New Restoration

“These four films by Man Ray take us back to the heady days of surrealism, when the essential properties of cinema could be turned against narrative logic, producing moods and gestures more akin to poetry and music.”

Michael Sicinski, Viennale 2023

Restored on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, Man Ray’s first foray into filmmaking, the wildly improvisational and unapologetically fragmentary Return to Reason, finds the artist exploding and reconstructing the cinematic medium as a vehicle for accessing the abstract essence of things. What emerges from this program—which combines Return to Reason with other kindred and newly restored early films by Ray, set to haunting and hypnotic new music by SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan)—is the sense of Ray as perhaps the modern artist par excellence, an intrepid experimentalist absolutely committed to delving ever deeper into the space between consciousness and unconsciousness, sense and nonsense, wakefulness and dreaming. —NYFF 2023

Return to Reason
(Le retour à la raison)
France 1923
3 min. DCP

Emak Bakia
France 1926
19 min. DCP

L’étoile de mer
France 1928
17 min. DCP

Les mystères du Château de Dé
France 1927
27 min. DCP

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