Man Ray's Silent Experimental Films Restored
Four short films that Man Ray made in the 1920s are being re-released with new music by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan's band SQÜRL
In the 1920s, while Hollywood solidified the conventional grammar of narrative cinema and consolidated itself into an industry with global reach, Parisian modernists experimented in cinema, exploring its potential to be non-linear, lysergic and not very profitable. This could take the form of the startling images, connected only by montage, of Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and Salvador Dalí, with its juxtapositions and provocations that recall the latter’s paintings; the rhythm changes, stop-motion and in-camera effects of Entr'acte (1924), by René Clair, commissioned by Francis Picabia to accompany a ballet with music by Erik Satie; of the rhythmic edition, fragmented perspective and futuristic frenzy of Ballet Mécanique (1924), by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy.
The day before its screening at the 1923 Soirée du Cœur à Barbe, affiliated with Dada and infamously interrupted by André Breton, Man Ray created his first film, Le Retour à la raison, with just three minutes, sprinkling salt, pepper, pins and needles directly into the film and exposing it to light — a method he had developed in the still photographs he called "Rayography". If the Rayographies highlight the materiality of the photographic image, the flashes of light and movement in Le Retour à la raison also demonstrate its immateriality.
Ray's films have been digitally restored and open in theaters starting today (May 15) at New York's IFC Center, with a new soundtrack by SQÜRL, the noise rock band composed by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his producer and composer Carter Logan. In Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926), L'étoile de mer (1928), and Ray's Les mystères du château du dé (1927), experimental techniques (such as glass or gelatin filters) complement a free-associative narrative, evoking mutable form of a dream.
"What inspires me most is his openness to playing with different forms," says Jarmusch, pointing to Ray's practice in several areas, which he sees as analogous to the collage-like editing of his own films, with references to people, poems and pop songs that he admires, the result of a process of "collecting ideas and then putting them together, rather than starting from an idea and expanding it".
Jarmusch and Logan have been accompanying Ray's films in live concerts since the late 2010s; having discussed a soundtrack project for silent films for a long time, they ended up choosing Ray after the insistence of a "teenage cinephile", says Jarmusch, daughter of a French colleague. Marieke Tricoire, the producer who led the restorations, had aspirations of making a concert film featuring the band, but changed focus, she says, when she saw that footage of Ray at his shows appeared to be taken from a 20-year-old DVD from the band. Center Pompidou gift shop. When the Pompidou was unable to find a better version in its own archives, nitrate copies were found in the archives of the Cinémathèque Française and the Library of Congress, although a copy of Les mystères du château du dé given by Ray to the artist and patron Marie-Laure de Noailles was poorly preserved and irrecoverable, "like a block of salt", says Tricoire.
After their rescue from dusty obscurity, films remain elusive objects, just like music. The soundtrack is semi-improvised, as a matter of principle, say Logan and Jarmusch, in deference to the "sense of playfulness" that Logan detects in the films. The fruits of Ray's creativity extend even beyond the frame: Tricoire notes that in the first generation copy of Le Retour à la raison, the patterns left by the Rayographs cover the entire celluloid strip, surrounding the perforations. Ray "treated the chamber like a toy," says Jarmusch, a parallel to noise rock's tendency to "treat instruments in a way that wasn't necessarily formal."
The music, an intoxicating, mantra-like wave of sound, is similar to the drone-rock soundtracks of Jarmusch films like The Limits of Control (2009) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), on which Logan served as producer. It doesn't sound like the jazz or "French popular music" that Ray initially suggested for his silent films, but sound and image are equally expansive. "Surrealism is about altering consciousness," says Jarmusch, an obvious link to SQÜRL's psychedelic vibes.
It also suggests a link between Ray's 1920s Paris and the New York of the 1970s and 80s. Several of Jarmusch's colleagues, he notes, drew inspiration from earlier generations of French bohemians, such as Tom Verlaine, who appropriated his name of the surrealist progenitor poet. Both scenes, much mythologized, were, Jarmusch feels, "vibrant with experimentalism", evident in the fertile interplay of music, film, literature and visual art, as well as in "anti-mainstream, anti-bourgeois attitudes". Punks and Surrealists, Logan says, eschewed specialization and professionalism, opting instead to "live on the margins of culture and therefore on the cutting edge."
Source: The Art Newspapper