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Thursday, March 27th, 2025
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| 8:00a | Man Ray’s Surrealist Cinema: Watch Four Pioneering Films From the 1920s
Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as character, setting, and plot. Today we present Man Ray’s four influential films of the 1920s. Le Retour à la Raison (above) was completed in 1923. The title means “Return to Reason,” and it’s basically a kinetic extension of Man Ray’s still photography. Many of the images in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique in which opaque, or partially opaque, objects are arranged directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper and exposed to light. The technique is as old as photography itself, but Man Ray had a gift for self-promotion, so he called them “rayographs.” For Le Retour, Man Ray sprinkled objects like salt and pepper and pins onto the photographic paper. He also filmed live-action sequences of an amusement park carousel and other subjects, including the nude torso of his model and lover, Kiki of Montparnasse. Emak-Bakia (1926):
The 16-minute Emak-Bakia contains some of the same images and visual techniques as Le Retour à la Raison, including rayographs, double images, and negative images. But the live-action sequences are more inventive, with dream-like distortions and tilted camera angles. The effect is surreal. “In reply to critics who would like to linger on the merits or defects of the film,” wrote Man Ray in the program notes, “one can reply simply by translating the title ‘Emak Bakia,’ an old Basque expression, which was chosen because it sounds pretty and means: ‘Give us a rest.’ ” L’Etoile de Mer (1928):
L’Etoile de Mer (“The Sea Star”) was a collaboration between Man Ray and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It features Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and André de la Rivière. The distorted, out-of-focus images were made by shooting into mirrors and through rough glass. The film is more sensual than Man Ray’s earlier works. As Donald Faulkner writes: In the modernist high tide of 1920s experimental filmmaking, L’Etoile de Mer is a perverse moment of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its great silent decade than most filmmakers today could ever imagine. 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. She undresses for him, but then he seems to leave her. Less interested in her than in the weight she uses to keep her newspapers from blowing away, the man lovingly explores the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube. As the man looks at the starfish, we become aware through his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for vision itself, in lyrical shots of distorted perception that imply hallucinatory, almost masturbatory sexuality. Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929):
The longest of Man Ray’s films, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (the version above has apparently been shortened by seven minutes) follows a pair of travelers on a journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyères, which features a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. “Made as an architectural document and inspired by the poetry of Mallarmé,” writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, “Les Mystères du Château de Dé is the film in which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary attitude, particularly in its reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.” Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April, 2012. Related Content: Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons Four Surrealist Films From the 1920Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter |
| 9:00a | The Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of: An Introduction to Tseng Kwong Chi
Once, the United States was known for sending forth the world’s most complained-about international tourists; today, that dubious distinction arguably belongs to China. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Chinese tourist was a practically unheard-of phenomenon, especially in the West. That’s an important contextual element to understand when considering the work of photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, who traveled around America taking pictures of himself at various recognizable monuments and landmarks while wearing a suit most commonly associated with Chairman Mao. The figure that emerged from this project is the subject of the new Nerdwriter video above. “He called this character ‘an ambiguous ambassador,’ and, in a series he called ‘East Meets West,’ posed him — posed himself — in front of various icons of touristic America,” writes Brian Dillon in a New Yorker piece on Tseng’s work. “He leaps into the air in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, stands impassive beside Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, gazes off into the distance with Niagara Falls behind him.” Inspired by Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 visit to the U.S., Tseng produced most of these photos in the late seventies and early eighties, and even “took the ambiguous ambassador to Europe, where he appears heroic before the Arc de Triomphe, and diminutive between two policemen at the Tower of London.” Born in British Hong Kong, then partially raised in Canada and educated in Paris, Tseng arrived in New York in 1979, ready to join the downtown scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ann Magnuson, Cindy Sherman, and Keith Haring. It’s for his documentation of Haring’s work, in fact, that he remains most widely known, 35 years after his own AIDS-related death. But now, as taking pictures of oneself in famous places around the world becomes an increasingly universal practice, “East Meets West” draws more and more attention. Maybe, in an art world where cultural identity is so fiercely declared and defended, the very ambiguity of the ambassador portrayed by Tseng — who, as Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak emphasizes, “didn’t want to be known as a Chinese artist, or an Asian-American artist, or a gay artist; he just wanted to be an artist” — has become that much more compelling. Related Content: The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist The Revolutionary Paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay How Dorothea Lange Shot Migrant Mother Perhaps the Most Iconic Photo in American History Demystifying the Activist Graffiti Art of Keith Haring: A Video Essay The Photo That Triggered China’s Disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966) Photographer Bill Cunningham (RIP) on Living La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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