Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray

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. In celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Le retour à la raison, the Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan combo, SQÜRL, presents Return to Reason. The band’s cosmic sounds complement Ray’s work by conjuring the beautiful, ineffable, haunting, and sublime.