Anemic Cinema or Anémic Cinéma is a 1926 Dada/surrealist French experimental film by Marcel Duchamp (credited to his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), made in collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret.
The seven-minute film is composed of alternating static camera shots of spinning animated drawings disks — which Duchamp called Rotoreliefs — inscribed with puns and alliterations in French. The text, which spirals in a counterclockwise motion, suggests erotic scenarios and the words, if read aloud, produce repetitive patterns of sounds that lead to scatological or obscene associations in reference to pulsating human sexual activity.[1] To make Anémic Cinéma, Duchamp filmed painted designs he made on flat cardboard circles while they spun on a phonograph turntable. When spinning, the flat disks appeared three-dimensional.[2]
The film premiered in a private screening in Paris in August 1926 and was acquired by MoMA in 1938, the first Duchamp work to enter a museum.
Duchamp had a commercial printer run off 500 sets of six of the designs and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring three-dimensional sight to people with one eye.[3]
^Affron, Mathew. The Essential Duchamp, Yale University Press (2018), p. 85
^"Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 9 September 2023.
^Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (1996), pages 301–303.
AnemicCinema or AnémicCinéma is a 1926 Dada/surrealist French experimental film by Marcel Duchamp (credited to his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), made in...
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Duchamp filmed early versions of the Rotoreliefs, and they named the film AnémicCinéma (1926). Later, in Alexander Calder's studio in 1931, while looking at...
Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film AnemicCinema (1926), and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet...
Museum of Art Monte Carlo Bonds 1924 Collage / lithograph 31.2 x 19.3 cm AnemicCinema 1926 Short film 7 min Fluttering Hearts (Coeurs volants) 1936 Collage...
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The volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film AnemicCinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic practices, and...
his parents' girth, Lajoska appears pale and impoverished, with a thin anemic frame and haunted visage. When not working from his taxidermy shop or failing...
an equally negative review, David Fear of Rolling Stone called the film "anemic and sluggish" and said audiences would be "bored to death." "A Haunting...
critical success, The Joy Luck Club, which did not outweigh the general anemic box office record of the division. On April 26, 1994, Mestres was forced...
Sale". siskelandebert.org. Thomas, Kevin (June 30, 1989). "Movie Review: An Anemic Outing for 'Karate Kid Part III'". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November...
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