This post is a Media One / Cinema Studies Crossover post about Non-narrative / avant-gade cinema

I confess, I have never much enjoyed non-narrative and avant grade cinema. I tend to stick to the warm fuzzies of pretty hollywood narratives. But eventually, a film student is forced to grapple with the void of a sans story film or learn to find the story in the apparent absence. Ballet Mechanique, has a very similar kind of absence as Disney’s Fantasia in the sense that, the two films are like a dance, seemingly made up of small components that don’t much blend (kinda sorta like Holy Motors).

Film Art categorises Ballet Mechanique as abstract form, suggesting that the film is made up of several distinct parts. As I touched on in some of my previous blog posts, pieces that people would consider to be non-narrative, still at a core level contain some level of narrative. In this case the way in which the elements of the scene are juxtaposed with editing creates narrative, despite it being near impossible to extract meaning from.

I found the film to be quite jarring to watch as the quick successive shots in the film do not really flow. The pace of the edit is very disjointed as opposed to modern montages. The inclusion of the cartoon Charlie Chaplain as a motif was really interesting. Using theme and variation, similarly to other longer form cinema, the film introduces and then reintroduces images and motifs to encourage small snippets of audience-created meaning. The idea is to create a dance of the machines, yet with mostly human elements rather than machine-like elements.

Obviously, the film substantially differs from anything around in the late twenties and the film would have been more of a visual experience for the audience and I think that is something really interesting about these avant grade films, they show us how cinema can exist without the conventional elements we would associate with the medium.