Man Ray’s Surrealist Cinema: Watch 4 Pioneering Movies From the Twenties
Man Ray was one of many leading artists of the avant-garde of Twenties and Thirties Paris. A key figure within the Dada and Surrealist transferments, his works spanned various media, including movie. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as character, setting, and plot. Immediately we current Man Ray’s 4 influential movies of the Twenties.
Le Retour à la Raison (above) was completed in 1923. The title means “Return to Reason,” and it’s basically a kinetic extension of Man Ray’s nonetheless photography. Lots of the photographs in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique by which opaque, or partially opaque, objects are organized directly on high of a sheet of photographic paper and uncovered to gentle. The technique is as outdated as photography itself, however Man Ray had a present for self-promotion, so he known as them “rayographs.” For Le Retour, Man Ray sprinkled objects like salt and pepper and pins onto the photographic paper. He additionally filmed live-action sequences of an amusement park carousel and other subjects, including the nude torso of his model and lover, Kiki of Montparnasse.
Emak-Bakia (1926):
The 16-minute Emak-Bakia contains a number of the identical photographs and visual techniques as Le Retour à la Raison, including rayographs, double photographs, and negative photographs. However the live-action sequences are extra inventive, with dream-like distortions and tilted camperiod angles. The impact is surreal. “In reply to critics who wish to linger on the merits or defects of the movie,” wrote Man Ray within the professionalgram notes, “one can reply simply by translating the title ‘Emak Bakia,’ an outdated Basque expression, which was chosen as a result of it sounds pretty and means: ‘Give us a relaxation.’ ”
L’Etoile de Mer (1928):
L’Etoile de Mer (“The Sea Star”) was a collaboration between Man Ray and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It features Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and André de la Rivière. The distorted, out-of-focus photographs have been made by shooting into mirrors and thru tough glass. The movie is extra sensual than Man Ray’s earlier works. As Donald Faulkner writes:
Within the modernist excessive tide of Twenties experimalestal moviemaking, L’Etoile de Mer is a perverse second of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its nice silent decade than most moviemakers right now might ever imagine. Surrealist photographer Man Ray’s movie collides phrases with photographs (the intertitles are from an othersensible misplaced work by poet Robert Desnos) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a sort, to a intercourseual encounter. A character picks up a girl who’s promoteing informationpapers. She undresses for him, however then he appears to depart her. Much less interested in her than within the weight she makes use of to maintain her informationpapers from blowing away, the person lovingly explores the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube. As the person seems to be on the starfish, we change into conscious by way of his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for imaginative and prescient itself, in lyrical photographs of distorted perception that suggest hallucinatory, nearly masturbatory intercourseuality.
Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929):
The longest of Man Ray’s movies, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (the version above has apparently been briefened by seven minutes) follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, which features a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. “Made as an architectural document and impressed by the poetry of Mallarmé,” writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Movies of Man Ray, “Les Mystères du Château de Dé is the movie by which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary attitude, particularly in its reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.”
Word: An earlier version of this put up appeared on our web site in April, 2012.
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