Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray

Co-presented by Canyon Cinema

“Swirling coils, dancing legs, twitching starfish, and thrown dice are a few of the beguiling visuals in MAN RAY: RETURN TO REASON, a recently released collection of four experimental shorts in the oeuvre of the seminal Dada and Surrealist artist.” — Rania Richardson, ARTnews

In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Le Retour à la raison, the Jim Jarmusch-Carter Logan combo Sqürl 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. the restoration process for these films was led by Womanray and Cinenovo sourcing original prints from various parts of the world, in partnership with La Cinémathèque française, the Centre Pompidou, the Library of Congress, the French CNC and Cineteca di Bologna.

The four films Man Ray directed between 1923 and 1929, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L’Étoile de mer, and Les Mystères du Château du Dé 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.