Anemic Cinema (1926)

Original title

Anémic cinéma

Directed by

Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp

Genre

silent film, experimental film

Country

France

Runtime

7 min

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 86 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This 1926 silent black-and-white film from Marcel Duchamp shows spinning disk designs called Rotoreliefs. The disks have French puns spiraling on them, and the words and patterns hint at erotic or scatological wordplay.

cerebralstatichypnoticdryly comicabstractminimalistpulsatingwhimsical

What happens

Anemic Cinema or Anémic Cinéma is a 1926 Dada/surrealist French experimental film by Marcel Duchamp (credited to his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), made in collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret. The seven-minute film is composed of alternating static camera shots of spinning animated drawings disks — which Duchamp called Rotoreliefs — inscribed with puns and alliterations in French. The text, which spirals in a counterclockwise motion, suggests erotic scenarios and the words, if read aloud, produce repetitive patterns of sounds that lead to scatological or obscene associations in reference to pulsating human sexual activity. To make Anémic Cinéma, Duchamp filmed painted designs he made on flat cardboard circles while they spun on a phonograph turntable. When spinning, the flat disks appeared three-dimensional. The film premiered in a private screening in Paris in August 1926 and was acquired by MoMA in 1938, the first Duchamp work to enter a museum. Duchamp had a commercial printer run off 500 sets of six of the designs and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring three-dimensional sight to people with one eye. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Emak-Bakia (1926)
• Ballet Mécanique (1924)
• Un Chien Andalou (1929)
• Mademoiselle Josette, My Woman (1926)
• Seein' Things (1909)
• The Imaginary Voyage (1926)
• L'Homme mouche (1902)
• The Four Troublesome Heads (1898)