Man Ray | Autoportrait, ou Ce quí manque a nous tous / c. 1930

masturbatory explosion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Man Ray (director) Autoportrait, ou Ce quí manque a nous tous / c. 1930

 

This short (5-minute) film, what one might describe as what Ray called his “home movies,” is structured in a tripartite form, beginning with a scene showing a large pipe from which huge bubbles are blown. The bubbles, white upon the stark black background, emanate from the pipe into large globules before bursting in air. They look much like teats or testicles that then explode into a kind of masturbatory detonation.

     After a few moments of this expanding and exploding pattern, the artist (Ray) is shown in front of a painting of two amorphous forms, perhaps representing male and female, two females, or two males between which he draws angular squiggles or various lines either separating or linking the two forms.

   We observe Lee Miller, Ray’s lover of the period, first uncovering an abstract, odalisque-like sculpture over which she runs her hands before we see her soon after behind a camera.

     In the last section of the film, Ray appears in a woman’s white night shift, sitting down to flash his penis, before standing and flouncing about as if attempting to represent femineity before getting down on all fours to stick out his bum. It is as if, momentarily, he has become an androgynous model, readily revealing both his outer masculine body and his inner feminine self, something which he, along with his friend Marcel Duchamp would continually explore.

    Although we might describe this brief cross-dressing episode as an attempt to explore the other gender, however, it appears just as to have much more in common with the “mugging” in front of the camera that Ray performs in several of his short “home movie” pieces, particularly in La Garoupe of 1937. Although it does seem to point to the combinate sexuality—“what we all are missing”—which he seems to be seeking in all three sections of this piece.

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).