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Crosstown Arts presents a screening of Return to Reason: The Short Films of Man Ray in Crosstown Theater.
Crosstown Theater
Thursday, August 22, 2024
Tickets: $5 at the door
Doors at 6:30 pm | Films begin at 7:00 pm (sharp!)
Man Ray / 2023 / 70 minutes / Not Rated
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 Crosstown Arts Film Series showcases a diverse collection of independent, international, historically significant, artistic, experimental, cult, underground, and documentary features.
