His ideas are more sophisticated than most student films – his Freudian imagery is almost a precursor to Deren’s Jungian imagery from her Meshes in the Afternoon (1943). One thought that goes through my head when I watch this short film is how much it is like experimental student films I saw years ago, only generally much better. Here a few screengrabs of some of my favorite images from the film: You can find an online version of it at ubuweb, as well as other Ray films.

Made in 1928, Starfish is a great example of both the Surrealist impulse and Man Ray’s exploration of the “montage of attractions.” It was also based on a poem by Robert Desnos.

In particular I was taken by Man Ray’s film Starfish ( l’Etoile de Mer). I believe it is a good thing to review avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s, or thereabouts, to see what those artists where up to and how they were approaching their culture and that new medium called cinema. The avant garde films I was watching came from Kino Video’s Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s. But, whereas many might shrug there shoulders or even complain at a film by Brackhage (et alia), I get a kick out it it. This is not to say that I don’t also swoon over great narrative films. I am a fan of most all cinema, but I have a special place in my heart for films having a greater kinship with the kinds of art one finds in galleries and museums than with traditional narrative cinema. These two episodes come to mind because I recently watched some avant-garde films from yesteryear and I couldn’t help making the connection between those films and the avant-garde or experimental filmmaking impulse in me. I edited it at the local community television studio, which I was managing at the time. For the most part it was a vehicle to explore the idea of how a garage sale might have some thematic relationship to mankind’s place in the universe.

It became known in local circles as the infamous garage sale video and, as you can guess, we had a lot of fun making it. I can’t say my film turned out well, though it had its moments, but I have to say I loved the project and its process.Īround that same time a couple of my friends and I made a video that was as loosely based on a poem as it was whimsical.

One of the film projects required each of us to randomly pick a haiku poem out of a hat and then use that poem as the basis for our film. When I was an undergrad studying film history and production I took a class in which the students made several “personal” films (we were using video equipment).

Do tarfish have kin