Dudley Murphy

Who was Dudley Murphy?

Dudley Murphy was an American film director. Murphy was born on July 10, 1897 in Winchester, Massachusetts. He began making films in the early 1920s after working as a journalist.

In his first short film, Soul of the Cypress, a variation on the Orpheus myth, the film's protagonist falls in love with a dryad and throws himself into the sea to become immortal and spend eternity with her. Murphy's then-wife Chase Harringdine played the dryad. Murphy followed this with Danse Macabre featuring Adolph Bolm, Olin Howland, and Ruth Page. Both of these early films are in the DVD collection Unseen Cinema issued in October 2005.

Murphy's eighth film, Ballet mécanique, which he co-directed with the French artist Fernand Léger, premiered on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna. Considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking, Ballet mécanique also included creative input from Man Ray and Ezra Pound, and was presented at the exposition by Frederick Kiesler. The film was scheduled to be screened with George Antheil's masterpiece of the same name. However, the music ran close to 30 minutes, while the film was 17 minutes long. In 2000, Paul Lehrman produced a married print of the film.