Le Retour à la Raison

Man Ray | France | 1923 | Short, 3 min

October 13, 2012

Le Retour à la Raison (The Return to the Reason). Produced, edited and directed by Man Ray (1890-1976). Made and first shown at Dada soirée 1923.

With this series of visual experiments alternating abstract and concrete images, negative and positive exposures, moving and static objects, Man Ray invents a catalog of techniques that subsequent filmmakers working in the avant-garde would continue to explore.

The film ends with a beautiful painterly shot of the nude torso of a female model caught in reflecting strips of lights.

"The most random and therefore probably the most 'Dada' of Dada film (the title is in itself an ironic joke), it was put together overnight by Man Ray when the poet Tristan Tzara announced, as much for a joke as anything else, a showing of a Man Ray film for the last of the great Dada soirées, Coeur à Barbe. American painter and photographer Ray, who went to Paris in 1921, had already made a short segment of film experiments together with Marcel Duchamp. He had also been making photographs without a camera by the direct process of placing objects on unexposed negatives. These photographs he called 'Rayographs.' Retour à la Raison was made by combining the footage he already had with additional material he produced that night using his Rayograph technique adapted to motion picture film. Ray had no experience with film editing and no idea how the result would appear on screen, but he considered the element of chance to be part of the artistic process."

—Museum of Modern Art film notes