A seminal work born of the experimental film movement of the 1920s, the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926) features a series of hypnotic spinning discs, which he called ‘rotoreliefs’. For the film, the painted circular designs were captured spinning on a phonograph, giving them the illusion of depth. Throughout, these clockwise sequences trade off with counterclockwise-spinning sentences written in French. While, due to their use of pun and alliteration, these phrases are considered to be somewhat untranslatable into English, each is sexually suggestive or otherwise obscene.
Source: Dizzying discs and obscene wordplay – revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 film debut | Aeon Videos