SEE-
HEAR
FESTIVAL
one of the twentieth century’s most original artists
American painter and artist in various media who participated in a few films. He helped found the Dada movement and was the prime American participant in the Surrealist movement. An American expatriate to Paris in the 1920s, he was a member of the so-called “Lost Generation” of creative minds associated with that time and place. His art encompassed not only painting but photography and collage. He acted for René Clair in one film and was assistant director to Marcel Duchamp in another.
PROJECTS
What Do Young Films Dream About? (1924, 46 min )
Emak-Bakia (1927, 18 min)
L’étoile de mer (1928, 21 min)
A collaboration between Man Ray and Henri Chomette, half-brother of the filmmaker René Clair.
Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including Rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features. Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless.
Surrealist photographer Man Ray’s film collides words with images (the intertitles are from an otherwise lost work by poet Robert Desnos’) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a sexual encounter. A character picks up a woman who is selling newspapers.
