In 1923, Man Ray improvises his first film. This movie, boldly surrealist, is called Le Retour à la raison. Subsequently, he renews the experience with Emak Bakia in 1926, L’Étoile de mer in 1928 and Les Mystères du château de Dé in 1929.

Le Retour à la raison deconstructs cinema in all its aspects. On the one hand, Man Ray emphasises the fragment, or series of fragments, denying any sense of unifying wholeness (independently of the principle of unity: story, theme, style). He explains his choices in a piece published in “Close Up” in 1927: “You can appreciate the abstract beauty of a classical work much better through a fragment than the whole; in a similar fashion, this film attempts to reveal the essential elements of contemporary cinema”. However, the film also negates the fundamental components of the medium itself: its material base and the use of light. Instead of filming, we have the “rayogram”, a direct printing/impression on the negative; there is no division between individual frames, but rather a violation of the tiny gaps that are normally rendered invisible during projection, and there is a deliberate lack of respect for the chemical nature of the celluloid base. Moreover, movement is not recorded but deliberately constructed, and the traditional boundaries of the representation of space and objects are overturned (high/ low, the tidy organisation of the frame, proportionality, perpendicular framing, and a prism-effect that duplicates the same shot in a single image). Similar violations are also applied to the treatment of time (repetition) and the notion that the various elements should be coherently linked (heterogeneity of the successive images).

François Albera, Avanguardie, Il Castoro, Milan 2004