Music Box

Overview

The tiny mechanisms of the box take on an industrial character in this expanded scale and recall the austerity of Adolf Lazi’s Neue Sachlichkeit photographs of the 1930’s, and the cinematic visual language of Chaplain’s Modern Times and Lang’s Metropolis. The associations of industrial alienation coexist with the intimacy of the personal object and the proximity of the camera. In another cinematic analogue the music box suggests a kind of Wellesian Rosebud significance that is never resolved. The literary allusion would be Proust’s Madeleine Cake - the intense gaze inside the box leads not to traces of Dahlberg’s own history but instead to associative moments in the history of industrialism and cinema.