Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray

France/1923-28 - Directed by Man Ray | 76 min.

The wildly improvisational and fragmentary Return to Reason is Man Ray's first film, where the artist explodes and reconstructs the cinematic medium as a vehicle for accessing the essence of things by rhythmic accumulation of visual details.

What emerges from this program - which combines Return to Reason with three other newly restored Ray films is set to hypnotic new music by SQURL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) - is the sense of Ray as a modern artist par excellence, an experimentalist committed to delving into the space between consciousness and unconsciousness, sense and nonsense, wakefulness and dreaming.

The meticulous restoration of all four films was led by Womanray and Cinenovo, in partnership with La Cinematheque francais, the Library of Congress, and Cineeteca di Bologna.