ACM Presents Score & Screen: Ballet Mécanique at The CheckOut

Machines. Motion. Rhythm. Dada. Welcome to the moment when movies went completely off the rails. Score & Screen: Ballet Mécanique — Machines, Motion & the Avant-Garde dives into the radical explosion of experimental filmmaking in the 1920s, when artists stopped asking movies simply to tell stories and began treating the screen itself as a laboratory. An hour of surreal, abstract, mechanical, and gleefully strange films explores a cinematic world of spinning objects, fractured bodies, impossible movement, visual rhythms, machines, repetition, and pure image. The program culminates in Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s legendary Ballet Mécanique, one of the defining works of the early avant-garde. And then there’s the music. George Antheil conceived his notorious Ballet Mécanique score as a musical machine of pounding rhythms, player pianos, percussion, sirens, and sheer sonic excess. For this performance, Dr. David Wetzel creates a new realization of Antheil’s score, bringing this outrageous musical experiment roaring back to life alongside the film. It’s a collision of image and sound that artists dreamed about a century ago but technology could barely make possible. One hundred years later, we’re going to give it another shot.