L'Étoile de mer (1928)
Directed by Man Ray

Film Review

Under his adopted name Man Ray, Emmanuel Radnitzky was one of the most influential and prominent avant-garde artists of his day.  On his arrival in Paris in 1921, he fell in with the Dada and Surrealist poets and artists, and soon became a key player in these movements, initially through his photography, later through his film creations.  L'Étoile de mer was one of the great achievements in this stage of Man Ray's career, a weirdly enthralling visual poem that makes the unlikely connection between a love that is lost but not forgotten and a starfish floating in a glass jar.  Now considered an important piece of surrealist art, the film impresses as much with its dazzling use of cinematographic technique as with its distinctive and unsettling lyricism.

Man Ray made the film in collaboration with another prominent photographer, Jacques-André Boiffard, after the surrealist poet Robert Desnos read him one of his poems.  Man Ray and Desnos spent several days working together on the screenplay, and the latter makes a brief appearance at the end of the film as the 'other man'.  Taking the central role of the unattainable object of male desire is the seductively sensual Alice Prin, better known by her professional name, Kiki of Montparnasse.  Prin had been Man Ray's muse and lover for several years before this and had been the subject not only of many photographs of his but also a bizarre short film entitled Le Retour à la raison (1923).  The model's magnetic personality and vitality are preserved for posterity, along with her astonishing beauty and obvious sex appeal, in L'Étoile de mer, which is as much a tribute to the wonders of the feminine sex as a lament to lost love. 
      
Unlike Luis Buñuel's more deliberately surreal Un chien Andalou (1929), Man Ray's film has a coherence to it that makes it a more effective attempt at recreating the dream experience.  Its oneiric effect is achieved by photographing the central narrative involving a transient love affair through gelatine to give the impression it is seen from a distance, through frosted glass (presumably representing the distorting effect of time and memory).  Spliced into this there are cutaways to shots of towers, smoking chimneys and prison walls that have obvious Freudian connotations - potent symbols of desire and repression.

Ray flirts with brazen eroticism with a lingering close-up shot of a woman's legs as she lifts up her skirt and draws up her stockings.  This is followed by a scene in which the same woman strips naked in front of her lover - the fact that we seem to be watching this spectacle from a distance, through thick textured glass, does not diminish its erotic impact.  The third and weirdest excursion into highly suggestive erotica involves a close-up of a slowly moving starfish - this is the film's captivating highlight, a reminder that sensuous beauty is not confined to the human form.

Despite its brevity (the film runs to just over 15 minutes), L'Étoile de mer is one of the most startling and original films to have been made in France in the 1920s, and rare in cinema is there a work that expresses the transient nature of romantic love with such exquisite poetry.

Film Synopsis

A window opens onto a quiet country lane, where a man and a woman are walking side-by-side.  Transported by desire, they ascend a staircase and enter a room, where the man watches as the woman removes her clothes and stretches out on a bed.  The man bids farewell and slips away.  They meet again in the street and the woman makes the man a present of a starfish floating in a jar,  Later, the man makes a close examination of the strange sea creature and becomes fascinated by it.  In doing so, a pattern of lines appears on the palms of his hands, like stigmata.  When the woman returns to the staircase, she is fiercely brandishing a knife.  Clearly her intentions are murderous.  What follows will surely lead her to the Santé prison...  The story repeats itself.  The man and woman meet again in the same country lane.  But this time, a second man appears and takes the woman away with him.  All that the first man has left to console him is his starfish, a symbol of a lost love...