User Reviews

Well, what can one say about this? Seven minutes of spirals and circles and nonsensical sentences or sentence-fragments in French, an experiment in revolution I suppose you could say. Duchamp's only known film as director, obviously a conjunction of formalist exercise and dadaist nonsense. I won't say it wore out its welcome, but I'm also glad it wasn't any longer. Watched on YouTube in an OK copy but most with a real interest in the avant-garde will want to catch it on Kino's excellent "Avant-Garde #1 with other experimental works from the silent and early sound periods including works from Man Ray, Joris Ivens, etc.

Not really "rateable" I think, though I'm doing it anyway...

Well, it's only four or five minutes, so if you can see it do so. Any fan of Duchamp or anyone interested in the experimental films made during the Dada movement in the 1920s would find this fascinating. Others will find it pointless. Non-sensical French phrases are placed on a spinning wheel and inter-cut with neat spiral visual effects. The epitome of Dada and Duchamp's only experience with directing film (to my knowledge.)

I am sort of a fan of the Dada artists, their kind of work, but after seeing 'Anémic Cinéma' I have come to the conclusion that me being a fan does not apply when it comes to the visual art forms. When it comes to visuals, paintings or films, I am able to like strange things before my eyes but not the Dada kind. I mean, I enjoy surrealism a lot including Buñuel's 'Un Chien Andalou' and paintings from Salvador Dalí.

In a way I enjoyed this piece of cinema from famous Dada artist Marcel Duschamp, but only because I knew what kind of man was behind it. What we get to see is a spiral design spinning before our eyes and a disc with French phrases on it, also spinning. Duschamp cuts between these two images although the kind of spiral design and the French text changes after every cut. Interesting? Yes, but that's about it.

And what to think of it I am not sure. Basically it is made up of interchanging rotating spirals and rotating discs with text written on them in French. The text is short and in doesn't add up to much. Except for various kinds of dizziness there is nothing else here than what you can theorize around it.

It is a piece of dada-art where things were put out of context and therefore gains a new meaning or get incomprehensible. One example is Duchamps signed urinal and like that it almost requires to be put in a gallery to get meaning from it.

It is photographed by the great visualist Man Ray, but you cant notice as it is fixed in the same position for the whole duration of the movie (6 minutes).

Anemic Cinema (1926) is a short film consisting simply of spirals and text. This short is very avant-garde and leaves a lot to the audiences interpretation, but it was strangely hypnotic.

If you decide to watch this please watch it without sound as, in my opinion, the spirals create a rhythm of their own and I got a lot more out of my watch when the video was muted.

This film, even though incredibly simplistic, was interesting and felt quite progressive. It was definitely something I needed to delve into and do research after watching but I'm glad I did!

The use of text is intriguing, for example, the title itself is almost a palindrome which I found pretty cool. Also, the text spirals get slower as you read further in, i fell like there's meaning to this. The phrases written are almost child-like and read like a tongue twister, however some quite 'controversial' language is used which feels oxymoronic

For me, the spirals partly represent how film makes you FEEL, rather than the direct actions you watch on screen. The whole movie is a massive metaphor and definitely not for everyone, but it was certainly fun to look into!

A mesmeric seven minutes of avant-garde animation in which spiralling patterns alternate with nonsensical prose.

I had previously watched 4 titles from Kino's 2-Disc AVANT-GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920s AND '30s; apart from this, I own multiple versions of a few of them. Anyway, having spent yesterday watching cartoons included in "Wonders In The Dark"'s 3000 All-Time Best Movies, I opted to follow it up with experimental shorts from the same poll, plus films by the same directors found in the afore-mentioned set. This one basically presents a progression of geometric forms shaped like a series of vaguely nonsensical quotes (in French) – one would think the constant revolving makes these hard to read but the eye actually adjusts to their alignment fairly quickly!

This is the only film directed by French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose name is associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements (who doesn't remember the urinal exhibited with the title "Fountain"?). As other similar avantgarde works made by Man Ray, Hans Richter or Fernand Léger, there's not a plot, only moving shapes and objects, in an attempt to deny the vision of art as contemplation and ecstasy. All we see here is only wheeling spirals and disks in which we can read sentences that apparently have nothing to do with the film. So it's impossible to comment this short the way you can comment any other non-avantgarde movies. It's Dada. It's strange. It's incomprehensible and also a bit monotonous, but we can forgive the genius Man Ray for this.

The most impressive thing about 'Anemic Cinema' is its title: an anagram which is very nearly also a palindrome. Unfortunately, it only works in American English, since in Britain 'anaemic' is spelt differently.

I've always found the dilettante Man Ray and his artistic efforts to be deeply pretentious, and I've never understood why his work attracts so much attention. Apart from his Rayographs (which he invented by accident, and which are merely direct-contact photo prints), his one real contribution to culture seems to be that he was the first photographer to depict female nudity in a manner that was accepted as art rather than as porn. But surely this had to happen eventually, and there's no real reason why Ray deserves the credit. The critical reaction to Man Ray reminds me of the story about the Emperor's New Clothes.

Back in the early 1960s, the second season of 'The Twilight Zone' opened each episode with a shot of revolving concentric circles in black and white. There's an image in 'Anemic Cinema' which is so similar, I wonder if 'Twilight Zone' borrowed it from this film. The main difference is that the revolving image here is a black and white spiral. Indeed, if ever there was any movie that deserves to be described as a spiral, this one is it. Throughout 'Anemic Cinema', we're treated(?) to shots of a revolving disc containing words (in French) moving in a spiral. The effect is vertiginous, and the texts -- about incest and Eskimos -- are nearly Dada in their meaninglessness. I did laugh at one clever sexual pun.

The emperor is naked, folks, and this movie just barely rates 2 points out of 10. Au suivant!

Almost two decades before the Macy conferences, the dadaists and their successors, the surrealists, experimented with transformation of meaning- and senseless information. And over half a century before Derrida, they elevated deconstruction to the status of method. Like Hugo Ball, the co-founder of dadaism, who cut out random words and parts of words out of newspapers, Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) film experiments with the accidental construction of meaning and sense after they have previously purposely been thrown out of language. One of the dadaist's favorite method was the anagram: the mathematical (combinatorial) and pre-automatic generation of meaningful utterances from deconstructed meaningful utterances. Like in a laboratory of linguistics, people can observe the genesis of meaning while Duchamp's spiral keeps turning. Also several decades before poly-contextural logic, the watcher recognizes that there is not only the repetition of the old, but the repetition of the new as well. Nevertheless, one often overseen important moment of the dadaist's and surrealist's work was humor: the component of childish play and provocation as an anarchic reaction against steely bourgeoisy. The proper sense of dadaism, co-founder Hans Arp said, is to release Michelangelo's Laocoon from his uncomfortable position and allow him to use the restroom.

So this guy goes into a psychiatrist's office for his first appointment. After the paperwork is done, the psychiatrist says "I'm going to show you ink blots. Tell me what you see in them." "Well, says the patient," looking at the first one, "I see a man and a woman having sex." On seeing the second one, he says "I see two women having sex." On seeing the third, he says "I see two men having sex." On seeing the next one, he says "I see two men and two women having sex." The psychiatrist puts down the the inkblots. "So," he says, "We'll start by discussing your monomania." "MY monomania?" says the guy. "And you with all these dirty pictures!" That's how this movie strikes me.

This is just one of many strange films from the DVD collection "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941" and it's from Disc 3. "Anemic Cinema" is a short film from Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a Surrealist and Dadaist and loved provocation--such as proclaiming a urinal to be a piece of art.

The film consists of rotating spirals and inscriptions that are VERY hypnotic. The inscriptions are in French and I have no idea what they say, but considering it's a Dadaist film, it probably doesn't matter. It's a black & white film made during the 1920s and must have confused the life out of audiences back then, as even today with our more 'modern' sensibilities, it would be a tough-sell trying to get audiences to watch and appreciate this art film. Not terrible but certain a film that defies your ability to give it any sort of numerical rating.

Just because something happened, doesn't mean that it matters. Just because some artist farts controllably doesn't mean we should enter it.

This was unimportant when it was new, and only slightly less so now. I say slightly because film as a whole has lost a certain sense of adventure that this possesses.

If you do not know it, the short consists of various revolving spirals of the type usually used in later movies as a device to hypnotize some character. Interspersed are revolving disks with random phrases printed on them. The obvious intent is to imbue the designs with something like the syntactic import or words. Saying so doesn't make it so.

Its not anti-art in this case. Just a bad idea.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

A spiral design spins dizzily. It's replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end.

This is the work of two men: Duchamp and Man Ray. And what is it? I have no idea, other than a series of spirals that spin and hypnotize the audience. And between the spins? More spins, but with words forming sentences that make no sense to me whatsoever. They are just nonsense, or have some deeper meaning that is beyond my comprehension.

One of the most interesting things about this to me is the discovery that the words "cinema" and "anemic" are anagrams. What is anemic about this film? Not much, as far as I can tell. But just using that name deserves some credit.

"Anemic Cinema" is a different sort of Dada film from the 1920's when compared to the work of the surrealists which later followed it. Instead of disturbing, dreamlike imagery which became the trademark of Luis Bunuel, or the creepy, uncomfortable world created by the Quay Brothers, the famous French artist Marcel Duchamp here goes more for the look of a moving painting rather than a film in the repetitive cycle this short follows. The effects of the moving discs called "Rotoreliefs" might question your use of drugs, and as a whole the film takes on the look of a flip-book.

Duchamp's film--not his only one as he apparently made several other versions of the Rotoreliefs after this--depicts many whirling spirals intercut with French text, apparently a series of puns that are incomprehensible if you don't know French. While it creates a good effect for a bunch of cardboard discs, the speed of them really isn't fast and doesn't go for a hypnotic effect like you might expect, and the entire thing seems a little too long like some segments could have been removed; it drags after a bit. Also, the amount of movement itself depends: some spirals create better visual effects than others, and at one point one of the least-moving ones stops entirely. Interesting and eye-catching, but little else.