The author wishes to thank the editors of the journal, Ornella Volta, Thomas Bauman, Candace Brower, Jane Bernstein, Elizabeth Seitz, and the late John Daverio for all of their help and guidance with this project.

1. Quoted in Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “History of Dada” (1931), in The Dada Painters and Poets An Anthology, second edition, edited [and translated by] Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 1981), 101-102.

2. See Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 57-61; Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art – A Critical Study of Music in Films, 2nd edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 223-26; and Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 134-38.

3. For an example of one way to apply gestalt principles to music see Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1983), 36-47; for applications of gestalt principles to the visual arts and to film specifically see Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); and Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

4. Hanns Eisler [and Theodor W. Adorno], Composing for the Films [1947], reprint (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1994), 65-71.

5. See Sandra K. Marshall and Annabel J. Cohen, “Effects of Musical Soundtracks on Attitudes toward Animated Geometric Figures,” Music Perception 6 (1988): 95-112; and Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 66-74.

6. For example, the metaphor “Time is Money” makes sense to us because we recognize an enabling similarity, which then leads to a transference of attributes; thus, attributes of “Money” are transferred on to “Time.” Cook’s discussion of metaphors is based on the seminal work on metaphor carried out in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). Also, see Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 70.

7. See Rick Altman, “General Introduction: Cinema as Event,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1-3.

8. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, v.

9. Newspaper articles from the time relate how the audience thought it was a hoax and hung out around the theater until 11 p.m. Apparently after they got tired of waiting, a group retired to a nearby café where upon closing, the manager noticed that all of the ashtrays had been stolen! Without naming names, the manager blamed the crime on a prominent musician who was supposed to be at the Théâtre de Champs-Elysée that night. See Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 354, n. 41.

10. René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today [1970], translated by Stanley Appelbaum, edited and introduced by R.C. Dale, Reprint (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 110.

11.René Clair made two cinematic sequences for the ballet. The first was a very short prologue that he titled the projectionette. This was followed by the first act of Satie and Picabia’s ballet Relâche. At intermission, Entr’acte was shown. Today film scholars refer to the projectionette and Entr’acte as one film and refer to it as just Entr’acte. The music Satie wrote for the projectionette is unrelated to the music he wrote for the film shown during the intermission, but fits into the large palindromic form Satie created for the ballet. See Orledge, Satie the Composer, 179-184.

12. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, introduction to Dada and Surrealist Film (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1998), 3.

13. Steven Kovács, From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980), 79; and Orledge, Satie the Composer, 178.

14. René Clair, A Nous la Liberté and Entr’Acte, translation and action description by Richard Jacques and Nicola Hayden (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 115-40.

15. Francis Picabia, “À Propos d’Entr’acte,” Films no. 28, supplement to Comoedia (Nov. 1924); quoted in Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 168.

16. Noël Carroll, “Entr’acte, Paris and Dada,” Millennium Film Journal 1, no. 1 (1977/1978): 7.

17. Mack Sennett’s thirteen minute short, Love, Speed and Thrills (1915) is strikingly similar in plot to Entr’acte: it features speeding, hunting, and a similar sense of irreverent mockery.

18. Thomas Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. by Kuenzli, 20.

19. In Francis Picabia’s Ici c’est ici Stieglitz, made for a cover of Alfred Stieglitz’s periodical 291 from 1915, the artist depicts an impotent camera; notice the flaccid bellows rendering the camera unable to perform its traditional function. The image simultaneously functions as a cover to a magazine and does not function because the camera is broken.

20. Since none of the timings of each of Satie’s ten sections correspond with the timings of any known print of the film we can safely assume Satie either never saw the film, or did not care to synchronize his music with specific events within it.

21. While Satie had been playing musical games with his audience throughout the ballet, the music he wrote for Entr’acte makes exaggerated use of repetition and the effect on most listeners is particularly annoying (test this out for yourself).

22. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 53-79; and Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800—1900 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990), xi-xiii, 135-75.

23. Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, 11.

24. Douglas W. Gallez, “Satie’s Entr’acte: A Model of Film Music” Cinema Journal 16, no. 1 (1976): 42.

25. Satie parodied overblown Romantic style cadences of pieces throughout his career.

26. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 223.

27. Rick Altman, “The Silence of the Silents” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (1996): 678.

28. Chopin’s funeral march had long been part of the standard repertoire of silent film accompaniment. In 1924, it was even listed in Erno Rapee’s publication, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists: a Rapid Reference Collection of Selected Pieces, Adapted to 52 Moods and Situations. The fact that this seasoned silent film music arranger and conductor, who performed in both the US and in Europe, placed the Chopin march in his anthology is indicative of the long history this piece holds in the silent film repertoire.

29. Robert Orledge discusses structure in Satie’s music for Relâche noting that “… far from being a rushed job and the inferior fling of a declining composer, Relâche was, in Satie’s eyes, the most important theatrical project of his career; his path into the future, and his opportunity to show that Dadaism did not necessarily preclude reasoned structural planning.” See Orledge, Satie the Composer, 178. While Orledge and I interpret this “structural planning” differently, we both identify it within the scores of the performance.