The first years of cinema, the seventh art was treated more as a technological marvel than a device with which to tell stories. Even when the technology progressed and storytelling took over, artists still found ways to explore the medium through its components of camera, film stock, and lenses. Many of these types of experimental/avant garde films, usually shorts, have been lost or can only be found in archives. Luckily, some of the silent films of visual artist Man Ray has been restored and now released via Criterion Collection, with a fantastic score by Sqürl.
Ray was an artist of many talents, known for painting, photography, and sculpture. While he did not work in film as much as the other forms, his reworking of photograms into what he would call (after himself) 'rayographs', films (or parts of a film) made without cameras was hugely influential in avant garde cinema. While it could be argued that a narrative in some of his films could be found, if you want to interpret the images a certain way, these four short films are experiments in the form and physicality of film.
L'Étoile de mer, or The Starfish, is based on a poem by Robert Desnos. Ray and his partner at the time, Alice Prin (more known as Kiki of Montparnasse) were so taken with the tale of lost love, that Ray suggested making a film out of it, starring Ki, André de la Rivière, and Desnos. Rather than have his performers act out the words of the poem, the images are become an interpretation of it: a couple walking through a park, a woman removing her stockings, a railway journey, an examination of a starfish in a jar. A "ciné-poème", as Ray would call it.
Using a gelatine dry-plate process, Ray creates an effect of spectrality, as if we are watching ghosts that can't quite manifest, or perhaps watching the film through waves of water. We're not meant to always see it all clearly, and have to make our own interpretation. It is both eerie and compelling; at first you might try to proverbially (or maybe literally) lean towards the screen, peek around the corners to try to see clearly. But it's best just to understand it through this strange process, read the lines of poetry as they appear and find the deeper meaning the images give you. It's not hard to see why cinema can work as a poem, allowing the audience to be active participants in finding hidden meanings through this visual subterfuge. The score gives emphasis to this: it's setting a slightly minor-key tone, never illustrating movement or emotion, but instead sonically encouraging the audience to open new corners of their mind to understanding.
Emak Bakia is another ciné-poème, though unlike the previous film, without any kind of narrative (again, unless you want to find one for yourself). The score waxes and wanes as the images come at us in no particular order or theme: rayographed patterns of flowers and pins, a diamond-shaped glass spinning, scrolling ticker tape, Kiki with eyes painted on her eyelids, a man in drag, another man tearing his shirt collars. It feels like Ray had all these objects and images in his head, and found that putting them in a film worked for how he wanted to present them, and put them together in a seemingly random sequence. At 19 minutes, the mind might struggle against the lack of clear interpretation, and Ray's delight in having various objects spin for the camera could be a little dizzying, but it's a matter of letting your mind take the presentation at face value and let these images find their ways into the mind, for analysis at a later time.
Despite being the film which gives the collection its name, Return to Reason is the shortest of the group at a mere two minutes. And yet, it embodies so much of what Ray was trying to accomplish with his films. In his memoirs, Ray would write that he took a roll of film, cut it up, sprinkled it with various 'ingredients' such as salt and pepper, thumbtacks and pins, and then exposed it to light in his rayograph technique. The developed film preserved that to which it was merely light-exposed, without passing through a camera. But there is also his signature spinning images, of a carousel at night, spring in the shadows. It's almost enough to make one giddy to watch, or perhaps woozy, depending on if this would wake you up or put you in a trance.
If there is any film of Ray's that has at least something of a coherent narrative, it's The Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice. Dedicated to the Vicountess of Noailles, text at the beginning introduce a journey to be undertaken by Ray and J.A. Boiffard. The two, with stockings over their heads, make their way across the French countryside to an abandoned castle. The two men are eventually joined by others, and they walk down secret passageways, play with a giant pair of dice, and seem to act as children in this enormous playground.
Are the owners merely absent or have they left as these two men have arrived? Perhaps this is some kind of sequestered asylum, and the patients are being observed without their knowledge. But that would make us, the audience, their captors and spies. Ray plays with reversing images, tableaus, and stop motion animation, as if asking us to not only watch these people at play, but see what it is like inside their heads. The score creates an ominous feeling; the music would certainly change perspective on what is happening, so Sqürl's choice to lean into the uncanny makes us unsettled. Whether this was Ray's intention cannot be known, but it feels like it fits.
Special Features
Given that these films are nearly 100 years old, it likely goes without saying that restoring from prints is not small task. The process to preserve the original look of the films while giving them 4K quality was undertaken by several organizations, including WOMANRAY, Cinenova, Cinémathèque française, CNC, Centre Pompidou, and Musée national d'art moderne. It involved first generation nitrate prints, fifth generation preserved positive prints, and third generation nitrate prints (depending on the short). The result is outstanding, it looks seamless, perhaps a little cleaner than the original viewing, but arguably restored to what Man Ray had hoped for an envisioned.
A taping of an interview with Carter Logan and Jim Jarmusch sets up their relationship to cinema as musicians, and how they found their way to Man Ray. They discuss how they conceived of the soundscapes for the shorts, and the process for making music for short films, given the time span from when the films were made and how musical instruments and development is so different in the 21st century. It's a good segway into the music concert of Sqürl performing the score live. It's probably best to make this the second viewing of the shorts, and director Michaël Pierrard presents Logan and Jarmusch with their guitars, percussion and synthesizers, alongside the films, so you can follow along with their semi-improvisation.
Mark Polizzotti's essay 'Optical Dazzle' discusses Ray's work in photography and how that informed his filmmaking, and some of the myths about Ray's process that have created an image that might be unnecessary: his work speaks for itself. Given that there is no concern over narrative spoilers, it's wroth reading before watching the films (if you've never seen them before), or reading between the first and second watch (and you will want to watch these more than once). Polizzotti understands why Ray has remained an important figure in cinema, outlines his influence on the avant garde and the lost importance of the connection with the physical in the filmmaking process.
Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray is now available to order from the Criterion Collection.