| Sophie Durbin |
Man Ray: Return to Reason plays at the Trylon Cinema from Saturday, November 16th, through Sunday, November 17th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
As a child, it would’ve been hard to fathom that going to the movies would one day be as esoteric as spending a night at the opera. But some time in the past five years, I realized that spending much of my free time on film had suddenly cast me as an eccentric clinger-on to a cultural institution with fading relevance. Coordinating my concessions snack to whether I was taking in a Dots movie, a popcorn movie, or a nacho movie (this requires a whole other blog post); getting excited about the Oscars; spending time at home going down cinematic rabbit holes—these activities had once been the habits of a slightly overeager, but overall relatable, film fan. Now, it’s not uncommon for people to tell me that they haven’t seen a film in theaters in years. And increasingly, my friends tell me that they don’t like watching movies much anyway. At first, this was often offered to me in confidence, with the friend in question sheepishly guessing that their attention span had been eroded by parenting, TikTok, or both. But now, disliking movies doesn’t seem to require an explanation. While I’m not owed an explanation, this all makes me feel a little wistful and heartsick. The market is oversaturated with entertainment options, and I’m not immune. I find myself marveling at how I watch comparatively fewer films than I used to in favor of TV. So: in a world where film is becoming more of a niche hobby than a bedrock of family life, what’s the point of watching something like the works of Man Ray? He’s an artist so removed in time and space from most of us that the barrier to entry may simply be too steep. Today, I will try to make a case for why his experimental, nonlinear, and nonsensical shorts should have a place in anyone’s film queue.
Man Ray: Return to Reason contains four short avant-garde films made between 1923 and 1929: Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L’Étoile de mer, and Les Mystères du Château du Dé. Ray was one of those Americans of the 1920s who found themselves more at home in Paris, where he linked up with the Dada movement. For Ray, like for any good Dadaist, the artistic process itself was often more important than the finished work. He never committed to one medium, experimenting with photography, film, Duchampian readymades, and the written word. His films are mostly free of narrative, collage-like in their construction, dreamily shot and edited. These films thwart viewers’ expectations that a film should tell a story. They are best thought of as dreamscapes painted on moving canvas.
How might the 2024 viewer best approach the cinematic world of Man Ray? Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, presents a quote from William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology that I have always found comforting:
The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.1
If we use this definition of paying attention, blaming an inability to enjoy a film on a short attention span becomes less convenient. More importantly, the goal of watching a film, keeping focus, and gaining something from the experience becomes less futile. James gives us a system to follow. To keep one’s mind upon a single object, it’s necessary to return repeatedly to it, each time looking for something new to observe. Watching four Man Ray short films in a row in 2024 was, to me, the perfect test case for this practice.
Le retour a la raison, the namesake film of the quartet, is 2 minutes and 24 seconds of chaos. Within moments of starting the film, I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t try to make any sense of it right away. That could all come later, after first observing its formal qualities. Rayographs2, scribbles, visual noise, and floating spheres are interspersed with shots of a carousel, recognizable only by its twinkling lights and circular rotations. This is followed by photograms of springs, lines resembling morse code, and a cascade of dangling cardboard objects. A paper tic-tac-toe shape spins in the air, juxtaposed against its own silhouette on a wall. This gives way to Alice Prin (known then also as Kiki de Montparnasse), topless, rotating slowly by a window for a few seconds as shadows shift across her immaculate breasts. It took me a few viewings to make sense of Prin’s place at the end. When Ray shot Le Retour à la raison, Prin was his romantic partner and muse. She is the only human figure we see in the film, but without a face would have only been recognizable immediately to Ray himself and anyone else who knew her intimately. Her anonymity turns her body into a sculptural object, another rotating mobile—to me, an exercise in objectification without any of the negative undertones the word now carries. Sure, there’s no narrative to grasp onto here, but what a lovely thing to be rewarded with after all those photograms of nails and tacks! This primes us for the way the human body returns as an art object in all of Man Ray’s work, including Les Mystères du Château du Dé.
L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish) is the most narratively friendly of the films that comprise Return to Reason. The film follows a couple—Alice Prin makes another appearance here—and intersperses the out-of-focus shots with title cards showing lines from Robert Desnos’s poem L’Étoile de mer. Even so, throughout its 27 minutes I felt my attention drifting and I had to continuously redirect focus back to the screen. Eventually, I found that L’Étoile de mer is best enjoyed through absolute free association of thought, without any expectation of discerning linear or literal meaning. Man Ray invites us to meditate on the wonders of the starfish itself. In one close-up, the viewer is treated to a long, lingering shot of the inner workings of a starfish leg. It’s an inherently ambiguous figure, powerful and primordial at the same time. Some starfish can reproduce by themselves. With this fact in mind, anyone up-to-date on their Catholic dogma will understand the implicit parallel to the Virgin Mary, who since the early medieval period has been occasionally referred to as Stella Maris or Our Lady, Star of the Sea—or, in the blessedly literal French language, L’Étoile de mer. Our Lady, Star of the Sea is the manifestation of the Virgin that guides seafarers safely to their destination. Man Ray’s Star of the Sea does not guide us to a particular location; instead, the film brings us to a state of mind, a feeling, a quietude.
This is a surprisingly emotional piece for me to write for Perisphere because it feels like a plea and an admission. Maybe it is one. I’m lucky to live partially in a bubble where obsessing over movies is still an activity with a community surrounding it, in a city where a constellation of small theaters work together to foster a small but thriving ecosystem for film. Still, whenever I realize the diminishing place of film within the general culture, I feel an anxious need to cling on and evangelize in hopes that I might buy the art form a little more time as something the public needs and wants. I am convinced that it’s worthwhile to watch something without a point. Emak-Bakia is stamped near the end with the words “cine-poeme.” Clearly, to Ray, it didn’t really matter whether his films were conceived of as films, poetry, both, or something else entirely. They were meant to embody a spirit of experimentation that would energize the audience and perhaps inspire them to think differently about creative expression—as a process rather than an outcome. To me, this is certainly something worth paying attention to.
Footnotes
1 William James, Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), 227; cited in Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019.
2 Man Ray’s version of photograms – a photographic image made without a camera. More on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogram#Man_Ray’s_’rayographs‘.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
Thanks Sophie. You are not alone. Lovely piece.