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EXPERIMENTAL FILM 185
endless number of times. Now the stubborn reiteration of her performance is palpably not meant to impress upon us this particular woman in the act of climbing; were it otherwise, she would not invariably behave in the same way but slow down after a while and show the usual symptoms of weariness. And since the shots of the woman fail to account of her presence, we do not experience their possible meanings either; looking at the repetitious woman, it never occurs to us that her vain climb might reflect the toils of Sisyphus. Actually, what we are watching is not so much a real-life figure mounting a nightmarish flight of stairs as the movement of climbing itself. The emphasis on its rhythm obliterates the reality of the woman executing it so that she turns from a concrete person into the pale carrier of a specific kind of motion.* Due to the obtrusiveness of the movements they perform, the saucepan lids and egg beaters with which she is mingling22 are likewise reduced to near-abstract shapes. They vanish from sight, so to speak, and what remains of them is as immaterial as the grin of the Cheshire cat. Leger himself traced his Ballet mecanique to his desire "to create the rhythm of common objects in space and time, to present them in their plastic beauty."23 Does he not misinterpret his film? Such "plastic beauty" as he, perhaps, presents in it is inherent in the rhythms rather than the objects overshadowed by them. If the intrinsic beauty of objects is found anywhere, it is in Dovzhenko's Earth, not in the Leger film; and Dovzhenko reveals that beauty not by having his objects achieve impressive movements but, conversely, by showing them in a state of complete motionlessness.
All this amounts to saying that the real-life shots in the rhythmical avant-garde films suffer from emasculation. Instead of suggesting the continuum of physical existence from which they are elicited, they function as elements of compositions which, almost by definition, shut out nature in the raw. True, the devotees of visual music trained their camera on natural objects, but their formative aspirations, manifest in a permanent preoccupation with formal values and sundry movements, blunted their sense of the medium's affinity for the unstaged, the incidental, the not yet shaped. The "artist" in them won out over the "reader."
In their films the flow of rhythms— if it is a flow— continually disrupts the flow of life, and once they are isolated from the latter, the phenomena belonging to it cannot become eloquent. The images of the falling water drops and the mysterious alley in Disque 957 hold out a promise which, by no fault of theirs, is revoked instantly.
* Hans Richter in his Ghosts Before Breakfast borrowed this motif from the Leger film, the only difference being that he featured a man climbing a ladder instead of a woman trying to negotiate a flight of stairs.