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Self-portrait, 1924 © Man Ray Trust/Cinédoc 2001
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Films and videos by : |
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Man Ray
Man Ray
Painter, sculptor, photographer, born in1890 in Philadelphia, USA. He discovered European avant-garde painting at the big exhibition in New York in 1913, the Armory Show, and was particularly struck by Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase". The following year saw the birth of the artist, self-styled: Man Ray, the Ray of Light Man. In 1920, with Marcel Duchamp, he filmed the shaving of a naked model's pubes, then made a stereoscopic film: both films however remain lost. He moved to France in 1921, welcomed by artists such as Tzara, Brandon, Rigaut, Soupault, Picabia, and it was there that he made most of his films. Film, far more than simply an art he practised outside the industry system as an artist-craftsman, was the art that prompted his most productive artistic thinking. It was through film and in film that he was particularly innovative: camera-less film and the Ciné-rayogrammes with his first film Le retour à la raison in 1923, the play on optics and narratives, going far beyond story-telling, as he himself described: "No stories, each film offered to the audience is the culmination of a way of thinking as well as of seeing", in Emak Bakia ("Just leave me alone" in Basque) in 1926, Etoile de mer in 1928, Les Mystères du Château du Dé in 1929 ; then expanded Cinema or film outside of standard screening conditions such as Bal blanc in 1930, a Méliès film that Man Ray projected onto his guests, who were all dressed in white for the ball given by the Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt. The second phase in his filmmaking was marked his experiments with the new 16 and 9.5 mm formats and the first colour film stock, the first home-movies, or personal films: Autoportrait (1930), Courses landaises (1935) and La Garoupe (1937) in which Man Ray filmed his friends Picasso, Eluard, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and a lesbian pornographic piece Deux femmes (1937).
Claudine Eizykman, Un Cabinet d'Amateur, Cinémathèque Française, March 93
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