Man Ray was one of many leading artists of the avant-garde of Nineteen 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. At present we current Man Ray’s 4 influential movies of the Nineteen 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. Most of the photos in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique during which opaque, or partially opaque, objects are organized directly on high of a sheet of photographic paper and uncovered to mild. The technique is as previous 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 photos and visual techniques as Le Retour à la Raison, including rayographs, double photos, and negative photos. 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 previous 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 photos 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 Nineteen 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 at this time might ever imagine. Surrealist photographer Man Ray’s movie collides phrases with photos (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 lady who’s promoteing informationpapers. She undresses for him, however then he appears to go away 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 appears to be like on the starfish, we change into conscious by means of his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for imaginative and prescient itself, in lyrical photographs of distorted perception that indicate 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 during 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.”
Observe: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our website in April, 2012.
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