Watching Duchamp and Man Ray's Anemic Cinema, I enjoyed the relationship between the spiral swirls and the cryptic spinning discus. Well, perhaps there is no direct relationship - a diptych reading of the film - but I found that they each separately invited an automatistic delving on the viewer's part past the mere geometric and linguistic syntagma on screen. As Le Grice discusses, the spiral image is actually not composed of spirals, but concentric and eccentric circles. However, despite my best knowledge that I was watching circles, I felt a hypnotic physiological response - seeing single lines twirl and gyrate - in a dimension beyond the flat image. In this way, Anemic Cinema entices a kind of "psychic automatism" (Baldwin) that Man Ray and the Surrealists (giving proper distinction between the two.) It is not orthodox Surrealism that explores unconscious association of images and created dreamscapes, but rather, an abstract piece of art photographed on film that tempts the mind to find pattern and order - the automatism of the computing mind to find order. Likewise, the viewer's mind begs for understanding when reading the asynchronous juxtaposition of words. The 'nonsensical' grouping of words could be read as Dadaist - resistant towards sense and convention. However, contrasted against the 3-D venture of the spiral sequences, these cryptic linguistic invitations seemed to me also experiments in automatism. My main take-away from Duchamp's use of language was that departure from aesthetic normalcy invites thought, reconsideration. Le Grice cites this as the longstanding impact of Dada - the deconstructive force of anti-art prompting artists to consider innovation - construction from destruction.
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