Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) made some heady art. His whole goal was to “put art back in the service of the mind,” or to create what Jasper Johns once called the “field where language, thought and vision act on one another.” And that’s precisely what Duchamp’s 1926 avant-garde film Anémic Cinéma delivers.
Drawing on his inheritance, Duchamp shot Anémic Cinéma (almost a palindrome) in Man Ray’s studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. The Dada-inspired film features nine whirling optical illusions, known as Rotoreliefs, alternating with spiraling puns and complex word play. (Vision acts on language and thought, indeed.) The text of the puns appears below the jump. We didn’t attempt to translate them, in part because there’s a convincing case that translations can’t do them justice in any way.
Anémic Cinéma appears in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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ugh, I am not a fan of Marcel Duchamp. I understood his ambition, but the barbaric and utterly basic ways in which he chose to pursue them make people confuse his lack of talent with progressive thinking.
Writing in sharpie on old urinals and calling it high art and selling them for ludicrous amounts of money to make a statement about art is fucking stupid. His goal was to get reactions, and he did, but honestly how does that make him any more eloquent than an internet troll?
Andrew, I’m pretty sure you don’t “understand his ambition.” Have you ever seen his early work? Nude Descending a Staircase? Know anything of his withdraw from painting, his study of mathematics, physics, music. He quit commercial art (in which he could have made a fortune, like Dali) to become a chess player and writer. He was certainly abstruse, and infuriating to the conventional art world, but he was the polar opposite of a money-grubbing huckster.
he was a kept man, married to a wealthy woman, so he did not need to make commercial art. There is a letter to his sister Suzanne ( which was hidden from the public domain in a museum archive for many years, )where he states that a female friend has sent him the urinal “fountain” It has since been assessed by some historians that female friend was most likely Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven…If you want to investigate this further check out Irene Gammel book.