“I’d like to see something in a film I have never seen before, something that I don’t understand”  
“ Film and photography, the latest and hence the youngest of the arts, are primitive, compared with painting, which has thousands of years’ history behind it. Nothing has been done yet.”
Man Ray

This first exhibition on Man Ray as Filmmaker covers both advances made in film, through the cinematic work of Man Ray and advances made through film in the work of Man Ray.
Advances through film in Man Ray’s work because they relate to the challenge that film posed for artists in the early 20th century : Man Ray integrated cinematic elements, movement, light, optics to his entire body of work.
Advances in filmmaking in his cinematic œuvre, because his films were innovative in terms of film history: camera-less cinema; the personal cinema that appeared under the rubric “Home Movies” in the USA in the 60s ; “expanded cinema”, visual cinema, liberated from narrative, to use Man Ray’s own terms.

The work of Man Ray (1890-1976) reveals the many facets of a boundless capacity for invention that announced a new kind of artist: painting, photography, sculpture, object, film, were, in turn, radically reinvented. From the aerographs of the ‘teens to the camera-less photos of the 20s, including the cine-rayograms, the camera-less films, the cine-poems, the “objects of my affection”, the magazines, Man Ray was both involved in and left his mark on Dadaism and Surrealism whilst maintaining his own independance and distance. Initially known for his photographic portraits, his personal work became increasingly influential and is now considered one of the most innovative bodies of work of the first half of the century.
Yet for a long time his cinematic work, from when he started in 1923 and then throughout his subsequent career, always working outside of the industry, was notable for its absence in exhibitions and publications devoted to Man Ray, despite the fact that an entire chapter in his book “Autoportrait/Self-Portrait” (1963, éditions Robert Laffont, France; Atlantic Monthly Press, US), titled Films Dada and Surrealism, provides a detailed account of his film activities.

The exhibition comprises :
From New York to Paris, moving towards film (1914-1921)
The first film. Le Retour à la Raison (The Return to Reason, 1923)
The films of the 20s
The unseen films of the 30s
Man Ray’s Collaborations
The film projects and the lost films
Man Ray’s imaginary studio: a recreation
Mural presentation of SOIES-RAY
Ray’s Star Portraits

Institutional partners: CNC and Le Mois de la Photo