 water drops trickle down a window pane and floating mists make an alley look mysterious. On the other hand, the same artists recorded such material phenomena not to establish physical reality but for a compositional purpose: they wanted to build from them a self-sufficient sequence of rhythmical movements.
This is strikingly illustrated by that quasi-realistic episode of Ballet mecanique, in which a washerwoman climbs a flight of stairs without ever safely arriving at the top; no sooner is she about to reach it than she finds herself back again at the bottom and resumes her ascent. [Illus. 35] By means of a simple editing trick she is thus made to trudge up and up an
* See pp. 152-3. Cf. also p. 149.