No, wait, come back! “Leave me alone” is the English rendering of the Basque title of Man Ray‘s 1926 film, Emak-Bakia.
It arose out of Cinéma pur, arguably the first movement to consciously strategise film’s leave-taking from narrative to make it an autonomous art form adhering to its own conventions. I’ve previously featured a snippet focussing on Dadaist Jacques Rigaut’s appearance (the other featured performer is Kiki de Montparnasse, subject of a new graphic novel), but the whole film is well worth watching.
In Emak-Bakia, Man Ray experiments with stop motion, multiple exposure and other techniques, while sequences which mimic narrative turn out to be just as elusive. Man Ray: “Just as one can much better appreciate the abstract beauty in a fragment of a classic work than in its entirety, so this film tries to indicate the essentials in contemporary cinematography. It is not an ‘abstract’ film or a story-teller; its reasons for being are its inventions of light-forms and movements, while the more objective parts interrupt the monotony of abstract inventions or serve as punctuation.”
If all that sounds too demanding, keep in mind Man Ray’s boast: “My film had one outstanding merit, it lasted not more than fifteen minutes.”
Am I callous for thinking that perhaps Rigaut should have offed himself before he started pestering widows? (I know I should comment on the older post, but it’s also relevant here, no? Perhaps I’m jealous of how pretty he was, ha.)
(Perhaps I’m saying ‘perhaps’ too much. It’s been a long day!)
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, as Doris might say (and I confess I had to go to her Wikipedia page to see if she was still alive…amazingly, yes, and the first line of her entry gave me my first belly laugh of the day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Day)
Ha! I want to know how I can lie about my advancing age when the time comes; with the Internet as all-seeing as it is, who will believe me when I tell them I’m 49 three years in a row?
I had to go back and read it again to realise what you meant! Though it has happily reminded to read up on the fate of Arthur & Mina’s daughter (Fabienne, I think?)
I did some digging on the poet H.D.’s daughter recently, and… Well, artist’s children of that generation certainly went down interesting roads. http://www.imagists.org/hd/perdita.html
I’ll hope for a post to tell me about the fates and feats of Fabienne.
Oh my! Cecil Gray was her father? He was a good friend of Peter Warlock (http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/to-the-very-dregs/) who had his own secret child, only revealed years later.
I was also surprised by her parentage, though I’m not sure why, given her family situation. http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2013614&iid=1057794&srchtype=
Brian Sewell had been a secret to me too before you posted his BBC interview about Ludwig II. Everyone’s connected!
Reblogged this on PORTAFOLIO. BITACORA DE UN TRANSFUGA. 2000.2010.
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