“Emak Bakia” means leave me alone. You can’t ask for a better title, even if it seems unrelated to the film at hand. That film being Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece, a kaleidoscope of images, transfixing and astoundingly beautiful. In it, two things stand out:
The first is the way the film blurs the distinction between non-representation and representation. It begins with a shot of abstract, fuzzy lights that were presumably created directly on the film; it then cuts to a shot of a flower-filled field. The use of a match-cut rather than a dissolve maintains a sufficient difference between the two shots to distinguish the ontological roles of the images, but there is such a striking similarity between them that those roles are made ambiguous. Later, there’s a shot of a metallic object standing on a rotating disk, such that the object appears periodically in the frame. When the object isn’t present, the frame contains only an abstract play of light and shadow, but when the object appears, it is obvious that we are viewing a physical scene. The shot hence periodically morphs between non-representation and representation, such that each is contained in the other.
Shots and sequences like these appear throughout the film, purposefully dissolving or muddying the distinction between layers of “reality” and “representation”. Similarly, the difference between human life and abstract, representative notions of it is distorted by shots showing things such as a human figure motion being mirrored by a representative, simplified set of lines. In another shot, human eyes are related to a car’s headlights, ambiguating other distinctions: between life and inanimate objects, light going in and light coming out, the perceiver and the perceived—though it’s worth noting that early philosophers thought that light was emitted by the eyes.
The second thing that struck me is the capture of immediate experience. Certainly the shots of pure light, free of any objects, give the sense of pure sensory perception: not perception of something, but just the feeling of perceiving, the raw, undifferentiated sense. But even other shots—shots of blurred or skewed objects; shots of a sign in the darkness; shots of flowing water, both from above it and from within it—capture the feeling of just being there. They evoke those moments when one is just drifting in the feeling of one’s surroundings, acutely aware of the sights and sounds rather than viewing them in terms of their constituent objects, with their objective uses and definitions. And repeated shots of a woman opening her eyes directly link the images to the idea of the perception of them.
In conjunction, these two aspects of the film create a dreamlike sense of ambiguous reality. I’d go so far as to say that it comes the closest of any work of art to achieving the surrealist’s goal of directly capturing the unheralded, spontaneous movements of the mind, free of all the overlying structure of symbolism and rational thinking. And with the final shot, in which a woman slowly, repeatedly opens and closes her eyes, with her eyelids painted to look like her eyes, the film continues its process of dissolution by mixing the waking state with the dreaming one. The spontaneous, disconnected dream-state is an inextricable part of the rational waking state, and vice versa.
Tags: avant garde, favorites, movies, perception, surrealism
