Séance Film Festival – Man Ray: Return to Reason

Friday, September 13, 2024 at 9:00pm
Theatre 514, Civic Theatre of Allentown
514 N 19th St, Allentown, PA 18104

Séance Film Festival – Man Ray: Return to Reason

Lehigh Valley Cinema Club presents the first Séance Film Festival, a weekend film festival (Friday, September 13 – Sunday, September 15, 2024) celebrating cinema as séance and portal to the afterlife, and the parallels between film projection and reincarnation.

This program contains new restorations of the four short films made by Man Ray between 1923 and 1929—masterpieces of avant-garde filmmaking—paired with new recorded soundtracks by SQÜRL, the drone-rock project of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and producer Carter Logan. Programmer Herb Shellenberger will introduce the program. 

Tickets: $10 per night
Weekend pass: $18
Supporter pass: $40

–Le retour à la raison, Man Ray, 1923, digital, 19'
–Emak-Bakia, Man Ray, 1926, digital, 19'
–L’Étoile de mer, Man Ray, 1928, digital, 17'
–Les mystères du château du dé, Man Ray, 1929, digital, 28'

Total running time: 70'

The four films Man Ray directed between 1923 and 1929, Le Retour à la raison, Emak-Bakia, L'Étoile de mer and Les Mystères du Château du Dé 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. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Le Retour à la raison, the Jim Jarmusch-Carter Logan combo Sqürl present Man Ray: Return to Reason, with a newly-recorded drone rock soundtrack for that title as well as the three other Ray films. The band’s cosmic sounds complement Ray’s work by conjuring the beautiful, ineffable, haunting, and sublime.

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.

Please note! Tickets include entry to this program and the previous Séance Film Festival program—Opening Program—at 7:00pm in the same theater. 

Thanks to Francisco Aguilar & Haley Arnold (Civic Theatre of Allentown), Brian Belovarac (Janus Films), Bret Berg (American Genre Film Archive), Canyon Cinema Foundation, Rick Charnoski, Jesse Pires (Lightbox Film Center), Chris Regec & Steak (National Sokol's), Doug Roysdon (Ice House Performing Arts Collaborative), Drew Swedberg, the University of Texas at Dallas and all the filmmakers, performers and audience members who have supported this event.