A Film Canon

Despite opening and closing with an animated cubist painting, this is primarily a work of futurism, aestheticising and eroticising - that is, fetishising - consumer objects, generally by juxtaposing them with women, who in turn become more mechanical, mannequinised and, ultimately, appealing. As the film progresses, these women gradually lose any semblance of femininity, exhibiting a mass-produced androgyny that suggests some new, non-biological configuration of sexuality, as well a more general, utopian, industrialised subjectivity. For this reason, Léger makes very little distinction between people and machines, subsuming both into a rhythmic vision whose effectiveness depends on a tension between the two-dimensional, embodied in a prismatic, kaleidoscopic tendency to fragment the screen into so many triangles; and the three-dimensional, embodied in a vertiginous movement of (usually) spherical objects towards the camera, most notably the semi-reflective pendulum of a clock. The former is particularly effective, especially in those sequences where Léger orchestrates things to give the impression that the machines portrayed are effecting this fragmentation and triangulation, creating a complete collapse of subject and object that characterises the camera as a mere machine among many. This explains its tendency to mechanically repeat certain segments over and over, as well as the industrial soundtrack, scored for player pianos, bells, a siren and aeroplane propellors.