Ballet Mécanique (1923–24) is a Dadaist, post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray).

The film premiered in a silent version on September 24, 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler.

[1] However, some scholars argue that Léger conceived of the film himself, as part of his making the dazzling effects of mechanical technology the exclusive subject of his art; this after fighting at the front in World War I and spending the year of 1917 in a hospital after being gassed there.

During a period of convalescence in Villepinte, he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war.

The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.

[5]The Card Players marked the beginning of his "mechanical period" of which Ballet Mécanique is a part, an artistic technique that combined the dynamic abstraction of constructivism with the absurd and unruly qualities of Dada.

However, a photo of a Dada sculpture with the name Ballet Mécanique had been previously featured in 391, a periodical created and edited by the Dadaist Francis Picabia that first appeared in January 1917 and continued to be published until 1924.

George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique (1924) was originally conceived as an accompaniment for the film and was scheduled to be premiered at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik.

Antheil assiduously promoted the work and even engineered his supposed "disappearance" while on a visit to Africa so as to get media attention for a preview concert.

[6] The official Paris première in June 1926 was sponsored by an American patroness who at the end of the concert was tossed in a blanket by three baronesses and a duke.

Among these, player pianos, airplane propellers, and electric bells stand prominently onstage, moving as machines do, and providing the visual side of the ballet.

Lehrman used an edited version of the original orchestration in which he used player pianos recorded after the Lowell performance, with the rest of the instruments played electronically.

The performance, with the newly-realized soundtrack and the 1952 version of Ballet mécanique, was repeated at the Friedberg Concert Hall at Peabody Conservatory on February 17, 2003.

It was installed in December 2007 at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, FL, and again at 3-Legged Dog in New York City, where it was used to accompany a play about Antheil and Hedy Lamarr, and their invention of spread-spectrum technology, called Frequency Hopping.

The true film score must have been much simpler and more precise, possibly for solo pianola and noise machines, and, after various reductions and modifications, close to the one he would end up orchestrating in 1935.

This version, made by Ortiz Morales with the collaboration of the Ensemble Modern, uses algorithms to search the exact copy of the film[21] and the correct Antheil score, which they both joined together in 1935 (the only time they know that proper 'timing' occurred, according to themselves).