Val-de-Grace Studio

Swiss artist, painter, writer, and photographer Elisabeth Meret Oppenheim encounters Man Ray in this short film. There is no direction here, we see only insignificant movements – lighting a cigarette, or drinking from a glass. This is the middle of the director’s surrealist period, when his films were successfully presented alongside Un Chien Andalou, Entr’acte, and La Coquille et le Clergyman. In 1933 he made a film about the artist Constantine Brâncuşi that unfortunately was not preserved.

In the director's autobiography, he says that he often and gladly filmed scenes from private life on 9.5 mm amateur film. Sometime around 1929, he lent a camera to Ernest Hemingway so that he could capture bullfighting in Pamplona, Spain. To date it has not been possible to determine with any certainty who actually shot Corrida. In 1929, Man Ray travelled, published, and filmed quite a bit, so it is certainly possible that this is indeed his footage from Spain.

Here we enter Man Ray’s private world and watch a short scene in which the key role is played by the artist’s former partner Ady Fidelin, with whom he lived until the 1940s.

Since 1922, Man Ray had his studio in the Hotel Istria on Rue Campagne-Première. Marcel Duchamp, who worked in his studio, lived in the same building. In this short film, we see several shots from this place, supposedly unused footage for the film The Starfish. Here he also shot footage for the film What Do Young Films Dream About? for Henri Chometta.

Once again, we see footage of the holidays that American photographer and filmmaker Man Ray spends in the French town of Antibes. And once again he uses Kodachrome color film supplied to him by the manufacturer. This new type of film was introduced to the market in 1937. According to Ray, he also received a camera with the request to show what he could create with it. He did not like the natural colors and used a filter that he forgot to take off, so that all shots ended up completely different and Man Ray was dissatisfied with the results.

One of Man Ray’s last film experiments, in which he refers to the origins of cinema. We follow the mysterious Jenny, who performs a kind of dance. The same year, the International Exhibition of Surrealism opened at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, Man Ray is a master of light, and visitors tour his exhibition using a flashlight.

Assistant, lover, and muse Lee Miller is the main character of this film, which is one of the few that has been positively identified, because in 1930 Montparnasse magazine published a photo with the description that it is a shot from Man Ray’s upcoming film. This film references to his famous later artwork from 1935 – Porcelain Pipe with Bubble. In other words, this is the film version of the artwork, in which Miller discovers the phallic symbolism of Princesse X, which at the time caused a scandal.

In July 1940 Man Ray departed for New York. In Hollywood he met Juliet Browner and they settled there together. Here he focused only on art and the creation of art pieces. Although director Al Lewin offered him work in Hollywood, Man Ray devoted himself solely to adding sound to his older films. In the film we see several private scenes of Juliet shot on 8mm. As Man Ray himself said: “At this time, I go to the cinema more out of politeness, because most films bore me.”

From 1935, Man Ray stayed with friends in the Landes region. The company he kept included personalities such as André Breton and Paul Éluard, the writers of a script called An Attempt at Simulating Cinematic Delirium, from which several scenes were filmed on this very spot. Seven photographs from the shooting were published in the same year in Cahiers d'art. Here, however, we have another movie on the topic of the French version of bullfighting (tauromachie).