DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

Appendix 4

591 Emak Bakia: A Shot Analysis and commentary 1 The title “Emak-Bakia” [sic] in stylized Art Deco characters. The image is still. (“Emak Bakia” is said to mean “leave me alone” in Basque. It is also the name of a house near Biarritz where Man Ray stayed when he began the film.) 2 The title is now deformed, as though projected onto a rubber sheet that undergoes compression and stretching, all the while rotating. Man Ray had a close friendship with an American filmmaker named Dudley Murphy (1897–1968) who spent several years in Paris. They worked together in 1923–24, and by late in 1923 they were very close (close enough that each could film the other making love to his respective partner—Man Ray with Kiki and Dudley Murphy with his wife Katharine Hawley Murphy). By the time that Emak Bakia was shot, Murphy had returned to America—nonetheless , his penchant for rubbersheet effects (he was responsible for some similar effects in Ballet mécanique [1924], on which Man Ray collaborated) likely influenced this (and other similar images). 4 Appendix Appendix Four 592 Emak Bakia makes extensive use of rotating, spiralling, and gyrating forms. In this regard, it resembles Anémic cinéma, the film Man Ray did with Marcel Duchamp—Ray started work on Anémic cinéma before undertaking Emak Bakia (and for a while, work on the projects overlapped). The rotating forms Emak Bakia includes can be seen as part of Ray’s ongoing conversation with Duchamp. 3 A dissolve from the dark title “Emak-Bakia” to the lighter title “cinépoème.” Both titles are deformed, as though projected onto a rubber sheet, becoming compressed and stretching, and all the while rotating. Note: In claiming that the film is a sort of poem, Man Ray asserts both that film concerns the realm of mystery and that its structure is that of paratactically associated concrete images. 4 A dissolve from the lighter title, “cinépoème,” to the darker title, “de/ Man Ray/Paris 1926.” The titles are deformed, as though projected onto a rubber sheet, and swirl about. 5 Close-up side view of a man (Man Ray) beside a mirror, looking through a movie camera: an image of an eye appears in one of the lenses, then the image fades to black. Note: By starting the film with an image of the filmmaker, Man Ray asserts his authorship and suggests that what we will see is a product of the filmmaker ’s imagination—including the eye in many of the shots also serves to proclaim the film’s visionary character. The image of the filmmaker also suggests that the preceding images present the contents of the filmmaker’s mind, which retrospectively confers on the preceding images the status of subjective forms. However, most any viewer likely recognizes that the preceding sequence was a collage—an assemblage of concrete materials turned into light (by the photogram/Rayograph process). Thus, the preceding sequence takes on an ambiguous status, as being both objective (material ) and subjective. When we see the image of Man Ray at work filming, we might ask ourselves what else, besides himself, he might be filming—and the answer that suggests itself is that he was filming the preceding shots. The confounding of the inner and outer worlds that is such an important theme of the film starts right here, at the film’s beginning. But the preceding (and immediately succeeding) images hardly seem to have the character that one expects of a cinematographic shot, for they do not depict a “real” scene. 6 A photogram (or Rayogram) that creates a salt-and-pepper effect—irregular small white areas appear at sundry places against a black background 593 Emak Bakia: A Shot Analysis and Commentary (and do not stay in the position from one frame to the next). The film begins resolutely flat, affirming the cinema’s true character. Man Ray’s early writing concerned flatness and the new art. This shot and the next four are from Le retour à la raison. This incorporation highlights the work’s collage character. 7 The camera pans across a field of daisies, giving the impression they are rotating. 8 Photogram of pins, graphic image of white lines on black background, moving in various directions. Man Ray described this animation of pins and tacks as an epileptic dance. Photography meets cinema meets dance. 9...