Man Ray and Abel Gance Films To Screen at NYFF 61

STILL: FROM MAN RAY’S RETURN TO REASON (1923). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

At this year’s New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and playing in New York City from September 29th to October 15th, 2023, films by Man Ray and Abel Gance will screen in the Revivals section, which spotlights “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners.”

On Sunday, October 8th, and Tuesday, October 10th, at 6pm, four essential works by Ray will play at the Walter Reade Theater in the program Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray. Those works are: 1923’s RETURN TO REASON, 1926’s EMAK-BAKIA, 1928’s L’ÉTOILE DE MER, and 1927’s LES MYSTÉRES DU CHATEAU DE DÉ. As described in NYFF’s program notes:

Restored on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, Man Ray’s first foray into filmmaking, the wildly improvisational and unapologetically fragmentary RETURN TO REASON, finds the artist exploding and reconstructing the cinematic medium as a vehicle for accessing the abstract essence of things by way of the rhythmic accumulation of visual details glimpsed in part, never in their wholeness. What emerges from this program — which combines RETURN TO REASON with several other kindred and newly restored early films by Ray, set to haunting and hypnotic new music by SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) — is the sense of Ray as perhaps the modern artist par excellence, an intrepid experimentalist absolutely committed to delving ever deeper into the space between consciousness and unconsciousness, sense and nonsense, wakefulness and dreaming… The restoration process was led by Womanray and Cinenovo sourcing original prints from various parts of the world, in partnership with La Cinémathèque française, the Centre Pompidou, the Library of Congress, the French CNC and Cineteca di Bologna.

KEY ART FOR LA ROUE (1923) BY ABEL GANCE. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

GME distributes on DVD, with Re:Voir Video, to the North American university market, Ray’s RETURN TO REASON and EMAK-BAKIA in the eight-film collection CINÉMA DADA. This collection also includes films by early experimental film pioneers like Hans Richter and Fernand Léger.

Additionally, on Saturday, September 30th, at 12:15pm; Wednesday, October 4th, at 12pm; and Thursday, October 5th, at 12pm, Abel Gance’s 412-minute long, 1923 epic LA ROUE screens at the EBM Film Center. (The screening on the 30th presents the film in full with a 30-minute intermission, while the film is presented in two parts across the 4th and 5th).

As described in NYFF’s program notes:

One of silent cinema’s undeniable high-water marks, Abel Gance’s monumental work of psychological realism, LA ROUE, is a narratively and emotionally expansive epic whose technical innovations changed the course of film history. The film recounts the doomed love of a railroad engineer, Sisif (Séverin-Mars), for the orphan he takes in and raises as his own daughter, Norma (Ivy Close); upon realizing that his affection for Norma is as romantic as it is paternal, he inadvertently sets in motion a tragic chain of events. Shot almost entirely on location and marked by a dazzling array of techniques that would influence countless filmmakers in the decades to come — superimpositions, extreme close-ups, and rhythmic montage, to name a few — LA ROUE is at once a towering classic of early narrative cinema and a genuine formal experiment whose gambits shaped our understanding of film style… the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé restored the film in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française, the Cinémathèque Suisse, and Pathé and with the support of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée. The reconstitution of the music was supervised in Germany under the responsibility of ZDF/ARTE and the composer Bernd Thewes. It relied on the musical list of the conductor Paul Fosse played during the first screening and which had been kept at the Cinémathèque Française. The reconstitution and interpretation of the music is the result of a collaboration between the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, ZDF/ARTE, the radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.

GME is proud to distribute LA ROUE on DVD, to the North American university market, in conjunction with Flicker Alley. GME also distributes Gance’s J’ACCUSE (1919) on DVD with the same label.

Tickets go on sale for the New York Film Festival on September 19th. Get yours early before they sell out!