Emak Bakia - Man Ray

          This film was absolutely mesmerizing. From the haunting music to the mysterious mesh of visual effects, I could not take my eyes off the screen. Man Ray's amazing artistic ability shines through this piece, particularly when he distorts and blurs images of ordinary everyday objects, turning ordinary things like nails into art. There are reflections and rotating objects where you can never be sure if it is the camera moving or the object. Because everything is so distorted, I had to second guess everything I saw in the film; I never knew if I was looking at something real or if it was something Man Ray had created with technology. 
          I also found influence from different art forms we talked about in class in Man Ray's video. For example, at 3:32 there was a sort of rectangular prism that was rotating and reflecting light on the screen. This reminded me of cubism, because of the rigid edges of the prism and all the reflecting patterns were rigid shapes. There were traces of order, since a cube is an orderly shape with equal sides, but they were displayed in a disorderly way because of the confusion Man Ray's technology created. 
          I also sensed surrealism in the film, because everything was so dreamlike and surreal. The fact that the viewer needs to ponder whether what they see is reality or not is exactly what the art movement of surrealism provokes. For example, at 4:15, Man Ray turns something as simple as driving a car into a surreal experience. The angle of the camera puts the driver almost totally out of frame, and all you can see is the landscape whizzing past as the front of the car speeds down the road. The vision is shaky and goes in an out of focus so that you aren't exactly sure what it happening. Then at 7:07, the simple idea of the ocean is transformed into a strange montage of motion and images that may or may not be the ocean. The layering of scenes on top of each other create a picture that is constantly in motion, and many things are happening at once. You see fish swimming, then you see waves washing on a shore, then you see reflections in the water; and the whole time the scene is rotating and swaying so that your eyes take a while to adjust and your brain takes a while to decipher the scene. This interesting dreamlike state seems to be influenced by surrealism.