The Favorites - Emak-Bakia (#92)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Emak-Bakia (1926/France/dir. Man Ray) appeared at #92 on my original list.

What it is • A dream, a vision, or - as the introductory title puts it - a "cine-poem" made up of various images, many distorted (as usual in photographer-turned-filmmaker Man Ray's famed oeuvre). Some of these images are immediately identifiable: a goggled driver behind the wheel of a motorcar, various women opening and closing their eyes (one with surreal painted eyelids), a man making himself up as a woman in the mirror. Others represent familiar objects, skewed - an electronic sign isolated in inky darkness, overlapping flapper legs emerging from an auto, double-exposed fish swimming across one another's images. Finally there are those inscrutable abstractions, shapes and points of light growing and shrinking, fluctuating in shape as well as size, suggesting unexplored dimensions in our known universe. Together these approaches evoke the world of a sleeper caught between dream and waking, in which recognizable objects take on strange proportions and images from the everyday are cast in bizarre and evocative lights.

Why I like it •

Avant-Garde: The Silents ("Fixing a Hole")

A new month, a new theme for "Fixing a Hole". The year ends with the avant-garde, and today I've tapped Maurizio Roca, whose noir countdown was one of the highlights of 2011, to address three of his favorite avant-garde films of the 1920s. I added the pictures and videos. Maurizio writes about Entr'acte, Emak-Bakia, and Ghosts Before Breakfast here:

Read "Avant-Garde: The Silents" on Wonders in the Dark

"Opening with a startling close-up of a man looking through a movie camera, we are quickly led to a barrage of abstract and animated images (some taken from the earlier Le Retour a la Raison) that instantly plunge us into a world of bewilderment. A similar tact was taken by Clair’s Entr’acte, when after a relatively docile opening, the filmmaker quickly pulled out the rug from under us with a swift journey into abstraction. Emak Bakia (at least in the Kino version) is greatly aided by the mournful string-heavy score that accompanies it. Early on, the visual focus, like Entr’acte, is centered primarily on slow-motion movement. We are given the various traits that make up film art and watch as they are applied in nonlinear and unconventional ways. The concentration always seems to be simply about reveling in this new medium’s impressionistic possibilities above all else. Where the dancer was the underlying image of movement that Clair returned to early in his short, Ray instead decides to devote his time with distorted depictions of artifacts we cannot make out clearly. They come and go with no established delineation other than to reveal the ability to gracefully move before our eyes."

Dance of the Silents 1912 - 1926 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 1

The first chapter of "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update - includes Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 1: Dance of the Silents"

Dance of the Silents 

In the early days, everything was difficult and anything was possible. Ingenuity and technical know-how were prerequisites, but all was new so imagination was unhampered by exhaustion or familiarity. Vampires glided into bedrooms, Babylonians paraded down colossal stairways, abstract forms danced across the screen, and bugs spied on one another's sex lives. There are quite a few masters in this first chapter, yet most of the films seem to have, alongside their boundless creative energy, a sort of elemental simplicity. Styles will grow more complicated, visions more elaborate in the next chapter, but at first, the wonder of the moving image seemed magic enough.