Anemic Cinema
S. E. Armstrong
Marcel Duchamp made a number of Rotoreliefs by applying various patterns to discs and then rotating them with an electric motor. The film he made of them in 1926 was called Anemic Cinema and, just as the pieces themselves did, it successfully generated virtual sculptures through optical illusion. There are versions of this film in circulation on the internet, YouTube and Vimeo for instance, with a musical sound track added, and there are also colour versions floating around. But the original was made in 1926, so it’s safe to say it’s a black and white, silent film. I found the added sound track impertinent and distracting because three dimensionality suddenly popping up silently, and in black and white, is more than stimulating enough on its own. The film from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is included below.
Why would Duchamp call it Anemic Cinema? I think this question gets to the heart of the matter. To answer it, the viewer needs to clarify an understanding of what sculpture is, and what cinema is. Must sculpture actually be three dimensional, or would virtual three dimensionality suffice? A major theme in Duchamp’s work is to push viewers to define terms and make the necessary and sufficient conditions explicit. In the 1917 New York show of the Society of Independent Artists Inc. Duchamp exhibited a urinal, and if a urinal can be art, then the question is “Why?”.
Duchamp’s film refines the sculpture problem even further. Now there isn’t even a disc and a motor, but rather, an image of a disc that seems to rotate because of the presentation speed of progressive images, in other words, a movie. That’s about as virtual as a sculpture can get.
But I think “anemic” relates strictly to film as opposed to sculpture. A film is a virtual event, non-narrative and abstract films included. Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale, 1971, is a virtual event just as much as Citizen Kane. I think that’s just what film is. The events you witness in a movie aren’t really happening, you just knowingly take them as real during the viewing.
In 1920 Naum Gabo was probably responsible for the first kinetic sculpture in Western art, and in 1926, Duchamp used movement to make a virtual sculpture, a visual illusion with his Rotoreliefs. As an aside, I searched when Calder made his first “mobiles” and Wikipedia gives a date of 1932 plus the incidental information that Duchamp was the person who suggested that name.
What we find is, Duchamp had a wry sense of humour. Anemic Cinema is a film of a sculpture that requires motion to generate a stable shape and thus the film, which functions as an illusion itself by the rapid presentation of successive images, is a film of an illusion, or better, an illusion of an illusion. Anemic indeed.
Here’s the film from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on YouTube:
A subscriber back-channelled me with something worth pointing out. Anemic and cinema are anagrams of each other. And it's also a near miss on a palindrome.