Anemic Cinema

The film Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp is one of the most important experimental films of the early 20th century and will screening during the month of October, on loan from the Moderna Museet

Start time: 2017-10-02 at 08:00

End time: 2017-10-31 at 17:00

During the entire month of October, the Dadaist film Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp will be screened in the SSE Atrium, as part of a a year-long collaboration with Moderna Museet.

The film Anemic Cinema is a milestone in cinematic and artistic history.
Several versions were made in 1920, 1923 and, finally, in 1926, with the help of Man Ray. The film is shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. The film, which Duchamp called Anemic Cinema, had its premiere that August at a private screening room in Paris. The film depicts spinning animated drawings — which Duchamp called Rotoreliefs — are juxtaposed with puns in French, typical in many of the works of Duchamp. He signed the film with his alter ego name, Rrose Sélavy, a female character that Duchamp sometimes interspliced in his work, both as a pun and as a theoretical framing device.

Marcel Duchamp is considered as one of the most important artist in the last 100 years. His early figure paintings were influenced by Matisse and Fauvism, but in 1911 he created a personal brand of Cubism combining earthy colours, mechanical and visceral forms, and a depiction of movement. His earliest readymade artworks included Bicycle Wheel (1913), a wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and a snow shovel entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915). One of his best-known pieces is a urinal, titled Fountain and signed 'R. Mutt', which he submitted to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. In the ensuing controversy, the concept of the readymade became associated with an assault on the conventional understanding of the nature of art and its institutions.