Man Ray Return to Reason: Everything Old is New Again

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

If you like to have your eyes excited and your brains scrambled in a medically safe manner, I recommend Man Ray: Return to Reason, a collection of four experimental shorts from the 1920s, opening this Friday and running through July 1 in selected theatres across Canada in an improbably welcome alternative to the summer blockbusters.

Ray (1890-1976) — born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia — was the American photographer associated with two major anti-rationalist movements of the early 20th century: Dadaism (nonsense, irrationality, anti-bourgeois) and its successor, Surrealism (unleashing the power of the unconscious mind.)

He left us many of the most famous photographs of artistic celebrities of Paris in the 20s, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Duchamps. But perhaps his most famous image is Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin), a black-and-white photograph of the model Alice Prin, a.k.a. Kiki de Montparnasse, seen from behind, with two f-holes from a violin superimposed on her nude back.

We get to see more of the fascinating Kiki, Ray’s lover — and a woman who Ernest Hemingway wrote dominated the Montparnasse era “more than Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era” — many times over the course of Return to Reason.

As well as a glimpse into the erotic ideals of the past, the four films, with a combined running time of under 80 minutes, are an antidote to the contemporary monotonous insistence that story is king, rather than a source of visual poetry.

The four Ray films included here — Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason, 1923), Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone, 1926), L’Étoile de Mer (The Starfish, 1928) and Les Mystères du Dé (The Mysteries of the House of Dice, 1929) — are a series of caprices, reveries, and mind games that tell no stories, but communicate the excitement of creative spontaneity.

Last year, the Cannes Film Festival presented the four films in 4K versions to honour the centenary of Ray’s 1923 first extant film. This year’s wider release coincides with another anniversary, the 100th anniversary of Surrealism.

To add some contemporary hip credentials, there’s a semi-improvised ambient drone score by Sqürl, a musical duo consisting of Jim Jarmusch (electric guitar with various effects) and Carter Logan (rhythm, loops, keyboards). The score was recorded live at the Pompidou Centre last year last year, one of numerous performances the band has done to help support the restoration.

The films are not shown chronologically but begin with arguably the most narrative of them, L’Etoile de Mer (The Starfish), a romantic breakup story based on the writings of poet Robert Desnos, in which the starfish represents a relationship between a man and a woman.

The film begins with a couple walking along a road, out of focus as if shot through thick glass. A caption reads: “A woman’s teeth are such charming things.” It’s definitely about a break-up, but also about spinning starfish, blowing newspapers, characters in masks.

Return to Reason, the 1923 film which gives the anthology its title, was concocted overnight for a Dada exhibition entitled The Evening of the Bearded Heart. Ray took salt, thumbtacks, and pins and threw them onto the film strips, briefly them exposed to light and then developed them.

The film also includes Kiki, nude, with the pattern of a striped curtain reflected in circles on her breasts. The film broke twice on its first screening; only a small incident in an evening that broke into a donnybrook between rival artists.

The 22-minute Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone in Basque language) takes its title from a house in Biarritz, rented by an American couple who commissioned the film. In various ways, organic subjects turn into mathematical abstraction through spinning, spirals, and reflections. Kiki again appears, staring at us until she opens her eyes, and we realize a pair of eyes were painted on her eyelids. (The film’s first screening also led to a riot).

The final and longest film of the group, the 27-minute The Mysteries of the House of Dice, was commissioned by the Vicomte de Noailles to show off his home and art collection and was not intended for public screening.

It begins with two men in a café rolling dice who then drive to a chateau in the south of France, where various guests cavort, swim, wear masks, and periodically throw dice. In retrospect, it’s a kind of last gasp of frivolous fun before the stock market crash later that year.

The effectiveness of Sqürls’ semi-improvised score is a matter of taste. It’s moody, bordering on the funereal (the group also provided the soundtrack for Jarmusch’s vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive), suggesting a necromantic chant to summon these apparitions from their slumber.

At times, the score is deliberately jarring, as when an aggressive percussion accompanies a woman’s feet doing the Charleston when there’s a cheerful banjo player right there on screen. Of course, unexpected juxtapositions are at the heart of Surrealism and perhaps there’s nothing more surprising than realizing that films from a century ago make most of what is made today look conventional and old-fashioned.

Man Ray: Return To Reason opens on May 24 at the Bytown Cinema (Ottawa), Metro Cinema (Edmonton), Cinéma Public (Montréal) and Cinéma Beaumont (Québec) and Dave Barber Cinemateque (Winnipeg) followed by TIFF Lightbox (Toronto) on June 12 and The Cinemateque (Vancouver), June 24, June 29 and June 30.