L'étoile de mer (1928)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Man Ray

Writer:

Robert Desnos (poem)

Genre:

Short

Plot:

Two people stand on a road, out of focus. Seen distorted through a glass, they retire upstairs to a bedroom where she undresses...

Plot Keywords:

Avant Garde | Experimental Film

Cast

Kiki of Montparnasse	...	Une femme (as Alice [Kiki] Prin)
André de la Rivière	...	Un homme
Robert Desnos	...	Un autre homme

Runtime:

21 min

Country:

France

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Silent

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois (2004)

A Surrealist coup of untold unspeakable unearthly allure.

"L'Étoile de mer" is a classic piece of Surrealist cinema from the 1920's starring the adorable and timeless Kiki of Montparnasse, and also featuring the divine Robert Desnos. A lovely Surrealist poem written by Desnos accompanies the film, eloquently juxtaposing the images.

A great deal of the sequences are shot through a pane of glass, giving the film a diffuse, dreamy quality, although there are also many stunning shots in sharp focus. The uncanny motif of the starfish is the primary piece of Surrealist iconography, which reoccurs at several junctures, including a beautiful close-up that captures the sea creature's graceful delicacy in locomotion and its multitude of tiny pedicellariae.

Unlike the more striking and barbaric imagery of "Un Chien Andalou", another famous Surrealist short film produced in the same year by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, this film is more lyrical and sensuous, evoking with a sense of innate desire and mystery, the concept of the marvelous outlined by André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924.

Kiki of Montparnasse superbly portrays the primeval Surrealist muse and heroine, unashamedly stripping off her clothes in one scene, peering nefariously over the edge of a newspaper in another, and slowly climbing a staircase brandishing a long shimmering dagger in one of the penultimate scenes.

This film was way ahead of its time, anticipating stylistic and thematic currents that weren't fully developed until the latter half of the 20th century such as narrative discontinuity, jump cuts, the femme fatale and the dream sequence. A must see for all cinéastes and lovers of the Surreal.