FILM SCREENING + PERFORMANCE: Man Ray’s Return to Reason

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Film Screening + Performance: Man Ray’s Return to Reason
With a solo performance by Chad Beattie
Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 7 PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free and open to all

Join us for a screening of Man Ray’s newly restored experimental masterpieces Return to Reason (1923-1929) with a new soundtrack by Jim Jarmusch-Carter Logan combo Sqürl. The evening will begin with a solo performance by the Asheville-based multi-instrumentalist Chad Beattie, followed by a free screening of the films.

About Return to Reason:

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. 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, led by WOMANRAY and Cinenovo, involved sourcing original prints from all over the world, in partnership with the Cinémathèque française, the Centre Pompidou, the Library of Congress, the CNC, and the Cineteca di Bologna.

United States, France | 2023 | 70 minutes | Black & White | Silent

MAN RAY

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in the United States in 1890 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Man Ray is considered a pioneer of the surrealist and Dada movements, with work spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Disillusioned with conventional art and shaped by the trauma of World War I, along with the emergence of modern media culture, Man Ray and other Dadaists turned to audacious formal experimentation to capture an unreasoning world. Though Man Ray is perhaps best remembered for his striking fashion photography, and the camera-less pictures he called “rayographs”—photograms made by positioning objects directly onto photosensitive material, which he then exposed—his inventive forays into filmmaking are lesser known. In his silent shorts, Man Ray expanded his avant-garde techniques to the realm of moving images, playing with chance and light to fantastic effect.

Image: Man Ray. Self-Portrait with Camera. 1931. Gelatin silver print, 6 3/4 × 5″ (17.1 × 12.7 cm). Gift of James Thrall Soby. © 2022 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

SQÜRL

SQÜRL was formed by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan in 2009 to create some music for Jarmusch’s film The Limits of Control. In 2013, the group, along with Jozef van Wissem, received the Cannes Soundtrack Award for Only Lovers Left Alive. SQÜRL has also composed the scores for two other Jarmusch films, Paterson (2016) and The Dead Don’t Die (2019). The duo’s debut LP, Silver Haze, was released on May 5, 2023, via Sacred Bones Records.

Image: Portrait of SQÜRL courtesy of Janus Films.

Chad Beattie

Chad Beattie has been making music under the name Yes Selma for the past decade, rummaging through clatter and drones. Since relocating from Baltimore to Asheville in 2021, he has found a distinct voice in the hammered dulcimer, exploring its dynamic range through the repetition of melodic patterns, the reverberation of harmonic phrases – both in his solo work as well as with vibraphonist Adam Lion under their duo, Aperture. Beattie’s latest album Tapioca Daydreams was released in 2023.

Image: Photo of Chad Beattie.

Stills from Return to Reason courtesy of Janus Films:

ABOUT THE FILMS

Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason) 1923 | 3 minutes
For Le retour à la raison, Man Ray extended his visual experimentations from photography to moving images, playfully applying salt and pepper, pins, and thumbtacks directly onto celluloid. The final segment introduces the legendary Kiki de Montparnasse—his frequent model—her nude form overlaid by bands of light and shadow.

Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) 1923 | 19 minutes
Subtitled as a cinépoéme, or a cinematic poem, Emak-bakia restages many of Man Ray’s still-photography techniques, such as double exposure, soft focus, and his signature “rayographs.” The title means “leave me alone” in the Basque language, though it can also be translated as “give peace.”

L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) 1928 | 18 minutes
Featuring intertitles penned by surrealist poet Robert Desnos, L’étoile de mer explores an affair between a man (André de la Rivière) and a woman (Kiki de Montparnasse)—shots of whom are often distorted through glass or a gelatin filter—via a poetic montage of surreal images, including a starfish in a jar.

Les mystères du château du dé (The Mysteries of the Château of Dice) 1929 | 28 minutes
In Les mystères du château du dé, a pair of masked men allow chance to dictate their decisions. After driving out to a fabulous château in the hills, they frolic among its well-appointed interior and grounds—which sport sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró—and encounter other faceless travelers whose fates are also ruled by rolls of the dice.

Previous Film Screenings at BMCM+AC