Known primarily for his sensual black-and-white photographs, American-born Man Ray was also a painter and filmmaker who dabbled in Parisian Surrealism. He joined the movement in 1925 and had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste in 1926. His handful of films, made between 1923 and ’29, were collaborations with some of the main figures in the French avant-garde, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Desnos, and the Vicomte de Noailles, a wealthy patron of the arts who funded both L’Âge d’or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète. Man Ray’s films are sexy and playful, part experimentation, part documentation of this fertile time. The very brief Le Retour à la raison includes some of the most erotic images captured on film, transposing experiments in light exposure onto a nude woman’s torso. Ray’s famous Rayographs (in which he sprinkled salt, thumbtacks, and nails on strips of unexposed celluloid) were brought to life through the cinema. His night wanderings in Emak-Bakia recall Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, using the cinema-eye to capture modern life as an artist sees it. Its Paris by night escapade carries suggestions of noir, hinting at the dissoluble divide between fact and fiction, art and life. He also did the cinematography for Duchamp’s anagrammatic Anémic Cinéma, a Dadaist study in kineticism and alliterative verbal punning. Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, or “kinetic paintings,” are concentric circles designed on flat disks containing word plays. These jeux de mots are further explored in Ray’s L’Étoile de mer (starring the sultry Kiki de Montparnasse), one of the few Surrealist scripts to become a film. Written by poet Robert Desnos, this ciné-poème ties Magritte to Deleuze in its polysemic play. The starfish, as a hermaphrodite, was thought to exude a potent eroticism and was a famous Surrealist subject, an extension of amour fou and its association with irrationality and automatism. Man Ray’s final film, Les Mystères du Château de Dé, is a charming, enigmatic and eerie exploration of chance made at the Vicomte de Noailles’ opulent summer abode in le Midi.
Approx. total running time: 76 minutes