Anémic Cinéma

Anémic Cinéma is Marcel Duchamp’s only cinematic work and is now regarded as a classic of both dadaism and surrealism. In the film, hypnotic graphic spiral patterns alternate with rotating texts, a series of enigmatic messages, some of which are lewd puns in French.  The animation effect was achieved by filming the artist’s Rotoreliefs on a turntable.

Duchamp began early in his career to experiment with optical phenomena such as the effect of negative and positive shapes on our seeing. Here, the elements of silent movies at the time – image and text – are reduced to a minimum, as the title infers. In this work, Duchamp is striving to dissolve both visual and linguistic rationality.