Le retour à la raison

A good experimental short film. Good photography and attention to the lights and shadows. You can see the attention and photographic skill. The shadows on the woman's body are visionary!

I always get a headache trying to work out what avant-garde cinema is all about – allegedly, cinema brawls have been started for this very reason. So I've decided to appreciate 'The Return to Reason (1923)' for its aesthetic qualities only, and there are plenty. The beginning of the film is a hectic collage of white specks and rotating silhouettes, some footage created without the use of a camera, similar to the later work of Stan Brakhage. Ticking clocks, nail outlines, bright lights, spinning egg crates – what it all means, I don't know, but the brisk editing pace maintains a strong momentum that easily carries through the two-minute running time. Ray's montage flows smoothly for the most part, but occasionally jars like a jump-cut as he switches from one photographic technique to another; for example, from moving to static images, or between visuals produced with and without a camera. In this sense, the film doesn't stream as pleasantly as similar avant-garde works like Richter's 'Ghosts after Breakfast (1928)' and Vávra's 'The Light Pentrates the Dark (1931).'

This was my first film from Man Ray, one of the leading figures in the Dadaist film movement of the 1920s. Dada (or Dadaism) is characterised by the rejection of logic and rationality in artistic expression, and so the embracing of chaos. The title 'The Return to Reason' seems to be intentionally contradictory, at odds with a film in which very little reason is to be found. Perhaps the randomness is all for the director's own amusement – Man Ray was notorious for his wry sense of humour, and he reportedly "talked so you could never tell when he was kidding." He once stated that "To create is divine, to reproduce is human," suggesting an overlying theme of sex in his work. Indeed, the finale of this film involves the naked torso of a woman – perhaps this "return to reason" is the realisation, after two minutes of frenzied, random soul-searching, of what matters most to a man. I can sympathise.

I'm not an artist nor am I someone who can be considered to be artistically inclined. I am not going to sit here and pretend to understand what it is that I have just watched. However I will state that in my opinion it was a pleasant viewing experience. It really is the director danglingn a bunch of shapes in front of a camera for 2 and a half minutes before being shown a human figure. Soemhow I did not mind watching this. If anything I had a good time. Would I watch this again? No, probably not however, if it was showns to me again I would not protest. It is only 3 muinutes long. It does invoke a strange sensaiotn of nostalgia but I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I had by the end experienced glee like a child being shown a sparkly toy, dread and discomfort, and confusion all at diferent intervals. Impressive.

It starts in chaos. It's the chaos of the mind. The gargantuan amount of facts threaten to bring all thoughts out of order. So many trees, we can't see the forest. That kind of thing. So we just see static, gibberish dots and lights.

Then we have a date with a woman and go to the carnival with her. Our head is too full to see what really matters. We spin around, with the woman in our arms, and hundreds of light dots spin around us. We manage to sort our thoughts again and to return to reason. It's quite the opposite of going insane. We realize what really matters in life. Tits without a face. We are cured.

This short montage by Man Ray is interesting for fans of avant-garde, its photographic, surreal, Dadaist structure is highly experimental, and it appears to be the forerunner to the more rounded, structured Emak-Bakia, finished three years later. Man Ray has a particular penchant for close-up out of focus shots of revolving objects, which gives a strange jamais-vu feeling about many of the average household objects he spins in front of his camera. The image of Kiki's nude torso revolving and reflecting strips of light is particularly beautiful. However, Man Ray's best work, in my opinion are his home movies (particularly the film of the matador and also the colour film featuring a very young-looking Pablo Picasso)