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 understand that Man Ray's 1923 short "Le retour à la raison" - "Return to Reason" in English - is an example of pure cinema: returning the medium to its most basic form (moving images). It's not the greatest movie ever made or anything, but I recommend it just for the bizarre factor.

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)

Man Ray is a sometimes controversial artist. This film is quite fun to look at. It is filled with numerous examples of eye candy and coordinated music. I don't know if there is a story involved, but it is an engaging piece of cinema.