‘Man Ray: Return to Reason’ Trailer: Jim Jarmusch Scores Four Trippy Restored Short Films

Ryan Lattanzio
·2 min read
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Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his music partner Carter Logan’s SQÜRL want to induce a “psilocybin-inspired” experience for their latest project, a drone rock score written for four Man Ray films. The project debuted at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, comprising Dadaist pioneer Man Ray’s “Return to Reason,” “Emak-Bakia,” “The Starfish,” and “The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice,” with new music by SQÜRL. Now, the 4K-restored shorts, along with the score, are coming to theaters as one presentation this coming May. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for “Man Ray: Return to Reason,” as the series of four films has been dubbed, below.

The quartet of shorts holds up a distorted mirror to human sexuality as Jarmusch and Logan’s eerie music envelops the Freudian dreamscape — and while you might be tempted to take psychedelic drugs for the viewing, Jarmusch says that’s not necessary, as the fusion of sound and images here are trying to create that same effect.

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“Surrealism was about the altering of senses, of perception, and psychedelic music and the use of psychedelic drugs, there’s a place where they intersect,” Jarmusch told IndieWire last year. “We’re not on mushrooms or using psychedelics to create the music, but there’s something of it that’s important to us of where those two things connect in having an altered perception, rather than one that’s force-fed to you. Man Ray and the Dadaists were very interested in altering those perceptions.”

Per the synopsis from distributor Janus Films, the films “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. Juxtaposing undulating geometric patterns, a twirling fairground ride, and a female nude, among other striking images, Ray finds subconscious correspondences among seemingly incongruous materials and figures.”

“Man Ray: Return to Reason” opens in theaters beginning May 15 at IFC Center.

The restoration process was led by Womanray and Cinenovo sourcing original prints from various parts of the world, in partnership with La Cinémathèque française, the Centre Pompidou, the Library of Congress, the French CNC, and Cineteca di Bologna.

Meanwhile, SQÜRL’s LP, “Music for Man Ray,” will be released May 17 via Sacred Bones.

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