"Dadaism was an international nihilistic movement that lasted from 1916 to 1922; it was born from the widespread disillusionment engendered by World War I. ‘Dada’ is a nonsense word. It expresses a certain spontaneity because it is similar to an infant’s first words. However the true origin of this name is unknown. Dadaism attacked conventional standards of aesthetics and behaviour; it encouraged the role of absurdity and of the unpredictable in the artistic world- in figurative arts, in literature and in cinema. It assaulted and scoffed society’s institutions with the intent to break them down."¹ "In the 1920s society was practically drowning in its own superficiality of values and lifestyle, only believing in the absolute power of technological and scientific progress. The Dadaists’ provocative, teasing, and ironic forms of expression roused the bourgeois from their sluggishness."² "They forced them to question everything in life. The Dadaists took an object and presented it in a totally different way. Confronted with these art works the spectators realized the absurdity of their life style and their values."³

Born in Philadelphia in 1890, Emmanuel Radnitsky grew up in New Jersey and became a commercial artist in New York in the 1910s. He began to sign his name Man Ray in 1912. He initially taught himself photography in order to have a record of his own works of art, which included paintings and mixed media. In 1915 he met Marcel Duchamp, and with him he left for Paris in 1921. Thanks to Duchamp, he met the Parisian Dadaists. In 1922 Man Ray decided to make a living as a portrait photographer, and he began to make, among other things, photograms, which he called ‘Rayographs’. In the 1920s, he also began making moving pictures which were all highly creative, non-narrative explorations of the possibilities of the medium. Shortly before World War II, Man Ray returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles from 1940 until 1951.He was disappointed that he was recognized only for his photography in America and not for the filmmaking, painting, sculpture, and other media in which he worked. In 1951 Man Ray returned to Paris. He concentrated primarily on painting until his death in 1976.⁹

In America he felt isolated from society and felt a strong bonding with nonconformists. Because of this, his ambition to create a personal expressive style grew stronger. He met Marcel Duchamp, who had a terrible reputation for one of his new works that had been ridiculed by the American critics, and found a spiritual affinity in the French artist. Not long after the two artists became conspirators, collaborators, rivals in chess, and friends for life. Both artists elevated prosaic reality to the level of pure art. The American critics were rough on Man Ray’s works as well. Man Ray suffered from this until he decided to move to Paris. He made the long journey across the Atlantic Ocean by ship, arriving in Le Havre on July 22, 1921. In the 1920s Paris was the heart of the international art world. There Man Ray finally found a group that spoke his same ‘language’, artistically speaking. He couldn’t speak French yet, but had no problem entering the group thanks to his strong relationship with Duchamp. Moving away from traditional subjects and techniques, he was encouraged to produce provocative works of art, breaking the rules of traditional aesthetic and challenging the observer’s concept of beauty. In Paris one of his first works was ‘Le Cadeau’, an iron with nails glued to the base. This became one of the symbols of the Dadaist movement, and is one of Man Ray’s first attempts to actively involve the observer. He hoped the public would look beyond the physical aspect of a work and find a more profound meaning. The most conventional subjects were shown in a way to shock the observer.¹⁷

Because of economical difficulties he decided to become a professional photographer. He offered his services to other artists, portraying them in outstanding photographs. He immortalized many important artists and writers: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Cocteau, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot, and many others. This gave him the opportunity to become well known and to enter artistic and social circles. At the beginning of the 1920s Paul Poiret offered him a job as a fashion photographer, for he was in search of a different approach to the theme of fashion. In many of Man Ray’s photographs the models appear like veritable statues. After Man Ray’s elegant images were seen, his work was requested by famous magazines like Vogue, Vu, and Vanity Fair. In this period his paintings showed little progress, but his photography had no limits.¹⁸ These new financial opportunities encouraged Man Ray to continue incessantly with his experiments in innovative photography- for instance, moving the camera while shooting, or applying gelatin to the lens to obscure them- so he could produce images that would not reflect the ordinary world. He also rediscovered a procedure to produce images without the use of the camera. Positioning an object on a sheet of photosensitive paper and exposing it to the light, he could obtain an image with the outline of the object itself. He felt as though he were free from the stickiness of painting and was finally working directly with light. The images were produced without a negative so each piece was unique and thus had the same value as a painting or a drawing. Man Ray called these creations ‘rayographs’¹⁹ and they were often seen as the first example of surrealist photography. However, they were simply works of art permeated with Dadaist values, which were based on the principle of destructive projection of all formal art. Using a new procedure, Man Ray was able to propose a new vision of ordinary objects. Their combinations would create a ‘plastic poetry’: something new, distinguishable, visible and almost palpable. Rayographs weren’t abstract, being the reproduction, by contact, of real objects. There wasn’t any space for the unconscious, because the connection of the objects was well studied. It wasn’t a dream world to be represented, but a real one, even if participant of a different reality.²⁰

One day his assistant and lover, Lee Miller, while working in the dark room, felt a mouse near her feet and instinctively turned on the lights. The ray of light ‘solarized’ the photographs still in the process of being developed. After this ‘accident’ Man Ray started using this particular technique, exposing a negative or a print to the light during development. In this way all the photographic subjects had a kind of characteristic outline. The translucent quality of the solarized images were in great demand for surrealist publications.²¹ "This technique, together with others (glass negative, photograms, rayographs), is an old technique which was used by photographers in the 1800s, as well as by a handful of Man Ray’s contemporaries in the 1900s."²² Man Ray’s solarized photos have an astonishing effect: they seem like a materialization of the aura. It’s hard to believe that these amazing effects were considered a laboratory accident. Manipulations of this sort set his photographs apart from ordinary snapshots and situated them firmly in the realm of art. "Breton included Man Ray as a visual artist in his ‘Surrealist Manifesto’; he admired his photographs immensely. Man Ray’s juxtapositions of images and rayographs were far from everyday banality; his mental landscapes echoed the surrealists’ ‘automatic writing’."²³ ‘Automatic writing’ is like a ‘photograph of the mind’. "Man Ray became a poet par excellence, who wrote with light."²⁴ He developed a poetic vision of objects. To Breton’s eyes , whose aspiration was to produce art in an automatic form, Man Ray was the forerunner of surrealism. However, the American artist, though attached to both Dadaism and surrealism, never considered himself a true member of either group. Man Ray can’t be classified into a specific category of artists or in a particular cultural movement; he is unique.

Better off economically, Man Ray was able to move to Montparnasse, a central district frequented by artists, writers and eccentric personalities who gathered in the numerous ‘bistrot’ (cafés). The emerging artists thrived in the atmosphere of the bistrot. Making art without these particular meeting places was inconceivable. Most of the surrealists’ activities took place in cafés, where there were discussions, continuous comings and goings, forming of friendships (especially with women), but sometimes it was just a perfect place to be in solitude.

It’s a very short movie, but I think that its briefness is one of its merits, because it is direct and striking. The two characters do not seem to be romantically attached, but with the use of the opaque lens there is a feeling of romance. The starfish appears often throughout the film and I noticed that it would emerge somewhere on the screen every time there was a conflict between the woman and the man. Perhaps it’s because the ‘étoile de mer’ (in French, star of the sea) inhabits liquid depths, but at the same time ‘étoile’ is the star of the heavens, thus the starfish could symbolize eternity and hope. There is hope for pureness between man and woman…….for eternity. To my view, it is the quintessential symbol of lost love. The starfish could also be interpreted as the only part of the woman the man is able to possess. At the end of the film, the woman leaves with another man, and the first one is left alone, the starfish his only hope.