Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray: Optical Dazzle

Man Ray had initially considered Le retour à la raison a onetime exercise, an anomaly in his photographic oeuvre. In 1926, however, the American stockbroker Arthur Wheeler made him an offer he found hard to refuse: to finance a more ambitious work that would “give the movies a new direction,” no strings attached. Much of this second film, titled Emak bakia—a Basque expression usually translated as “leave me alone”—was shot at the Wheelers’ villa near Biarritz, where Man Ray and his assistant, Jacques-André Boiffard (who the following year would take the moody photographs illustrating André Breton’s magnum opus Nadja), had been invited to stay. Like Le retour à la raison, Emak bakia is largely improvised and tells no discernible story; unlike its predecessor, it is considerably longer than three minutes (twenty-two, to be exact), features several human actors (none professional), and took Man Ray an atypical six months to complete—not surprising, given that by the filmmaker’s own account he worked only an hour or two per day, “the rest of the time spent on the beaches lolling in the sun, at elaborate dinners with other guests, and dancing in the nightclubs.”

One of the director’s favorite improvisations occurred while he was shooting the landscape whizzing by from the passenger seat of Rose Wheeler’s Mercedes racer: after Wheeler nearly collided with a flock of sheep, Man Ray decided to simulate the accident by tossing the camera in the air while it was still running. He combined that footage with other sequences—including the “Banjo King” Vance Lowry’s hand flying over the strings, a woman’s legs dancing the then-popular Charleston, and repurposed rayograph imagery from his earlier film—to create an impressionistic and highly kinetic “cine-poem,” in which disparate vignettes, textures, and patterns accrete, much like lines of verse, to produce an overall effect.

In many ways, Emak bakia conforms to the aesthetics and ethos of the surrealist movement, with its emphasis on spontaneity, chance, and dreams. Man Ray was never an official member of the surrealist group, more like a fellow traveler, but Emak bakia can by association claim to foreshadow such signature works as Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (1928; scripted by Antonin Artaud) and the Salvador Dalí–Luis Buñuel collaborations Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930). Given Emak bakia’s fragmented, nonrational presentation and its inclusion of shots like the one of Kiki opening her painted eyelids to reveal a “second” pair of eyes underneath, as if waking into a dream, its creator had every reason to expect a favorable response from the surrealists gathered for the film’s premiere that November. And so it might have been, had Man Ray not drafted the writer and dandy-about-town Jacques Rigaut to play the man tearing up shirt collars in one of the film’s final sequences—unaware that Rigaut was then persona non grata in Breton’s circle. Or perhaps the surrealists’ lukewarm reaction was due to the fact that Man Ray hadn’t cleared the project with them beforehand, or that it had been financed by an American capitalist—who could tell?

Once again, Man Ray thought this would be his last cinematic effort. But two years later, he returned to film direction with L’étoile de mer (The Starfish), based on a poem and screenplay by Robert Desnos. Desnos had been one of surrealism’s rising stars (before he, too, fell afoul of Breton—it happened easily in those days), the most adept among them at creating spontaneous poetry and complex spoonerisms while in a sleeplike trance. The originating poem, which Desnos read aloud at a dinner, struck Man Ray as being “like a scenario for a film . . . each line presenting a clear, detached image of a place or of a man and woman.” His version of it is part adaptation, part personal riff, in which Desnos’s verses snake in and out of the visuals in an ongoing complement.

Contributing to the oneiric atmosphere are seemingly random sequences that intersect with the strands of plot—moving trains, a prison wall, a woman hawking newspapers, the same woman climbing the stairs with knife in hand—as well as the fact that many of the scenes were shot through gelatin or mottled glass, giving the whole a disorienting effect: one critic noted at the time that objects and people in the film “perpetually seem to dissolve.” The gauzy imagery also helped the director get several nude scenes past the censors—though, as he later recounted, “the apparent incoherence of the film upset them more than the nudes.”

More than the earlier works, L’étoile de mer presents the broad strokes of a story line, disjointed though it may be: a tale of frustrated passion in which a man, unable to consummate his love for a woman—Kiki again—ultimately loses her to an interloper, acted by Desnos himself. (André de la Rivière, who plays the hapless suitor, was Desnos’s neighbor.) Perhaps owing to this loose narrative, these seventeen minutes pack an emotional charge that Man Ray’s other films, for all their optical dazzle, rarely achieve. A sad autobiographical undercurrent leaches through the frames of L’étoile de mer, as both Man Ray and Desnos were suffering amorous torments at the time of its making. In Man Ray’s case, the overt adoration of Kiki’s character in the film, and the repeated protestations of her beauty, struggle to conceal his fear of losing her—and in fact, within a year of the film’s premiere, in May 1928, the couple had ended their eight-year union. In this light, the broken-glass imagery in the final scene takes on more heartbreaking—and more violent—connotations.

If Man Ray’s fourth film, Les mystères du château du dé (Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice, 1929), looks like an arty take on the home movie, that’s because it is. The work was commissioned by the recidivist arts patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, members of the Paris beau monde who enjoyed rubbing elbows with the unwashed avant-garde (partly through family atavism: Marie-Laure was a descendant of the Marquis de Sade). The Noailleses had bankrolled several surrealist publications and would go on to finance Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930) and, more scandalously, L’âge d’or, which almost got Charles excommunicated from the Catholic Church and, no doubt worse, did get him expelled from the prestigious Jockey Club. Having admired L’étoile de mer, they asked Man Ray to film them and their guests at their new château, Villa Noailles, designed by the modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens and built on a hill overlooking the French Riviera. Inspired by the villa’s severe cubistic forms, Man Ray dubbed it the “castle of the dice” in homage to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 symbolist poem “A Throw of Dice Never Will Abolish Chance.”

The patrons’ intent was for the film to showcase the château and its extensive art collections (which Man Ray does, perversely, by showing only the backs of paintings on sliding partitions), as well as to capture the houseguests cavorting in the gymnasium and indoor swimming pool. When the guests proved reluctant to show their faces on camera, Man Ray opted to mask their heads with silk stockings, giving the affluent participants the look of mannequins or bourgeois bank robbers. (Charles’s stocking also nearly caused him to drown, after it became waterlogged during his diving scene.) Shot without rehearsals, at the desultory rate of an hour or two a day—the rest of the time spent on sports, socializing, and cocktails—the film, at twenty-seven minutes Man Ray’s longest, met with great acclaim by all but the director himself, who politely declined an offer from Noailles to underwrite a full-length feature. By this point, as he later explained, his curiosity about filmmaking “had been satisfied—surfeited.”

Les mystères du château du dé is not, technically speaking, Man Ray’s final cinematic venture—among other projects, none brought to fruition, he shot some scenes with André Breton and Paul Éluard in 1935 at the country home of the poet Lise Deharme, one of the few surviving traces of which is a still of Breton with a dragonfly on his forehead. But for all intents and purposes, it was the last of what he jokingly termed his “mauvais movies.” The nonchalance belies the accomplishment: these largely unscripted, resolutely informal vehicles, labeled “automatic cinema” by their creator, trace a direct line to the nonnarrative works of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and others who saw celluloid as a support for more than just comedies, dramas, and musicals.

One reason Man Ray gave for losing interest was the changing nature of cinema itself, particularly the switch from silence to sound. “Something is going to die,” he told an interviewer shortly after completing Mystères. “Today’s cinema will be replaced by talking pictures.” At their original screenings, his films were shown either without sound or with a mix of live and recorded accompaniments that mashed together popular songs, classical waltzes, jazz tunes, and other musical motifs.

For the present digital restoration—which eschews chronological order for rhythmic fluidity—the band SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) semi-improvised a bespoke soundtrack that interlaces with the imagery, changing character in counterpoint to the visuals on-screen and to the tone of each individual film. Present but never intrusive, the music veers from somber and ambient to playful, feverish, or frankly dissonant, its heavy reverb guitar sometimes reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for David Lynch. Like the surprising ocher and blue overlays in Mystères, the joyfully anachronistic soundtrack provides a fresh new layer to a suite of films that, one hundred years later, retain the spirit of adventure, invention, and audacity that was integral to their creation.