Emak-Bakia

As explained in my review of the same film-maker's earlier and shorter THE RETURN TO REASON (1923), this is essentially an expansion of it: again, both the original, non-French title (EMAK-BAKIA) and the English moniker have no specific bearing on what we see on the screen!

Watching a number of avant-garde shorts in quick succession (culled from a Kino 2-Disc collection) is bound to make one forget to which effort a specific striking image belongs: I almost ascribed the scene involving a woman sporting a dual set of eyes (one real, one painted on her eyelids) – easily the most memorable image here – to an earlier short I had watched…go figure!

One of Man Ray's most well-known short films is without any clear classification, with the subtitle "Cinepoeme". There's no 'plot' to speak of, certainly without any clear human "characters"; with the Starfish a couple years later one could say there were some more identifiable people in that than here. For this film, the first shot is a man behind the camera looking out (one can see his eye in the lens I think), and then it's... lots of squiggly lines going by really fast (a precursor to Brakhage shorts), flowers, animated nails, and then... people walking, their legs, a banjo and dancing, on a beach somewhere, the ocean, fish, and a woman's face as she may or may not be in the midst of a dream.

In other words, there's no real way to say what this is 'about', more that it's one of those poetic expressions with the camera and editing in use for the flow. I have to wonder of Man Ray wrote this out as a poem first, and then just went about, as if a documentarian, finding the sights and sounds to correspond with what he wanted to lay down. Later in the short there's warped images of diamonds and objects that are hard to make out. And in the end the most memorable part comes with a woman who's eye-lids are painted to look like eyes. All of it is of a piece, and most of it's beautiful and curious in a beguiling way, while some of it just goes by so quickly that it seems more like Man Ray trying to see what things look like through a camera. At the end of the day, it's all for the beholder. Good or bad, it's art.

This is a beautiful silent short film about obsession, voyeurism and love, stylistically somewhere between DADA, surrealism and of course Man Ray's own genius style. It definitely shows how much the surrealist avantgarde has influenced contemporary (art)cinema!

If anybody out there knows what the title 'Emak-Bakia' means, please let me know.

I've always found the dilettante Man Ray and his artistic efforts to be deeply pretentious, and I've never understood why his work attracts so much attention. Apart from his Rayographs (which he invented by accident, and which are merely direct-contact photo prints), his one real contribution to culture seems to be that he was the first photographer to depict female nudity in a manner that was accepted as art rather than as porn. But surely this had to happen eventually, and there's no real reason why Ray deserves the credit. The critical reaction to Man Ray reminds me of the story about the Emperor's New Clothes.

There is in 'Emak-Bakia' one interesting shot of several women alighting from a 1920s motorcar: the camera aims at the pavement and the running board, so that we see only their feet in silk stockings and shoes. Man Ray's entire career shows a constant obsession with the nude female form: this one shot seems to imply that he may have had a fetish for women's feet or shoes or both.

We also see a brief montage of Rayographs, depicting either dressmaker's pins or nails (it's hard to tell), edited in a manner that almost makes them look animated.

I remember a shot of a headless puppet with a balloon in its neck, and a picture of Josephine Baker's face is drawn on the balloon. Or am I thinking of some other Man Ray movie instead? Who cares! All of his work is equally meaningless.

The emperor is naked, folks, and this movie just barely rates one point out of 10. Au suivant!

Consisting of a lot of the spinning imagery Man Ray is quite quick to associate himself with, Emak-Bakia comes off as a much less concise version of Le Retour de la Raison. Here Ray is going for a surrealist approach, which doesn't work in a few important ways.

First of all, while surrealism tends to be abstract in places, it's not this abstract. The whole idea behind surrealism is something odd accepted as real, while this is just a bunch of odd things. Secondly, there's a huge disjunct between the fractured narrative and the exploration of spinning, warped lights and patterns. A huge difficulty here is that Ray says that's the point. If you fail, but tried to fail, does that mean you've succeeded? What this film really needs is to decide which way to go: less abstract or more abstract? I'd lean towards more abstract, because what's really appealing about the imagery Ray uses is his love of revolving light. It's in these moments that the short film is relaxed and sweet to watch, and where multiple viewings are appealing.

Also nice is the repeated imagery of eyes, always something self-reflexive in avant-garde cinema. If anything, it's those more "concrete" parts that fit with the more abstract things.

--PolarisDiB