Reviews & Ratings for
Return to Reason More at IMDbPro »Le retour à la raison (original title)

8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Surreal, artistic, ...pretty short, 19 October 2004
Author: aeroplane from London, England

This short montage by Man Ray is interesting for fans of avant-garde, its photographic, surreal, Dadaist structure is highly experimental, and it appears to be the forerunner to the more rounded, structured Emak-Bakia, finished three years later. Man Ray has a particular penchant for close-up out of focus shots of revolving objects, which gives a strange jamais-vu feeling about many of the average household objects he spins in front of his camera. The image of Kiki's nude torso revolving and reflecting strips of light is particularly beautiful. However, Man Ray's best work, in my opinion are his home movies (particularly the film of the matador and also the colour film featuring a very young-looking Pablo Picasso)

4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
What it means? I have my own take on it., 10 July 2009
Author: Perception_de_Ambiguity from The Divided States of Earth

It starts in chaos. It's the chaos of the mind. The gargantuan amount of facts threaten to bring all thoughts out of order. So many trees, we can't see the forest. That kind of thing. So we just see static, gibberish dots and lights.

Then we have a date with a woman and go to the carnival with her. Our head is too full to see what really matters. We spin around, with the woman in our arms, and hundreds of light dots spin around us. We manage to sort our thoughts again and to return to reason. It's quite the opposite of going insane. We realize what really matters in life. Tits without a face. We are cured.

4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating, 18 March 2006

Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

This little short absolutely fascinates me.

The only thing I've seen thus far like it is some of the work by Sam Brakhage, the creator of Dog Star Man. However, where Brakhage is trying to unnerve by "making us learn how to see again" and provide us with an affront of head-ache inducing bright colors and flashes (which I still totally dig and embrace as high art...), this film I would characterize as very relaxing and hypnotizing. Man Ray's general use of spinning objects/camera does not create so much of a dizzy feeling but a warm flow of senses, intermingling and going along with the gravity of the moving world around us.

An interesting conceit of this very short work is that as it goes along, objects become more and more recognizable until we end on a nude torso (of which I feel is the least feminine well-rounded breasts I've ever seen). The circles and spirals of shadow and light over the torso make it an object of surrealistic beauty, something that you could hang on your wall and delve over forever. It's because of this and other images in this film that I had to watch it again and again (eventually a total seven times) just because it utterly fascinates me.

--PolarisDiB

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Finding reason, 1 February 2009

Author: ackstasis from Australia

I always get a headache trying to work out what avant-garde cinema is all about – allegedly, cinema brawls have been started for this very reason. So I've decided to appreciate 'The Return to Reason (1923)' for its aesthetic qualities only, and there are plenty. The beginning of the film is a hectic collage of white specks and rotating silhouettes, some footage created without the use of a camera, similar to the later work of Stan Brakhage. Ticking clocks, nail outlines, bright lights, spinning egg crates – what it all means, I don't know, but the brisk editing pace maintains a strong momentum that easily carries through the two-minute running time. Ray's montage flows smoothly for the most part, but occasionally jars like a jump-cut as he switches from one photographic technique to another; for example, from moving to static images, or between visuals produced with and without a camera. In this sense, the film doesn't stream as pleasantly as similar avant-garde works like Richter's 'Ghosts after Breakfast (1928)' and Vávra's 'The Light Pentrates the Dark (1931).'

This was my first film from Man Ray, one of the leading figures in the Dadaist film movement of the 1920s. Dada (or Dadaism) is characterised by the rejection of logic and rationality in artistic expression, and so the embracing of chaos. The title 'The Return to Reason' seems to be intentionally contradictory, at odds with a film in which very little reason is to be found. Perhaps the randomness is all for the director's own amusement – Man Ray was notorious for his wry sense of humour, and he reportedly "talked so you could never tell when he was kidding." He once stated that "To create is divine, to reproduce is human," suggesting an overlying theme of sex in his work. Indeed, the finale of this film involves the naked torso of a woman – perhaps this "return to reason" is the realisation, after two minutes of frenzied, random soul-searching, of what matters most to a man. I can sympathise.

The best film of the gifted photographer Man Ray, 4 May 2012

Author: Jarrod Bonner from United States

I like all of Man Ray's films, but this is the only one that I absolutely love. It was his first and is basically a series of experiments with light, shadows, and some innovative approaches to tampering with the actual film stock that precedes the films of Stan Brakhage. If you're a fan of his photography, this film is really little more than what you would expect - haunting black & white motion photography featuring nails, nude women and abstract objects.

I highly recommend watching this film to ambient music, especially some of the early Aphex Twin pieces. If you watch it in silence, you're going to deprive your senses and not really appreciate it as much. The film needs strange music to be enjoyed and as long as you're not expecting a story or characters, you should be pretty engaged. It's a great length, knowing to end before it gets too monotonous, unlike a lot of his later films.

It's meant to be chaotic and confusing..., 25 August 2011
Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

This is NOT something you might see on the Disney Channel or ABC! It's a bizarre Dadaist art film from Man Ray that was made by overlaying various objects on the filmstrip. And, occasionally, there are brief glimpses of images. If none of this makes any sense (including the nude torso and amusement park) then you are not alone--this IS the purpose of the film--to confuse and provoke, as anarchism was a major aspect of the Dadaist work. I actually found that with the accompanying music (that was added much later), it was actually rather hypnotic. Weird but actually kind of interesting in an artsy-fartsy way. And, it's impossible to give a numerical score to this film.

0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Mildly interesting, 20 February 2009

Author: TheFiendsThatPlagueThee from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Specks of white and various shapes, a beautiful nude, random images. That is what this little experimental short film is.

It's kind of interesting to think how in the early days of film such images could be transferred onto film, but despite my love of a lot of surreal images and films, and a fascination with the bizarre, this film just didn't do it for me.

I'm not sorry I watched it, but if there is any underlying meaning in it, I don't get it. Visually, it is not that outstanding, in my humble opinion. As an example of dadaism, I suppose it would fit in quite well, since it seems to reject any semblance of logic or reason, though I would have preferred that it do it in a more visually interesting way.

But to each his own.

1 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Man Ray's Le Retour à la Raison, and the child's conception of 'the uncanny', 18 December 2007
Author: Carl Packman from United Kingdom

Man Ray's film, made in France 1923, eats up the stuff of semi-consciousness and delivers them in a high-speed furore. If we can at least consider that the semi-conscious image that is being divulged is indeed that of a child's, we can identify those notions of terror that are archetypical to the psychological horror of, say, H.P Lovecraft or F.W Murnau. Common is the view that 'the fantastic' is, like Freud's 'uncanny', an instance of simultaneous familiarity and non-familiarity that toys with the subject. The horror image or text itself toys the reader with the familiar and the non-familiar. The subject may well become de-sensitised to the horror image or text if it is set from without of the familiar; in space or in the future. But the kernel of passing fear into the mind's of others is to infiltrate their comfort zone. Is this not the plan of the Big Bad Wolf – to woo by means of calm the innocent girl into submission. Indeed the Mythological qualities of the Big Bad Wolf descend from its various attacks on European settlements.

A human quality for Freud is repressing what meaning (or lack of) we attached to certain objects as a child. Of course at times these repressed meanings present themselves to us; certain "childish" jokes make us laugh. Indeed Freud thought that what made a joke funny was its revisiting the meaning that the child attaches to things – the bouncing and the lacking of concern for self-preservation found in the comedy of Buster Keaton, for example.

Of course what is repressed in a child is not the fear imagery of pre-sleep semi-consciousness, but simply how canny the uncanny was to him or her. On revisiting these nonsensical images in Man Ray's film we take them as almost without foundation. Quite literally they appear from nowhere and with no explanation. On later analysis of the film, in a pseudo-academic way, we see the film is designed so each appearing image stems from nowhere. It is without the safety net of cause and effect. Selected individually we see that some images in the film will be familiar to the child before sleep. The distortion, the gravel-like textures, the swinging light bulb, long tubes emanating from the walls or the ceiling, the shadows behind hanging objects.

Is it not interesting that these images that appear from nowhere are not uncanny enough. Mostly because the image is precisely how they appeared at one time when we were not so equipped to attach such a meaning to them as uncanny or fantastical. Without the appropriate net of symbolic attachment readily available to describe such raw phenomena, things were simply things. We now turn what it is to be uncanny on its head; to a child in those terrifying moments before sleep, when the walls have shadows and objects are moving independently, it is not that these things which are uncanny; i.e. objects in an ordinary capacity doing something extraordinary, because to a child this is not unusual. It would be unusual to an adult who discovers that objects which don't move independently, are. This is uncanny. To be sure the 'uncanny' only works in the symbolic order - the negation of the real of an object for its symbolisation. To the child nothing is uncanny because if things are simply just things, anything goes.

More literally, what is frightening for the child is that it is likely these objects on the wall are alive, conscious and vengeful. At their most alarming moments before semi-consciousness turns to sleep. A 'return to the repressed' in this formal sense is a return to the canniness of the independently moving object without the slightest notion of its fantastical qualities.

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