Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ra

Synopsis

The four films Man Ray directed between 1923 and 1929, Le Retour a la raison, Emak-Bakia, L'Etoile de mer and Les Mysteres du Chateau du De represent a high watermark of early European avant-garde cinema, a seminal nexus of experimental technique, surrealist narrative, and playful abstraction as suffused with dark eroticism. In these films Ray began discovering the limitless possibilities of montage as well as the direct application onto celluloid of objects such as salt, pepper, pins, and thumbtacks. Juxtaposing undulating geometric patterns, a twirling fairground ride, and a female nude, among other striking images, Ray finds subconscious correspondences among seemingly incongruous materials and figures. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Le Retour a la raison, the Jim Jarmusch-Carter Logan combo Squrl present Man Ray: Return to Reason, with a newly-recorded drone rock soundtrack for that title as well as the three other Ray films. The band?s cosmic sounds complement Ray?s work by conjuring the beautiful, ineffable, haunting, and sublime.