Dadaist Films

Hans Richters Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927)
Here,flying hats, floating neck ties, [and] stacked guns illustrate the statement at the films
opening that even objects revolt against regimentation. We have here a silent cut because, the
title informs us, The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art.The use
of stop-motion animation and ingenious editingaccords with the confluence of technology and
aesthetic experimentation that film offered suited the Dadaists passion for the machine-made
object. In Richters short, such objects refuse to cooperate and play nice with their makers.
Man Ray and the Cinma Pur:

Le Retour la Raison (1923)
Man Rays pure cinema actively resisted the reason of conventional film production, with its
linear narrative logic and realist complacency. One might watch his films with the words of
Tzaras manifesto in mind: Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads
of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centres. Its chains kill, it is
an enormous centipede stifling independence. the film as basically a kinetic extension of Man
Rays still photography, utilizing animated photograms, a technique in which opaque, or
partially opaque, objects are arranged directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper and
exposed to light.
The title means Return to Reason, and its basically a kinetic extension of Man Rays still
photography. Many of the images in Le Retour are animated photograms, a technique in which
opaque, or partially opaque, objects are arranged directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper
and exposed to light. The technique is as old as photography itself, but Man Ray had a gift for
self-promotion, so he called them rayographs. For Le Retour, Man Ray sprinkled objects like
salt and pepper and pins onto the photographic paper. He also filmed live-action sequences of an
amusement park carousel and other subjects, including the nude torso of his model and lover,
Kiki of Montparnasse.
Emak-Bakia (1926)
The 16-minute Emak-Bakia contains some of the same images and visual techniques as Le
Retour la Raison, including rayographs, double images and negative images. But the liveaction sequences are more inventive, with dream-like distortions and tilted camera angles. The
effect is surreal. In reply to critics who would like to linger on the merits or defects of the film,
wrote Man Ray in the program notes, one can reply simply by translating the title Emak
Bakia, an old Basque expression, which was chosen because it sounds prettily and means: Give
us a rest.'
LEtoile de Mer (1928)
LEtoile de Mer (The Sea Star) was a collaboration between Man Ray and the surrealist
poet Robert Desnos. It features Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) and Andr de la
Rivire. The distorted, out-of focus images were made by shooting into mirrors and
through rough glass. The film is more sensual than Man Rays earlier works. As Donald
Faulkner writes:
In the modernist high tide of 1920s experimental filmmaking, LEtoile de Mer is a
perverse moment of grace, a demonstration that the cinema went farther in its great
silent decade than most filmmakers today could ever imagine. Surrealist photographer
Man Rays film collides words with images (the intertitles are from an otherwise lost
work by poet Robert Desnos) to make us psychological witnesses, voyeurs of a kind, to a
sexual encounter. A character picks up a woman who is selling newspapers. She
undresses for him, but then he seems to leave her. Less interested in her than in the
weight she uses to keep her newspapers from blowing away, the man lovingly explores
the perceptions generated by her paperweight, a starfish in a glass tube. As the man
looks at the starfish, we become aware through his gaze of metaphors for cinema, and for
vision itself, in lyrical shots of distorted perception that imply hallucinatory, almost
masturbatory sexuality.
Les Mystres du Chteau de D (1929)
The longest of Man Rays films, Les Mystres du Chteau de Dfollows a pair of travelers on a
journey from Paris to the Villa Noailles in Hyres, which features a triangular Cubist garden
designed by Gabriel Geuvrikain. Made as an architectural document and inspired by the poetry
of Mallarm, writes Kim Knowles in A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray, Les Mystres
du Chteau de D is the film in which Man Ray most clearly demonstrates his interdisciplinary
attitude, particularly in its reference to Stphane Mallarms poem Un coup de ds jamais
nabolira le hasard.
Marcel Duchamps Anmic Cinma (1926)
Man Ray shared a fraternal friendship and an artistic sensibility with perhaps the most
renowned, or infamous, of the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp. In addition to starring as himself in a
few films, and co-writing the feature length Dadaist film Dreams That Money Can Buy,
Duchamp made his own directorial contributions, beginning in 1926 with Anmic Cinma,
above.Created in Man Rays studio, the film consists of a series of spinning disks, some
containing French phrases which may be untranslatable. The whole reel is reminiscent of stock
scenes of hypnotism in sensationalist bourgeois movies.Are Richter, Man Ray, and Duchamps
filmsin Tzaras wordslike a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers
preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition? Such hyperbolic
expressions only serve to underline what Duchamps disks set in motion: progress is an illusion:
after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and the writer is entitled to his
boomboom. If Dadaism champions solipsism, it also champions the right of artists to their own
personal boomboom. In its anarchic rejection of codes of progress, law, morality and all other
fine qualities, Dada opened the door for personal freedom of expression as wide as it would
swing, preparing the way for all the situationists, yippies, and punks to come.
Ren Clairs EntrActe (1924)
Ren Clairs 1924 avant-garde masterpiece EntrActe opens with a cannon firing into the
audience and thats pretty much a statement of purpose for the whole movie. Clair wanted
to shake up the audience, throwing it into a disorienting world of visual bravado and
narrative absurdity. You can watch it above.
The film was originally designed to be screened between two acts of Francis Picabias
1924 opera Relche. Picabia reportedly wrote the synopsis for the film on a single sheet
of paper while dining at the famous Parisian restaurant Maxims and sent it to Clair.
While that handwritten note was the genesis of what we see on screen, its Clair sheer
cinematic inventiveness that is why the film is still shown in film schools today.
Clair sought to create a work of pure cinema, so he filled the film with just about every
camera trick in the book: slow motion, fast motion, split screen and superimpositions
among others. The camera is unbound and wildly kinetic. At one point, Clair mounts the
camera upside down to the front of a rollercoaster.
In true Dadaist fashion, Clair creates a series of striking images an upskirt shot of a
leaping ballerina; a funeral procession bounding down the street in slow motion; a corpse
springing out of a coffin that seem to cry out for an explanation but remain
maddeningly, frequently hilariously obscure.
The movie also serves as a class portrait of the Parisian avant-garde scene of the early
20s. Picabia and Erik Satie who scored the movie are the ones who fired that cannon.
In another scene, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray can be seen playing chess with each
other on a Parisian rooftop.
Compared to Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalis notorious 1928 short Un Chien Andalou
a movie that is still quite shocking today EntrActe is a much lighter, funnier work, one
that looks to thwart bourgeois expectations of narrative logic but doesnt quite try to
shock them into indignant outrage. In fact, to modern eyes, the movie feels at times like a
particularly unhinged Monty Python skit. Picabia himself once asserted that Entracte
respects nothing except the right to roar with laughter. So watch, laugh and prepare to
be confused.

Dadaist Films

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What visual techniques did Man Ray pioneer in his films?

How did René Clair seek to shake up audiences with Entr'Acte?

Hans Richters Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927)

Man Ray and the Cinma Pur:

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